Abstract
Ongoing societal commitments to carbon energy systems means that escalating climate catastrophe becomes the unavoidable outcome of a system of reasoning and institutional practice that historically has enabled the consolidation and global advance of a fossil fuel hegemony. To understand the ‘rational’ component of these developments, it is necessary to examine how the reasoning and practices associated with this hegemony gradually came to be embedded in everyday social interaction, cultural and political exchange, and identity formation. This forum examines the central contribution of Peter Wagner's Carbon Societies to understanding these issues. Contributing authors reflect on some of the major arguments raised by Wagner on the societal advancement of carbon living, as well as obstacles currently standing in the way of necessary socio-ecological transformations.
Keywords
Introduction: A social ecology of fossil fuel dependency: Insights from Peter Wagner's Carbon Societies
Tracey Skillington
Wagner's Carbon Societies (2024b) explores the fossil fuel-intensive trajectory modernity has embarked upon and accelerated over the last two centuries. Unlike Malm's (2016) appraisal of the politico-economic dimensions of these developments or Mitchell’s (2011) assessment of the co-evolution of democracies and carbon capitalism, Wagner offers a timely critical assessment of the key social transformations set in motion by a largescale exploitation of fossil fuels. Specifically, his book shows how fossil fuels were promoted to address major problems and in ways that would steadily inform imaginaries of the good society across various socio-economic and political divides.
Wagner notes how workers’ demands for greater distributive justice from the late nineteenth century, for instance, became synonymous with a democratization of carbon economies. Similarly, campaigns to extend suffrage were not only about establishing greater political equality but access to the material benefits of fossil fuel economies as well. The societal relevance of fossil fuels was thereby concretized through the efforts of private enterprise and, importantly, an increase in public demand for fossil fuel-based produce (p. 237) and carbon supported democratic imaginaries of freedom (p. 256). By the 1970s, the manufacture and sale of fossil fuel-based produce became so globally extensive, calls by the science community in the decades that followed for a serious societal shift away from fossil fuel-intensive living on the grounds that it posed a serious threat to planetary wellbeing were met with a high degree of disbelief.
In this way, Wagner empirically shows how commitments to fossil fuel development pathways were concretized through ‘an extended chain of political and economic decisions’ that enabled the resource-intensive consumer society we know today to emerge (p. 238). For instance, those ensuring that freedom, material wellbeing and fossil fuel abundance would be actively interpreted together (e.g., government support for carbon intense industries, road infrastructure, suburban housing schemes, etc.) especially from the middle of the twentieth century when key components of fossil fuel energy systems would play a strategic role in supporting post-war imaginaries of freedom (e.g., cheap and widely available fossil energy systems, high employment, car ownership, middle class suburban lifestyles, global travel, etc.). Once societies embraced fossil fuelled visions of the good life, the benefits accrued from these choices, in terms of convenience lifestyle, consumer choice and material gain, weighed heavily on proposals to abandon these development paths in the 1990s and embrace less ambitious, green alternatives. Wagner shows how to understand the ‘rational’ component of ongoing commitments to fossil fuel energy options, it is necessary to explore, beyond accumulated material gains, how fossil fuels historically came to be embedded in everyday patterns of social interaction, cultural practice, identity formation and modern consumer choices. Wagner highlights the limitations of accounting for the social aspects of fossil fuel consumption and their destructive tendencies only in terms their emplacement in specific territories or time frames. Importantly, he highlights how their societal advance has also been enabled by their introduction into everyday practice and the steady emergence of habit-formed behaviours and ‘generative schemes’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 55) that would allow their social relevance to evolve independently of their creators to become ‘second nature’ (Adorno, 2006).
The ongoing evolution of a pollution ethic today justifies excessive carbon consumption as a ‘necessary evil’ in the trade-off between ecological loss and material gain or military defense. 1 Wagner questions whether current policies aimed at initiating a transition away from carbon problem-solving and towards green alternatives have given sufficient attention to this wider social ecology of fossil fuel supported living? If not, is the type of ‘socio-ecological transformation’ needed to address the scale of problems we face today feasible (p. 26)? Without a fundamental shift in ‘societal self-understanding’ and a more conscious move away from fossil fuel energy systems, such transformation, Wagner believes, is unlikely to occur. Limiting prospects currently are efforts to actively distort the practical relevance of democratic commitments to principles of freedom, equality and security (Wagner, p. 103) outside of their consistency with carbon futures. Wagner's argument here is reminiscent of that of Ancker (2022) on the rise of ‘ugly freedoms’ where universal principles are employed by economic elites as instruments to support a neoliberal dismantling of commitments to international human rights, environmental agreements and policies seen as ‘obstructing’ their right to development and autonomy (see, also, Brown, 2016).
To address these challenges, Wagner highlights the importance of a new democratic political imaginary (p. 102) capable of countering the destructive tendencies inherent in ‘fossil fuel nostalgia’ (Daggett, 2018) and disrupting fossil fuel dependency with ‘the force of example’ (Wagner quoting Ferrara, 2008). That is, ‘situated alternatives to the prevailing socio-ecological constellation’ (p. 288) offering a viable pathway to less destructive futures. When the recent efforts of the Trump administration to dismantle various environmental protection policies and withdraw America's support for international climate change mitigation efforts are taken into consideration, one wonders if situated alternatives can indeed continue to thrive in the face of such backlash? Critics have become more vocal in recent years in their portrayal of decarbonized models as an existential threat to several traditional employment sectors (e.g., mining, farming, energy-intensive manufacturing) and modern ways of living more generally. The specter of ‘industrial humans’ (Weber, 1905/20) becoming useless and economies radically decelerated provokes a deep anxiety amongst many, a fear that has proven highly beneficial to a far-right, anti-environmental agenda. Given these developments, one wonders what might trigger the type of ‘reformation of consciousness’ Wagner sees as essential? What radical impetus will awaken carbon societies from the ‘dream’ (Benjamin, 1985) of unhindered problem displacement or capitalists as legitimate conquers of natural worlds?
‘The force of example’ which Wagner speaks of may well be provided chiefly by nature itself, especially in moments when its capacity to be an agent of serious harm is fully displayed (unprecedented levels of wildfire destruction, flash flooding, etc.) and the practical, as well as moral necessity of a thinking and acting beyond the present towards a safer, more ecologically responsible future are driven home (Skillington, 2023, 2024, 2015). In this instance, the type of new political imaginary that Wagner promotes is fed more by a compulsory need to use insights drawn from concrete encounters with catastrophe to reconceptualize the future as a ‘democratic resource’ (White, 2025), an open and less hierarchical context (Delanty, 2024) still receptive to an impulse of transformation and the possibility of structural reform. 2 Moments of crises are a powerful reminder of the fact that existing structures and historically relevant socio-ecological constellations are not set in stone and the social logic that supports their development can be actively rethought in the present. The will to orient ourselves towards a safer, more stable future means the conceptual space for reimagining development pathways remains open, especially when ‘the power of the negative’ (Hegel, 1976) is harnessed and primary sources of climate breakdown are addressed democratically.
