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Climate Crisis and Humanity’s Future: Contesting Projects and Visions
Climate Crisis and Humanity’s Future: Contesting Projects and Visions
Abstract Submissions Closed
Thursday, 25 February 2021: 09:00-10:30
Location:
RC07 Futures Research (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
Amid a deepening climate crisis, humanity’s socio-ecological future depends on which of three distinct political-economic projects, currently vying for hegemony at different levels and regions of the world-system, comes to prevail. Each project is rooted in distinct class fractions and social interests. Carbon capitalism, currently ascendant institutionally, is a project of ‘business as usual’ (in the Stern report’s terminology), with efficiency improvements (and possible sunsetting of coal) but no major changes to the political ecology of contemporary capitalism. Climate capitalism proposes the ecological modernization of the energy base of capitalism, redirecting capital from fossil fuels toward more climatically benign energy including hydropower, solar, wind and nuclear. Included within this project are controversial geoengineering schemes to capture carbon from the atmosphere or to deflect solar radiation. The first two projects leave the class structure of capitalism untouched, including the concentration of economic power in the hands of major investors, executives and corporate directors, and the inequalities that issue from that power. In contrast, energy democracy finds its social base in environmental and other movements, including sections of the labour movement. Based in a vision of climate justice, it mandates a dual power shift, from fossil-fuel power to renewables (decarbonization) and from corporate oligarchy to public, democratic control of economic decisions (democratization). This session welcomes papers exploring the sociology of these projects, the contestation among them, and the intersections with related social forces, including decolonizing struggles. Analyses that foreground issues of political economy, political ecology and culture-ideology and particularly welcome.
Session Organizer: