Reports

Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture 

Author: Bob Johnson
Published: 2014 – Buy the book »

Historian Bob Johnson examines the start of the fossil-fuel revolution in the US in the 1800s and shows how it created more than a new energy economy. A new American culture came into being. “We became a people of prehistoric carbon between 1885, when the United States experienced its first energy crisis, a ‘crisis of abundance,’ . . . and 1970, when we experienced a second, more depressing crisis of malaise,” Johnson explains. “In these years . . . prehistoric carbons grafted themselves onto and embedded themselves deep with the American self.”

Johnson mines historic materials to make his case–much as we found, in researching our forthcoming book, Life After Carbon, that examining the interconnected rise of the fossil-fuel economy and the modern city was driven by new ideas that became deeply embedded in urban development and global urbanization. And, as he points out toward the end of Carbon Nation, what became embedded in the  modern self–the ideas, feelings, symbols, art, and so on–can be hard to change.

“The urge to look sideways at our energy dependencies goes well beyond unhampered propaganda and lax political contribution laws. It also derives from the fact that most Americans–on the political right and left and in the center–have very strong short-term incentives to want to believe that the status quo can be maintained.” Certainly the same is true about the underlying model–the assumptions–for modern urban development. Johnson continues: “To imagine life without prehistoric carbons . . . means engaging ourselves in the very messy and uncomfortable work of finding out who we are and what we might be without combusting fuels.” This is precisely what cities that have been most aggressive about decarbonizing themselves are discovering: the work is not just about technical solutions that reduce GHG emissions; it’s about reimagining the city’s identity and future.

Johnson makes another point about carbon culture in the U.S. that seems fresh. The rise of the fossil-fuel economy in the early 18th century occurred before Americans had experienced the limits of exploiting natural ecosystems–and the pain of economic contraction–that Europeans had already been through. In the US there was still much more land, trees, minerals and the like to consume. Americans evaded “the logic of organic constraints felt so viscerally in more land-strapped early modern regions such as England, France, Germany, Japan, and China.” As a result, Johnson concludes, “Americans became subsequently vaccinated against talk of ecological constraints.”

Climate change presents a great challenge to this nation’s deeply held cultural aversion to ecological limits. No wonder Johnson says that “disentangling ourselves from prehistoric carbon implies, in other words, that we are willing to cleave off a part of ourselves.”

The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability–Designing for Abundance

Author: William McDonough and Michael Braungart
Published: 2013 – Buy the book »

“If human beings were to devise products, tools, furniture, homes, factories, and cities more intelligently from the start, they wouldn’t even need to think in terms of waste, or contamination, or scarcity. Good design would allow for abundance, endless reuse, and pleasure.” This is the basic idea that architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart offer in The Upcycle. Endless reuse is their language for what’s now being called the “circular economy”–a concept applied design of products, workplaces, industries, and cities. In short, food=waste=food.

The Upcycle lays out an elegant conceptual framework for achieving this inspiring vision. As President Bill Clinton says in the foreword: “The optimist says the glass is half full and the pessimist says it’s half empty. Bill and Michael say it’s always totally full–of water and air–and they are constantly working to share that full glass with more people, to make it even bigger, and to celebrate the abundance of things that enable us to thrive.”

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

Author: Frank Trentmann
Published: 2017 – Buy the book »

“Our lifestyles, and their social and environmental consequences, should be the subject of serious public debate and policy, not left as a matter simply of individual taste and purchasing power. . . . Such a debate has to be bold and envisage different lifestyles and the concomitant changes to housing, transport and culture. It will need more people to remember that, as consumers, they are citizens and not just customers.”

With these words, distinguished historian Frank Trentmann draws his magisterial 2017 book, Empire of Things, to a close. The book’s subtitle, How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First, describes Trentmann’s ambition, which has global scope. He uncovers the historical roots of our modern consumer society, starting in the 1600s, partly by mining an enormous amount of data from an amazing array of sources, and partly by recognizing what came before it. A big shift occurred when wealthy Europeans in cities turned away from an idea that had guided previous generations, Aristotle’s praise for the use of private wealth as, Trentmann says, “a sign of civic virtue and pride in a community governed and defended by like-minded brave, propertied citizens. . . . The admired life was that if the active citizen who increased the splendor and strength of his city by erecting monumental buildings, commanding an army and sponsoring communal feasts and public works. Large-scale consumption was safe—and could be enjoyed—when it occurred in the pursuit of such public ends.”

Citizen-consumers. Consumers as virtuous citizens—taking responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of their consumption. A fantasy, perhaps, but as Trentmann’s project shows, what we feel and think about consumption, and the ways we consume, have not been fixed. They evolved and will continue to evolve.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Author: Jane Mayer
Published: 2016 – Buy the book »

Mayer’s book describes the sophisticated three-decade strategy of a network of the world’s richest people (many, but not all, of whom made their wealth in the fossil fuel industry) to engineer the political and regulatory system in a way that advances their corporate interests, and their extreme right-wing ideologies. The network is led by the Koch family, whose patriarch was a founder of the John Birch Society. But it also includes multiple other billionaires, including Mellon heirs, the Coors and DeVos families and Wall Street players like Steven Cohen, Paul Singer and Stephen Schwarzman. They have invested billions of dollars in a byzantine network of non-profit institutes and lobbying organizations (including such well-known players as the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity) designed to advance “free market” philosophies—including a robust denial of climate change, its origins, and effects. Dark money set up the ascendency of Donald Trump, who has fully embraced the network and brought many of its players into its administration. (See this great post by George Monbiot on some aspects of this integration.) This is the scale of opposition that climate leaders are up against and the scale of resources that will be needed to defeat them.

Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

Author: Andreas Malm
Published: 2016 – Buy the book »

Malm, who teaches human ecology at Lund University in Sweden, provides deep research and meticulous arguments to conclude that economic interests, the logic of profit-seeking capitalists in 18th and 19th century Britain, drove the use of coal to power steam engines to run the new factory machinery of the Industrial Revolution, and triggered the enormous expansion in fossil-fuel burning that has resulted in climate change.

How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City

Author: Joan DeJean
Published: 2015 – Buy the book »

With remarkable historical evidence and a witty approach, DeJean, Trustee Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, examines how planned developments in the 17th century gave Paris its modern identity and introduced new, enduring ideas about the design and use of urban public space.