In his appraisal of Wagner's context-sensitive historical analysis of ‘the social logic of fossil fuels’, Adloff considers how this analysis, with its emphasis on agency and contingency, might be used to better assess what transformations are needed to initiate more sustainable futures and address the current ‘polycrisis’ (the collective negative outcomes of rising political instability, inequalities, militarization, a loss of trust and solidarity, etc.). Mota focuses chiefly on Wagner's account of problem displacement. That is, the tendency of actors to address various social problems in ways that favour carbon-intensive responses and displace resulting ecological and social costs onto other peoples, territories and generations. Wagner's insights on displacement offer a rich theoretical contribution to understanding how carbon development pathways have been consolidated globally. Equally, however, the concept of displacement, Mota argues, should be situated within a more comprehensive historical framework that examines issues of agency, spatiality, coloniality and temporality from a comparative global perspective. Aykut also takes up the issue of problem displacement, assessing how it aligns with a broader literature exploring the ‘feral effects’ of key carbon development choices, noting how these choices have facilitated the externalization of structural mechanisms of social reproduction and the further expansion of capitalism's global power. In his reply to these critical commentaries below, Wagner reiterates the importance of retracing how climate change became ‘the inescapable’ outcome of a system of reasoning and institutional practice that has continued to consolidate its power over the years.
Taking contingency seriously: Looking back and ahead through the climate crisis
Frank Adloff
It has become commonplace to portray the future as bleak and its horizon as increasingly closed: The climate crisis is still escalating, and it is clear that global warming will not be limited to 1.5 degrees by 2100 but will likely reach 2–3 degrees or even more. The climate catastrophe also interacts with other dimensions of the polycrisis: Social inequality, the crisis of democracy, wars, etc. Given this situation, what is the point of knowing more precisely how carbon societies have evolved? What do historical-sociological analyses contribute to this situation? My point in this paper is, that historical-sociological perspectives that focus on contingencies of processes can contribute to the opening of the future.
Wagner's Ccntext-sensitive approach
In his magnificent book Carbon Societies (2024b), Peter Wagner analyses the development of modern societies’ dependence on fossil fuels and the historical origins of the climate crisis. In contrast to other social science works that emphasize very general systemic causes and structural continuities, Wagner asks which social problems the use of fossil fuels addressed in various historical contexts: ‘before climate change became a problem, it became a solution’ (4). Wagner is interested in the historically different uses of biophysical resources and the various social interpretations that go with them. He rightly points out that only by relating physical and ideological factors to each other can we adequately describe how carbon societies were able to develop.
In his highly persuasive study, Wagner demonstrates that the climate crisis is not the result of an inevitable historical logic, but rather the outcome of specific historical decisions and historically situated shifts in problems. His book emphasizes contingency, i.e., the changeability of social orders along critical junctures, while also taking a long-term view – he describes his approach as ‘context-sensitive global history’ (p. 80). Different causal factors were at work at different times. He is thus right to criticize monocausal historical explanations (according to which one cause has the same effect over centuries) and instead emphasizes agency, contingency and historical turning points. Looking back from the present, we can often only recognize the factors that contributed to the genesis of this very present (p. 59). Andrew Abbott (2016, 2019), in particular – to whom Wagner surprisingly makes no reference – has pointed out that the supposed inevitability and stability of past historical processes is often merely the result of narratives. Historical narratives retrospectively create a stable process, above all because the narrative often only includes events that contributed to the explanatory result – while ignoring all other factors.
Wagner identifies the global spread of the carbon regime after the Second World War as a decisive turning point in the climate crisis. Although the exploitation of the ‘first vertical frontier’ (coal) took place in the nineteenth century, it was not until the exploitation of the ‘second vertical frontier’ (oil and gas) from around 1900 onwards that greenhouse gas emissions began to increase massively. The United States played a particularly important role in this (p. 104ff.); it was seen as a society in which material abundance and democracy went hand in hand. This project was fuelled by the idea that frontiers could be pushed back: Horizontally to the west and vertically underground. In the United States, individual freedom, social and spatial mobility, and economic success have been linked to mass consumption, resource extraction, and fossil fuels, so that sustainability can seem downright ‘un-American’ (Paul, 2023).
After the Second World War, this model was increasingly adopted by other Western countries. Fossil fuels were deliberately used to solve socio-political problems. They can be seen as a means of resolving social issues and stabilizing democracy without undermining the power of the ruling elites (p. 136). However, as Wagner shows, other ways could have been pursued to satisfy the hunger for energy required by this type of problem-solving, such as the use of nuclear energy or hydropower. The ‘Western Great Acceleration’ after the Second World War and later the ‘Asian Great Acceleration’ in the 1980s and 1990s – led by China, the ‘Asian Tigers’ and India – ultimately led to a massive increase in CO₂ emissions and exacerbated ecological and social inequalities. It turns out that the decisions that led to today's climate emergency were only made in the second half of the twentieth century and that they were adhered to even though the unsustainability of burning fossil fuels had long been known – there was an ‘agreement’ on the logic of displacing the problem. The opportunity to change course during the critical juncture of the 1970s was missed, and the question now arises as to whether a critical juncture could be exploited today.
In this way, Peter Wagner can show that it is not a single cause that has set off a whole cascade of actions, but rather a multitude of causes that must be considered in a time-specific manner. It is not modernity with its functional differentiation (à la Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Luhmann) nor capitalism per se (à la Marx and (post-)Marxists) that are the cause of the intensified use of fossil fuels but rather: ‘we need an analysis of the transformations of modernity and/or capitalism to understand the increased human use of biophysical resources and its consequences’ (42). Wagner's view of the present is quite skeptical, but also somewhat cursory (which cannot be held against him in view of his intention to present a historical analysis). He calls in rather general terms for a recovery of democratic capacity for action and a departure from technocratic approaches. Wagner advocates a public discourse that understands the climate crisis as politically malleable and calls for the strengthening of the state's capacity to act. Two things are crucial to this: Redefining the key problems and reshaping the mechanisms of power (p. 255). His concise diagnosis of the times thus boils down to the conclusion that the needed reconfiguration of power does not necessarily mean overcoming capitalism, but that the hurdles are nevertheless very high.
Looking ahead
What does Peter Wagner's historical-sociological analysis mean for the scope for action in the present and future? In the following, relying on Wagner's reflections, I will ask how his context-sensitive historical analyses, which emphasize contingency and agency, can be used to look ahead. Firstly, it must be noted that, in view of the massive challenges and threats mentioned above, societies’ problem-solving capacities are currently too weak. Some believe that all that is needed is further technical innovation, others are banking on green modernization, while others are hoping for a fundamental transformation of capitalism (Adloff & Neckel, 2019). However, it seems that we are currently heading towards a world of climate barbarism, in which the Global North is pursuing an exclusionary, regressive and cruel approach to climate change adaptation (Blumenfeld, 2023). In view of possible temperature rises of 2 to 4 degrees, which could result in catastrophic developments and the crossing of climate tipping points, the way we deal with unavoidable socio-ecological damage must be redesigned. We are already in a phase of ‘post-sustainability’ in which the negative effects of climate change and biodiversity loss – with the risk of social collapse – are becoming increasingly noticeable, undermining confidence in a positive future (Adloff, 2024). An analysis of what is possible now also includes considering not only local and regional disasters, but also an accumulation of crises in the form of societal breakdowns or collapses, which manifest themselves in a reduction in collective capacity for action and a loss of functionality in social systems (Huggel et al., 2022; Steel et al., 2024). Existential risks pose threats to individuals, communities, states or humanity as a whole. To put it more clearly: Rising social inequalities, political instability, coups, unplanned transformations, the disintegration of social orders, polarization, the loss of trust and solidarity, high numbers of casualties, de-differentiation, tribalizing community formation, disruptive events, social tipping points, system change, wars, etc. are likely to become more prevalent and will have to be on the agenda of the social sciences. Modern social order, as we know it, is on the brink.
