Energetic Affordances: Climate Projects and Industrial Transformation

• In Event: The Sociology of Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is reorganizing the material foundations of economic life. This article proposes
the concept of “energetic affordances”—what inherited energy infrastructures make politically
possible—to explain how inherited infrastructures shape possibilities for industrial
decarbonization. Drawing on 95 interviews with automotive executives, union officials, and
policymakers, along with factory site visits, and documentary analysis between 2023 and 2025, I
compare efforts to transition from manufacturing internal combustion to electric vehicles in
Brazil and South Africa. Despite similar levels of development, democratic institutions, and
integration into global automotive value chains, these two cases have produced divergent
outcomes due to the ways their energy infrastructure shapes which responses are viable. Brazil’s
renewable electricity grid and ethanol infrastructure afford pathway pluralism: multiple
technologies can credibly meet emissions goals, enabling coalitional alignment among
automakers, labor, and agricultural producers; institutional coordination across administrations;
and sovereign partnerships with Chinese manufacturers including technology transfer. South
Africa’s coal dependency, in contrast, affords only pathway constraint. Zero-sum conflicts
fragment potential coalitions, paralyze institutional coordination, and channel the country
towards restrictive modes of climate finance that limit industrial development. In demonstrating
how energetic affordances structure such possibilities, this article reorients the sociology of
climate change toward classic questions of industrial transformation.

Author

• Benjamin Bradlow, Princeton University