Climate Change as the Ultimate Capitalist Crisis: Energy Regime Change and Post-coal Regions

• In Event: Marxist Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Marxist Sociology Section Roundtable 1

Abstract

The hydrocarbon energy regime’s rationale stands in question as climate change intensifies and capitalist logics of growth elicit existential debates across societies. Taken for granted assumptions about progress, largely forged during the industrial era, privilege growth and consumption over other signifiers of a good life (Beamish 2017, 174-5). At the intersection of the unsustainable fossil fuel energy regime and resulting climate change, humanity faces an all-encompassing crisis, compounded by expanding socio-economic inequality. The result of simultaneous, closely related pressures, suggests the possibility of an ultimate systemic crisis, parallel to Karl Marx’s conception of crisis inherent to capitalism. This paper explores humanity’s most serious, creeping problem, climate change, in relation to energy regime transition and inequality. Drawing on qualitative research in two historic coal extracting regions, in the United States and Europe, I ask how affected post-coal communities and government elites understand and describe the concurrent socio-economic, energy, and environmental dilemma and perceive solutions to it. Furthermore, based on findings from the two cases, I analyze what perception and solution narratives within those communities and among policymaking government elites suggest about our ability to secure a more socio-economically and environmentally sustainable future.

Author

• Nadia Smiecinska, University of California-Davis