Secondly, the planetary crisis is not only an ecological crisis, but also a temporal one: Nostalgic retrotopias, static presentism and transformative visions of the future compete for interpretative authority. What is needed is a new temporal regime that integrates long-term responsibility, planetary rhythms and social justice. However such integration is not (yet?) in sight. We currently inhabit a moment of profound historical rupture, an ‘epochal threshold’ (Blumenberg) where the foundational narratives and temporal structures of modernity are collapsing under the weight of their own ecological consequences. In this era, the escalating impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss are no longer future threats but present realities, systematically eroding our collective trust in a positive future. The diagnosis of a world beyond planetary boundaries stands in stark, almost unthinkable, opposition to the modern idea of progress, which is fundamentally predicated on an open horizon of future possibility and the assumed infinite availability of natural resources (Wagner, 2016). The central challenge of our time is not merely technological or political, but deeply temporal and imaginative: How to develop a new regime of historicity capable of guiding societies toward a livable future within these new constraints.
Wagner's analysis of the possible reveals a profound socio-political dilemma. In the short term, the only realistic path appears to be the defense and speeding up of ecological modernization – the project of greening the existing system through pragmatic measures like carbon pricing, emissions trading, innovation funding, and massive investment in renewable energy and resilient infrastructure. Yet, this approach has severe and inherent limitations. As Wagner and others like Blühdorn (2025) argue, ecological modernization often perilously continues the modern logic of ‘displacement’, solving problems in one domain by shifting them onto other societies, onto non-human nature, or into the future. Research on ‘climate colonialism’ (Sultana, 2022) reveals, for example, how technical and market-oriented solutions to combat climate change are often linked to environmental injustices and new forms of colonialism. These include land grabs for renewable energies, green extractivism and CO₂ compensation mechanisms, which obscure historical responsibilities and legitimize further emissions. Confronting this would require a completely new international distribution of power and resources, which is currently not in sight. Addressing it entails, as it were, expanding the concept of democracy, which has so far only been institutionalized at the national level. Dewey's (1991) theory of democracy, for example, does not start with the state, but with the concept of the public sphere. If the joint action of two or more actors has no impact on third parties, this interaction can be regarded as private. However, if uninvolved third parties are also affected by the interaction, they see a need to influence the action, perhaps even to prevent it altogether. In this case, Dewey argues, a public sphere emerges. It consists of a circle of citizens who, based on a shared experience of being affected, concludes that the interactions in question must be controlled. In this way, mechanisms of displacement could be called into question (provided that the demands of nature can also be integrated into this form of public sphere). It is therefore a matter of egalitarian communication between all those affected by specific consequences of actions.
Therefore, while pursuing these short-term measures (over the next 10–20 years) of modernization, a longer-term horizon (toward 2050 and beyond) must simultaneously be established to prepare for a more fundamental transformation that moves beyond the modernization, displacement and growth paradigm itself. These processes – modernization and fundamental transformation – are not sequential but must run in parallel, a complex and often contradictory undertaking. Navigating this dual imperative requires a radical rethinking of our relationship with time.
The dominant temporal mode of contemporary politics is presentism – a focus on immediate electoral cycles, economic quarters, and short-term interests that systematically excludes the needs of future generations. Compounding this is a fatalistic, apocalyptic pessimism that, perversely, leads to the same political paralysis: If the final battle is now and all is lost, why compromise or protect democratic institutions? Scholars like White (2024) critique this ‘temporal claustrophobia’, arguing for the necessity of collective visions that span several decades. This timeframe is long enough to contemplate radical structural change yet close enough to remain urgent and tangible. Philosopher Ludger Schwarte (2024) adds that the goal of political decision-making should not be to subordinate the future to the present – to preserve current conditions indefinitely – but to actively keep the future open as a pool of realizable possibilities. This requires fostering what he calls ‘futurity,’ an openness to discontinuity and creativity that lies beyond our current temporal horizons. To institutionalize this long-term perspective, scholars have proposed the creation of ‘deep-time organizations’ (Hanusch & Biermann, 2020) – political and social institutions designed to look ahead for centuries or even millennia. These would function as a ‘Deep-Time Observatory’, serving as a competence centre to gather and disseminate knowledge about the long-term interactions between society and the Earth system.
Given the improbability of a single, sweeping ‘Great Transformation’, a more pragmatic and promising approach is that of bricolage (for more detail see Adloff, 2026). This concept describes a step-by-step, exploratory, and iterative mode of action that combines practical short-term interventions with a committed long-term vision. It is an improvizational practice of weaving together diverse elements – new and old – to create transformative arrangements that can break path dependencies. This approach acknowledges that there is no universal model or silver bullet. Instead, it values the inclusion of diverse practices and forms of knowledge from across the globe. The strategist's role is to intelligently combine different types of action: Large-scale ‘Big Plans’ for infrastructure overhaul, changes to the ‘rules of the game’ like CO2 prices, and grassroots projects that foster radical innovation (Termeer et al., 2024). This flexible, multi-pronged strategy of bricolage replaces – in line with Wagner's historical analyses – the paralyzing illusion of an ‘everything-now-and-at-once’ transformation of modernity or capitalism with a strategic and context-sensitive prioritization.
Imagining possibilities
Yet, what is socially possible lies in the future and thus in the unforeseeable. We cannot anticipate what social and technological innovations will emerge, how civic engagement will develop, what political pressure will be built, or what investment decisions will be taken. In this context, it is essential to shift the focus from an absolute impossibility (wanting to change the whole system in a short time) to a differentiated, time-horizon-graded assessment. Socially, politically, and social-scientifically, we need both a ‘sense of reality’ and a ‘sense of possibility’ (following Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities). This means acknowledging the persistence of fossil structures and interests and the necessity of small, short-term steps, while also emphasizing the urgency and possibility of large, long-term processes of change. Only in this way can we respond appropriately and effectively to the various temporal, social, and ecological challenges.
