Sugar, Water, and Electricity: New Origin Stories for Today’s Climate Crisis

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

In the past three centuries, humans have rapidly increased the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere. While there is no scholarly census on when this acceleration began, the three papers in this panel offer, if not a single origin date, then a series of unexpected historical junctures—across the globe, and at a disparate times—that collectively pushed the planet toward a more carbon-intensive future. Beginning at the turn of the eighteenth century, Eric Herschthal demonstrates that slave-based Caribbean sugar plantations left a carbon footprint so vast that they extended into the wheat farms of Pennsylvania and livestock pastures of Connecticut. By including these “ghost emissions” into his estimates of slave plantations’ carbon footprint, he suggests that slave-based agriculture in the early modern Atlantic World marked a key transition in the West’s shift toward a more carbon-intensive economy. Hongyun Lyu argues that, in the mid-twentieth century, socialist attempts to electrify rural northern China deepened the region’s dependence on fossil fuels, while simultaneously exposing the region’s working people to new dangers. Focusing on the Gulf states of the twentieth century, Michael Christopher Low argues that recent attempts to prepare for a hotter planet, like desalination programs, have unexpectedly tied these regions, and the planet more broadly, to a fossil fueled future. Desalination depends on selling oil and has created an illusion among Gulf rulers that they can continue to develop an oil-dependent economy because, through desalination, they have escaped global warming’s gravest threat to the region: water scarcity. Taken together, these papers suggest that the origins of our climate crisis did not spring from a single or well-studied historical epoch—the Industrial Revolution, a postwar population boom—but a series of smaller transformations that occurred everywhere, all over the globe, and never at once.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Ghost Emissions: Sugar Slavery’s Carbon Footprint in the Northern Colonies of British America - Eric Herschthal, University of Utah

• Consuming Power Under Socialism: Electrification and the Changing of People’s Workspace and Patterns of Life in Rural North China, 1950-1983 - Hongyun Lyu, University of Toronto

• The Petro-State and the Saltwater Kingdom: Desalination, Extraction, and Climate Risk in Anthropocene Arabia - Michael Christopher Low, University of Utah

Chair

• Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame

Discussant

• Ruth Morgan, Australian National University