Underpinning all political, economic and technical solutions is the fundamental role of the social imaginary (which is, following Cornelius Castoriadis, also of immense importance to Wagner, cf. Adams & Smith, 2019). Individual and collective actors are guided not only by rational calculations but by fictional expectations (Beckert & Bronk, 2018) – imaginary constructions of the future that enable coordination and action in the face of radical uncertainty. These imaginations and narratives, whether they are climate models, ‘Green Growth’ slogans, or apocalyptic warnings, are performative; they shape reality by influencing investment, behaviour, or political mobilization. The task, therefore, is to cultivate new, compelling imaginaries. In the tradition of Castoriadis, this involves the radical work of ‘doing otherwise’ – consciously creating things differently than prevailing structures suggest. It means developing societal visions that can navigate the tension between ambition and realism, avoiding both the siren call of unrealistic utopianism and the paralysis of fatalistic resignation.
How societies imagine the future plays a decisive role in determining which future will become present. Images of the future are increasingly developed in highly specialized, often professional contexts – in econometrics, climate modeling, or strategic corporate planning. These fields produce their own future imaginaries, which often remain confined to their domain (Altstaedt, 2024), while other images circulate society-wide, such as ideas of green economic growth or visions of actors like Fridays for Future. Positive or negative expectations can influence the implementation of climate policies, for example through investment decisions, behavioural changes or the mobilization of social movements (Beckert & Bronk, 2022).
Making statements about the future is a difficult task for the social sciences. This is also because the discipline focuses primarily on explaining the present through its historical genesis (as Wagner does too). For many (but not for Wagner) the present appears determined by the past, and the future cannot be conceived as anything other than an extension of the present. In this way, proponents of theories of functional differentiation or of capitalist profit accumulation can see nothing in the future but a systemically inert society that will not radically transform (see for example Beckert, 2024). Both models share the common problem of ignoring the ubiquity of social change and the presence of the future in the present. Yet, change is firstly the normal state and is secondly guided by visions of the future (cf. Adam, 2024; Delanty, 2024).
Abbott (2019) asks how historicist approaches, which emphasize continuities, can be reconciled with presentist perspectives, which foreground causes for change. Abbott argues that the social science assumption of general laws or tendencies of social life works in the short term but is problematic in the long term, while the assumption of variability in rules and institutions is more sustainable long-term but less convincing in the short term. He shows that disciplines like sociology view the present from the perspective of the past as something that has become solid, while economics, in contrast, is interested in choices and therefore change. Economics is ultimately not about explanations but about choice: About assessments of possible future values and the actions that economic actors will take in the present based on those assessments of the future.
Thus, while sociological historicism often appears deterministic, teleological and past-focused, economic models emphasize freedom of action and neglect history and the macro-structures that shape action. As an alternative to these two models, Abbott advocates for a processual perspective that understands social phenomena as chains of events anchored in a constantly reconstituted, dense present. He rejects Max Weber's notion of history as long-term development, emphasizing instead a sequence of local, precarious presents structured by narrative linkages. History, accordingly, consists not of stable but of dynamic trajectories and of critical junctures that converge in the present. Marx's ‘nightmare of the past’ can sometimes be forgotten very quickly: Abbott's take is that there is always freedom in the present, and the futures we make can be astonishingly new.
In its analyses of social change, sociology generally focuses too strongly on the agency (of typically powerless actors) versus (anonymous, influential) structures paradigm. The juxtaposition of ‘event versus structure’, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of turning points that intervene unexpectedly in structured social processes. Events can unleash a force that drives change and generates new social and political dynamics. Examples from recent history include protests such as those in Paris in May 1968, events such as 9/11, or eventful processes such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Events are not simply isolated occurrences but can have profound effects on social structures and historical processes (Sewell, 2005). In events, constellations of actors and decisions are linked in unforeseen ways with a specific temporal sequence.
Thus, unpredictable events – a climate disaster, a social movement, a technological breakthrough, a new chance for economic profits – can break open seemingly entrenched structures and create windows of possibility that were previously closed or invisible. However, it is also possible that events open windows of opportunity for regressive, right-wing extremist forces, which cannot be ruled out in any way in the current situation. It is also conceivable that extreme weather events could raise awareness of social vulnerabilities, but that the primary conclusion drawn from this would be that people need to adapt better to climate change rather than engage in climate mitigation (a realistic possibility that Wagner does not discuss in his book).
To sum up very briefly, complementary to Wagner's historical analysis, I have attempted to use concepts such as contingency, imaginaries and events to analyze the present and possible futures. In view of transgressing planetary boundaries, the current situation must be viewed with extreme pessimism, but it is not hopeless. The future remains open in principle and the goal is not to predict it but to actively shape it with prudence, creativity, and a profound sociological responsibility for the worlds to come.
Problem displacement, a critical engagement with Wagner's Carbon Societies
Aurea Mota
Wagner's Carbon Societies represents a significant intervention in contemporary social theory by foregrounding the sociological and historical processes by which climate change became a societal phenomenon based on the ‘normalization’ of fossil-fuel dependence, what the author framed as ‘the carbon regime of democratic capitalism’ (Wagner, 2024b, chapter 6). The richness of his argument makes the work one of the most important analyses of our present condition. In what follows, I would like to assess one of the key analytical ideas presented in the book – the notion of ‘problem displacement’ – with a view to showing how it could be expanded. To make it clear from the very beginning, the critical dialogue I want to start is built on the assumption that ‘problem displacement’ is so structural for the whole analysis that it should have occupied a much more central position in the argument.
Wagner deals with the idea of ‘problem displacement’ in Chapter Nine when he describes a recurrent social and political process behind the social logic of fossil fuels His argument is that actors facing a social ‘problem’ recast it in ways that generally have favoured carbon-intensive responses, while displacing the attendant social and ecological costs onto other spaces, temporalities, or populations. 3 These practices have reproduced themselves along different global time-space scenarios. One of the key issues that Wagner pursues in his book is to understand how this mechanism (of displacement) works through history to provide us with a theoretical framework to understand the process of consolidation of global carbon society. This theoretical move shifts attention from technological determinism to the politics of problem-definition, interpretation and institutional design.
Yet, while Wagner's heuristic is illuminating, it invites further elaboration if it is to serve as a robust analytical model for critical historical sociology. The present essay critically engages with Wagner's approach, arguing for a more complex theorization of displacement, agency, temporality, spatiality, and coloniality. In doing so, it situates ‘problem displacement’ within a wider intellectual lineage and demonstrates its utility through comparative historical framework.
In this context, I would like to explore the idea of displacement itself, without the world ‘problem’ being added to it. A key contribution to the discussion about displacement comes from Derrida (1978), who worked with the idea of displacement as (self)transformation, a fundamental process connected to a his own ‘deconstructivistic’ agenda. 4 Even though Derrida is a key figure when it comes to the discussion about displacement in the social sciences, he used the term in a very elusive and not fully articulated way. In his approach, displacement originated in the Freudian interpretation of dreams and is related to his criticism of the ‘language of presence’ that constructs modern discourse and practice. For Derrida, displacement is the possibility of a movement that can turn hierarchy upside down to dislodge a dominant system.
On the basis of this position, but moving forward, displacement can be seen as a mechanism of transformation both in terms of a change in an actor's experience (subject) and in terms of the structure of time and space in which these experiences are inserted to. The use of the term ‘displacement’ by Derrida is much more abstract than the one that Wagner is proposing. However, Derrida's concept of displacement has a wider significance for understanding the self-constitution of modernity and to expand our understanding about the agency of human beings when it comes to the question of historical transformation. The focus of an analysis on a movement of displacement demands, in a very strong sense, the perspective to be simultaneously put on the action and on the transformation that always – inevitably – marks the process.
In Wagner's book the idea of problem displacement is a one that is very much dependent on the shared assumption of what a societal problématique is. 5 Drawing from Niklas Luhmann, Wagner understands a ‘problem’ as an issue in need of a solution, but this solution is not necessarily immediately available (Wagner, 2024b, p. 208). Thus, to move the problem somewhere else is a way of making the issue that needs to be solved ‘manageable’ – also in terms of a reflexion about the ‘negative externalities’ involved in the solution and a ‘cost-benefit’ analysis. In brief, Wagner identifies the historical pattern of modern ‘problem displacements’ and shows the ‘incoherencies’ of these processes when it comes to the global attempts of the stabilization of democratic capitalism and also of authoritarian regimes that produces the climate crisis.
There is no disagreement with the analysis that is presented in Wagner's book. However, I would like to suggest that a much more nuanced approach to the issue of ‘displacement’ and how it is connected to the emergence of different ideas of global problems needs to be developed. That is why one of the criticisms that we can bring to Wagner's analysis is why is the theoretical questions that concerned Derrida are absent from this discussion about displacement? The question is not about adopting (or not) a Derridarian position, but it is about what is under transformation (what has been turned upside-down) behind displacement operations.
Wagner's point of departure is that energy systems are not mere technical substrates but social formations whose trajectories are shaped by political contestation, institutional arrangements and cultural imaginaries. The concept of problem displacement is particularly powerful because it underscores the definition of a ‘problem’ as itself political and contextual. State agencies, corporate actors, professional associations, epistemic communities, regional possess unequal capacities to define social problems and to propose socially legitimate solutions. When such actors frame issues in ways that privilege carbon-intensive infrastructures – whether for reasons of profit, state-building, maintenance of communal structures, or modernist aspiration – the resulting social order acquires a material profile that can resist subsequent changes. In this sense, Wagner provides an important corrective to accounts of fossil modernity that rely on impersonal forces such as market efficiency or technological inevitability (Wagner, 2024b).
However, in treating displacement at the level of ‘society’, an analysis risks underplaying the heterogeneity of actors and interests involved in the framing of problems. Critical historical sociology insists on disaggregating the social into its contending parts. To illustrate this with a well-known European example, the historical rise of coal in Britain, or the later ascendance of oil as the dominant fuel, cannot be attributed to a single, unified societal logic. Rather, these trajectories were the outcome of extended struggles among mine-owners, municipal authorities, shipping magnates, labour unions, engineers and imperial administrators. 6 These actors engaged in bargaining, coercion and compromise, and the settlements they reached privileged some interests while marginalizing others. By representing displacement as a collective process of ‘society’, there is a danger of reifying the social and underestimating the incremental victories of particular coalitions that become sedimented into infrastructures and institutions.
Relatedly, Wagner's account could benefit from a fuller theorization of contestation and resistance. Historical evidence reveals numerous instances where actors have sought to disrupt or redirect carbon-intensive framings. Environmental movements, local communities, trade unions and dissident experts have often challenged dominant definitions of social problems, sometimes successfully altering policy and investment. The history of environmental regulation, anti-nuclear mobilization and urban transport reform illustrates how counter-framing can interrupt or mitigate displacement, even if unevenly. 7 This perspective reintroduces contingency and agency into the story: Displacement is powerful and dislocates everything but is not inevitable.
Another point related to the issue of the many possibilities of action as connected to a movement of displacement concerns temporality. Wagner recognizes that problem displacement involves the deferral or externalization of costs, but the mechanisms by which discursive shifts translate into long-lasting material and institutional arrangements deserve closer scrutiny. Here the literature on path dependence, socio-technical transitions and infrastructural lock-in is instructive. 8 Displacement begins as a rhetorical or cognitive reframing – as recognized by Derrida – but acquires enduring force when it becomes embedded in physical infrastructures, legal forms and organizational routines. For example, state investment in urban environments does more than ‘solve’ the immediate problem of mobility; it creates a built environment and an economic ecosystem – automobile manufacturing, petrol distribution, suburban housing, a complex system of connection that alters the spaces-time where life flows. 9 This whole new system, is the one responsible for producing, normalizing, or even ‘naturalizing’ – to stay with an idea of how social transformation became historically taken for granted (Taylor, 1989) – a specific behaviour. Once ‘established’, such new infrastructures make alternative framings politically, socially, culturally and economically costly to pursue. A historical sociology of displacement must therefore track not only discursive shifts but also the material and institutional processes by which those shifts are stabilized.
The point deserves greater attention when it comes to the issue of ‘problem displacement’ in the account of coloniality and uneven development. Wagner gestures to the imperial dimensions of fossil modernity but these should be foundational rather than peripheral. The ability to externalize environmental and social costs rests on the fact that there are asymmetries of power between metropole and colony, between urban centres and rural peripheries, which extend overseas. The architecture of modern empires – which despite their legal pluralism all had similar forms of exploitation of coerced labour, dispossession of land, racialization/hierarchization of peoples, and favourable trade regimes – created zones where pollution, deforestation, labour exploitation and resource depletion could be concentrated with limited political consequence for metropolitan publics.
Understanding how problem reframing worked in practice therefore requires examining where the burdens of particular ‘solutions’ fell. Different trajectories of modern development established by colonial extraction allowed different stratus of metropolitan societies as well of colonial areas to resolve certain social problems domestically precisely by displacing costs abroad. However, this ‘abroad’ was also ‘within’ the domains of colonial empire. In the case of the relation between colonial Portugal, for instance, the crown in the early nineteenth century moved the centre of power to Brazil which it continued to treat as the colony. This confluence of spatial injustice and the whole issue of political power needs to be fully inscribed in the historical anatomy of carbon dependence. So, the formation of new central/peripheral areas of power/resistance emerged after movements of displacements emerged.
In many colonial settings – and in metropolitan areas – the capacities to resist were severely constrained. Railways, mines and plantation economies were inserted into colonial territories to resolve metropolitan problems of supply and capital accumulation while structuring local dispossession and environmental harm. The resulting infrastructures were not incidental, they anchored future development trajectories and political economies in ways that persisted after formal decolonization. The colonial case demonstrates the spatiality and moral asymmetry of displacement: Some regions accumulated capital and security while others suffered pollution, labour precarity and ecological degradation. Any account of how problem-definitions become durable must therefore account for these unequal geographies and the enduring legacies they leave in post-colonial states. Without going further into historically specific examples, in terms of the organization of the argument of the book, the analysis of different trajectories that became strongly marked by historical events that happened in ‘early modernity’ should have been given much more prominence in order to deal with the problem of problem displacement and the formation of modern carbon societies, an
Without careful specification, the displacement heuristic risks becoming an unfalsifiable gloss – and lose its potentiality as a concept that could be very productively applied to critical historical-sociological enquire. As Wagner started to do by moving deeper into the logics of fossil fuel, historical sociologists could work with identifiable and observable ‘movements’ throughout the passage of time and how it can manifest in different spaces to be able to offer a critical analysis. Discursively, one can trace the rise of frames such as ‘energy security’, ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ in parliamentary debates, technical manuals and popular media. Institutionally, researchers can map the emergence and consolidation of regulatory instruments, subsidy regimes and procurement rules that channel investment toward carbon-intensive options. Materially, infrastructural mapping – cataloguing pipelines, transmission networks, ports, refineries and highways – documents the physical commitments embodying past reframing. To understand how these things construct carbon capitalism, we need to keep following the incorporation of a multi-level approach. 10 The challenge is to find a promising route to demonstrate how rhetorical frames translate into durable socio-technical regimes.
If the concept of displacement is to do analytic and political work, then it must be coupled with a framework privileging new forms of understanding on how problems are conceived and ‘solved’. As it is clear in Wagner's book, re-framing problems in low-carbon ways will not, in itself, secure the transformation of climate mentality. Without deliberate attention to reparations, labour conversion, land rights and participatory decision-making, re-framed solutions risk reproducing old injustices under a different guise. A hypothetical programme that scales up bioenergy without securing land tenure or consulting people who has constructed their societal self-understanding under diverse cosmological systems risks being pointless. Thus, the politics of re-framing must be inseparable from the politics of historical recognition of how the problem of displacement has originated as the artificial construction of boundaries between an inside and an outside have been created. To pursue that aim, what Krenak (2024) has called ‘affective alliances’ with the peoples who have been excluded from the central areas of knowledge need to be undertaken. Unlike in most of the modern period, the problem of the global climate crisis cannot any longer be displaced anywhere in time and space.
In conclusion, Wagner's notion of ‘problem displacement’ inaugurates a rich research programme. However, critical historical sociology can advance this agenda by insisting on analytical precision on both terms, but specially on the movement of displacement itself. That would make it possible disaggregating agency and conflict; specifying the temporal mechanisms of lock-in; bringing colonial and geographic inequalities into the analytic centre; and linking strongly this analysis with the whole issue of different systems of knowledge and action that aim at ‘solving’ problems. The stakes are practical as well as theoretical: Changing the energy trajectory requires not only better technologies but also a purposive politics of problem-definition, a politics that democratizes who counts, acknowledges historical injustice and designs institutional arrangements that prevent new artificial ways of displacement of harms onto those least able to bear them.
Making problem displacement Fecund: From unintended consequences to Feral eruptions
Stefan C. Aykut
Unlike many theory-driven or presentist accounts of the climate crisis, Peter Wagner's Carbon Societies approaches the issue from the vantage point of historical sociology. This in itself is a laudable enterprise, and the reader is quickly rewarded with a book that is both analytically ambitious and refreshingly concrete, rich in empirical and historical detail. Rather than identifying invariant systemic logics to explain the world's ever-deeper dependence on fossil fuels, Wagner advances a strikingly simple yet powerful guiding question: ‘Which kinds of problem were meant to be solved by increasing the use of fossil fuels – and thus generating climate change – and whose problems these were’ (Wagner, 2024b, p. 16).
By pursuing this question, Wagner seeks to retrace how and why societies – first in the West and North, later in the Global South – became increasingly entangled in the large-scale use of coal, oil, and gas to fuel their economies. This inquiry significantly enriches our understanding of the climate crisis. As Wagner rightly observes, existing accounts in economics, sociology, and political economy are often overly monocausal, attributing fossil dependence to singular and persistent logics such as population growth, modernization dynamics, or capitalist accumulation. Against such determinisms, Wagner foregrounds the contingency of historical developments, the interplay of social dynamics within the world system, and the formative role of human imagination and collective agency. In doing so, Carbon Societies renders climate change intelligible as a genuinely social and historical phenomenon.
A critical engagement with Wagner's thesis must begin with his central analytical concept: Problem displacement, which the book's subtitle identifies as the ‘social logic of fossil energies.’ The concept can be situated in the resonance field of earlier sociological diagnoses, including concepts such as Beck's (1999) ‘unintended side-effects’, Lessenich's (2019) ‘externalization society’, and Anna Tsing's ‘feral effects’, or ‘feral eruptions’. 11 My discussion begins by turning to Wagner's historical demonstration to give flesh to the displacement thesis, before attempting to tease out – through a comparison with these earlier frameworks – the specific contribution Wagner's concept makes, and where it might be productively extended or complemented.
One key moment in Wagner's narrative is the late nineteenth century rise of the European labour movement (Wagner, 2024b, pp. 99–104). At the time, European societies were marked by a double tension: Expanding productive capacities and material wealth coexisted with widespread pauperization and mass emigration, while democratic ideals clashed with restrictive suffrage laws that excluded large parts of the population. Under these conditions, demands for a more inclusive democracy and a fairer distribution of wealth gained force. While colonial exploitation temporarily alleviated some of these pressures, it ultimately intensified the contradictions of European modernity – contributing to the rise of communism and fascism and, eventually, to the imperial confrontation of the First World War. Wagner then shows that a different model emerged on the margins of the European imperial constellation, namely in the United States. Historical circumstances – its founding conditions, territorial vastness, and abundant resources – allowed for a comparatively more inclusive social structure. Here, social tensions could be mitigated, at least for a time, through the availability of land and, later, of fossil resources. Turner's Frontier Thesis (see Bonazzi, 1993) captures this ethos, according to which social conflicts are not resolved through reform or revolution, but by opening new frontiers of material wealth. Albeit, one must add, systematically at the expense of ‘others’: The Native Americans who were displaced, decimated, and whose histories were all but erased to sustain the illusion of an open land.
After 1945, Wagner shows, the American model of social compromise through expanding resource use was partially transplanted to Western Europe. Whereas earlier struggles over economic and political participation had led to stagnation and war, postwar fossil expansion made it possible to overcome these blockages without fundamentally transforming the social order or threatening elite power. What Wagner terms the ‘Western Great Acceleration’ (p. 125) was thus not only a story of reconstruction and Cold War competition, but also a means of resolving the ‘social question’ within the industrialized North. The costs, however, were double. While living standards in the North improved dramatically, the gap separating it from the so-called ‘Third World’ widened, and the ecological consequences of growth became ever more severe. In short, progress rested on both social and ecological forms of problem displacement.
The 1990s opened a new chapter: The ‘Asian Great Acceleration’ (Wagner, 2024b, pp. 219–223). Against the backdrop of a globalized social and ecological question, rapid industrialization in Asia produced a partial convergence of living standards across world regions. At the same time, global emissions, ecosystem destruction, and land-use change exploded, dramatically increasing the likelihood of transgressing planetary boundaries. While the Western Great Acceleration marked the planet's entry into the Anthropocene, it was arguably the Asian Great Acceleration that drove material flows of waste and pollution beyond the absorptive capacities of ecosystems, thereby definitively disrupting the Earth's biogeochemical cycles. 12
In Wagner's hands, the climate crisis appears not as the inevitable outcome of a single historical logic, but as the unintended – though neither unknown nor unseen – product of decisions made under contingent conditions. What he calls ‘displacement politics’ (Wagner, 2023) designates the process by which complex social problems are ‘solved’ through their systematic relocation in a threefold sense: Onto other societies, onto nature and the planet, and into the future.
Three critical questions arise from Wagner's framing. The first one concerns the specificity of fossil energies. Should problem displacement really be understood as ‘the social logic of fossil fuels’? Fossil fuels share properties – high energy density, storability, transportability – that historically made them central to conflict resolution strategies. Yet the mechanism seems broader: Major dam projects, nuclear power, or contemporary ‘technical fixes’ to climate change (from carbon capture and removal projects to large-scale geoengineering) all produce similar patterns of displacement. This suggests problem displacement may be a more general social mechanism, of which fossil dependence is only a particularly consequential manifestation.
Ulrich Beck famously argued that modernity, originally built on a promise of security, progress and freedom through science, emancipation and the rule of law, has produced new, global risks that undermine its very foundations. These risks are unintended consequences of the very processes set in motion by modernity itself: Individualization, industrialization, scientization, or gender equality. Modernization, Beck argues, operates through instrumental rationality – isolating problems and solving them without regard for the broader implications of those solutions. Thus, resolving one problem often generates another.
Beck calls ‘organized irresponsibility’ this circular movement of problem solving, symbolic normalization of new risks, and the continual escalation of material threats and destructions (Beck, 1999, p. 32). Organized irresponsibility draws on ‘manufactured uncertainties’, that is, strategic efforts to blur causalities and obscure responsibilities in order to sustain risky scientific practices and industrial processes. Unintended consequences, in this view, are therefore not necessarily unknown – or at least they often do not remain unknown for long. 13
Wagner similarly insists that problem displacements are unintended, but not unseen. Historical actors were often aware of the social and ecological risks they produced but chose to repress or sideline them. This is an important addition to Beck's argument. The history of the climate crisis, in this light, is not a story of belated enlightenment leading toward ‘reflexive modernity’ but one of active denial, as shown in other historical accounts such as Fressoz's (2007) récit of early industrial risk awareness and of the ‘small disinhibitions’ that enabled industrial modernity to advance despite widespread knowledge of its dangers.
Building on Beck and Fressoz, Wagner could have sharpened his notion of problem displacement by extending it to other historical phenomena beyond fossil-fuel dependence – drawing, for instance, on Beck's concept of ‘organized irresponsibility’ or on Fressoz's idea of ‘small disinhibitions’: The legal stratagems, moral contortions, and scientific tactics that have historically allowed actors to pursue risky trajectories despite growing awareness of their undesirable consequences.
To do so would inevitably bring us to a second question, which concerns the societal conditions under which problem displacement occurs. Under what social, political and economic contexts does it take place? In Living Well at Others’ Expense, Lessenich (2019) offers a very specific, albeit arguably somewhat one-sided answer to this question. His book aims to uncover the dark side of the success of the Western welfare-state model. ‘By externalization’, he writes, ‘I understand a specific mode of socialization, a historically situated and spatially circumscribed structural mechanism of social reproduction. Capitalist societies … are externalizing societies: They unavoidably, even compulsively, externalize in order to be able to permanently maintain their mode of production and to reproduce it on a constantly expanded level’ (Lessenich, 2023, p. 20).
For Lessenich, externalization is a necessary consequence of capitalist development, unfolding within a capitalist world system in which the centre systematically appropriates, exploits, and devalues resources from the periphery, while simultaneously outsourcing pollution and hazardous industries. For the richer societies of the Global North, externalizations thus constitute the ‘unacknowledged preconditions, side effects, and consequences of their world-historical success’ (ibid.). The social compromise that underpinned industrial welfare capitalism in the North was systematically concluded at the expense of third parties. Moreover, this context has been actively suppressed and rendered invisible, while the consequences of externalization have been shifted onto the future, as in Wagner's problem displacement thesis.
Wagner rightly departs from Lessenich's insistence on capitalism as the sole driver of problem displacements. He also avoids Lessenich's simplified conception of a global zero-sum game in which gains in the centre – the West or global North – are automatically and necessarily offset by losses in the global South. Wagner's displacements unfold within more complex regional and global constellations, which may partially and temporarily defuse certain tensions while deepening others. The ‘Great Asian Acceleration’, for instance, led to a partial deindustrialization of the West, with the social and political consequences we observe today in many parts of the United States and Europe. And yet, Wagner does not clearly distinguish problem-solving from problem displacement, a slippage that somewhat obscures the politics of his concept. In this regard, his reference to Luhmann (Wagner, 2024b, p. 208, 209) is of limited help. In Luhmannian terms, problem displacement would not constitute a scandal or a pathology, but a structural and ubiquitous feature of functionally differentiated modernity. In this model, problem displacement is all but unavoidable.
But is this satisfactory? Lessenich's account, despite its limitations, more clearly identifies the political economy of externalization, rooting it in capitalist logics of appropriation, unequal exchange, and externalization. For Wagner, too, the capacity of an actor or collective agent to displace problems successfully appears to correlate with their position in the (global) social hierarchy. Yet how are these logics of displacement linked to specific political and economic systems? Are they more prevalent in capitalism, in democracies compared to autocracies – or vice versa? And through what kinds of compromises or regulatory mechanisms might the tensions that drive problem displacements be mitigated or defused? The deepening climate, ecological, and political crises of our time make it all the more urgent to clarify these links.
The third interrogation concerns the historical succession of problem displacements and the possibility of a logic of escalation. In Wagner's account, successive displacements appear to follow such a logic: Ever more severe side effects are normalized as the necessary costs of resolving increasingly complex social tensions. But is this a historical rule? And, relatedly, how might we avoid yet another catastrophic problem displacement as the necessity to address the climate crisis creates new global tensions waiting to be resolved? Wagner's remark that the planetary nature of climate change and the current historical constellation limit the possibility of further displacements in time and space (Wagner, 2024b, pp. 225–227) may, in this regard, prove overly optimistic.
Here it is useful to contrast Wagner's notion of displacement with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's figure of ‘feral effects’ or ‘feral eruptions’. In the essay Earth Stalked by Man, Tsing (2016) conceptualizes modern infrastructures – plantations, industrial complexes, energy systems – as machines of replication: Simplified ecologies engineered for maximum yield and reproducibility. These systems are powerful and globalizing, yet they never fully subsume local, vernacular ecologies and ways of life. While capitalist world-making legitimizes extractivism by invoking hidden forces – market, growth, modernity – as self-regulating orders that will ultimately harmonize everything, in the cracks of these systems feral forces erupt: Pests, diseases, invasive species, or unexpected social mobilizations. She writes: At the center of my concerns are the awkward relations between what one might call ‘machines of replication’ – those simplified ecologies, such as plantations, in which life worlds are remade as future assets – and the vernacular histories in which such machines erupt in all their particularity and go feral in counter-intentional forms. (Tsing, 2016, p. 2)
Tsing's perspective revisits the figure of unseen side effects but breaks with linear, unidirectional imaginaries of externalization and also with the mechanistic connotations of the displacement metaphor. It highlights the patchy Anthropocene as a space of unevenness and unpredictability, in which the living world itself – humans, plants, fungi – reacts in ways that elude control.
By shifting the analytical focus from the ‘big’ mechanics of modernity, capitalism, or class compromise to the unruly agency of heterogeneous assemblages of ecological and social ‘others’, Tsing's figure underscores the necessity, in the Anthropocene, to think beyond social systems, processes and practices, and to account for the explosive force of complex interweaving between human and non-human agents. Through the examples she mobilizes, Tsing offers intellectual tools for understanding the logics underlying problem escalation – when organized irresponsibility in human institutions meets capitalist dynamics and globalized machines of replication, but also when these in turn enable the disruptive emergence of feral counter-movements in the form of antibiotic resistances, the rapid spread of new pathogens, pandemics, or invasive ecologies.
How might the language of feral effects and feral eruptions enrich the idiom of problem displacement? Seen together, Wagner and Tsing invite us to reconsider the climate crisis – and the Anthropocene more broadly – not as the expression of a single social logic, but as the outcome of layered displacements, denials, and counter-movements
Historical narratives, problem displacements, and energy imaginaries
Peter Wagner
Let me start by expressing my thanks to the contributors to this forum for their engagement with Carbon Societies and for their nuanced reading and comments. Over time, I have come to see a book as a quite arbitrary moment in an ongoing exploration of topics, which gains its force, if any, by the fact that it appears as closed and finished in the encounter with its readers. Raising further questions, as the contributors do, thus resonates with my reflections on aspects that ended up not being addressed in the now available text as well as on issues that were not expressed as clearly as would have been needed for the purpose.
Historicity and conceptuality
The starting point for writing that which became Carbon Societies was the combined insight into the significance of climate change as a global issue of high urgency for coordinated remedial action, on the one hand, and on the other, the incapacity of the social sciences to adequately grasp this significance, due not least to their commitment to preconceived ideas of the dynamics of long-term social change. Concern for how the present was created in concatenations of past actions is largely absent in the presentist majority of social-science research anyway. But even the historically oriented social sciences often tended to impose their concepts on a multitude of events and actions that would escape their conceptual grip if they permitted themselves a wider perspective. In a kind of retrospective teleology, therefore, climate change became the inescapable present outcome of a logic that has unfolded over a long time. If we are where we are now, so the appealing argumentative strategy, there must have been a clear and identifiable reason that brought as here.
While retrospective teleology is easily argued against in principle, the point that we are where we are and need to show why always works in its favour and makes its appeal persist. One needs to show that we arrived where we are for multiple and varied reasons, and this can only be done in a historical narrative that is richer in evidence than the standard monocausal ones, while at the same time elaborating arguments why the evidence presented should be seen as questioning those standard accounts. This is what I tried to do, and I learned a lot on the way. But let me also underline that the elaboration of the narrative that can be found in Carbon Societies was not easy, both because of the amount of evidence that could potentially be integrated and because any amount of mobilized evidence may still be seen as falling short of effectively questioning the standard accounts.
The preceding comments address this difficulty in one way or another. Aurea Mota suggests that the narrative may be inadequate in at least one respect, the significance of colonialism, and insufficiently nuanced in others. Tracey Skillington can be read as finding fossil imaginaries somewhat neglected in the account. Both Aurea Mota and Stefan Aykut see the key concept of problem displacement in need of further elaboration, both widening and specification. At least partly, thus, they aim to re-introduce elements of other narratives or at least reconnect my account to them. While appreciating my attempt to provide an account of history that emphasizes contingency, Frank Adloff deplores that too little is said about the consequences for present and future action. This observation is mirrored in Tracey Skillington's and Frank Adloff's concern about current climate-policy backlash. I will try, in due brevity, to respond to the very fruitful expression of these concerns.
World-regional Nuance
Even if works in global history tend to go up to 1000 pages in length, any such writing can still be described as lacking world-regional nuance. While remaining within reasonable limits of readability, Carbon Societies aims at introducing nuance with the help of precisely the focus on regionally available biophysical resources, in particular fossil fuels when this case arises, and to do so by marking a contrast with the standard accounts in modernization theory, theories of capitalism, and demographic analyses of population growth. In the light of Aurea Mota's observations, three findings can be underlined, which in my view are significant for re-reading world-history from this angle.
First, the period from roughly 1500 to 1800, which historians of Europe call early modernity, marks a major transformation in world-history due to the massive transgression of the maritime resource frontier, which leads to highly asymmetric relations between Western Europe and other world-regions. The trilateral Atlantic economy, in which African labour worked on American land for the benefit of West Europeans, meant a massive resource transfer towards Europe. It can be seen as a major cause for the emergence of rich ‘commercial societies’ in Western Europe. But fossil fuels do not play a role in this transformation. During that period, all societies with their organic economies were basically relying on energy from the sun, wind, and flowing water, with the burning of fossil fuels only a minor source of heat and light.
In turn, second, the enrichment of Western Europe with its increase in ‘industriousness’ also elevated the demand for energy and created the wood shortage that was widely discussed in the eighteenth century. But this new demand was met by a turn to a domestic energy source, namely coal, to be more intensely exploited by draining water from mineshafts by means of steam engines and thus permitting deeper extraction. In contrast to later European importation of oil from the Middle East, the resort to coal neither enhanced external exploitation nor dependence on external powers. What it did do, rather, was make European elites domestically dependent on an increasingly organized and powerful working-class, with the coalminers at the fore front.
This dependence created an impasse in many European societies in which intra- and international polarization led to two world wars, fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. That impasse, third, was overcome in the United States of America, which had an abundance of biophysical resources partly exploited through slave labour, a shortage of free labour, and exploitable deposits of coal and oil. The rise of the United States to world-power status during the first half of the twentieth century meant at the same time the emergence of a new fossil-fuel regime based conjointly on coal and oil, enabling a mass-production and mass-consumption economy and society, and a change in global hegemony away from Western Europe towards a former colonial society.
If discussed in greater detail, as it is to some extent in Carbon Societies, the above examples show how large-scale problem displacements that led to world-historical transformations are not easily grasped by a straightforward narrative of colonialism. Moving from historicity to conceptuality, these examples also serve as the background to further discussing the concept of problem displacement.
Problem displacement
The concept of problem displacement is meant to identify the social logics of fossil fuels. It appears late in Carbon Societies because I wanted the presentation to mirror the research process, namely first scrutinizing world-history and only subsequently elaborating the concepts that help to read and grasp that history. Otherwise, the presentation may have conveyed the false impression that this concept is imposed on that history by virtue of a prior decision.
While the late introduction of the concept may already have been misguided, its overly short presentation has possibly created even more issues for critical discussion. The reference to Niklas Luhmann has not been helpful. It suggested to some readers that I also accepted aspects of Luhmann's broader theorizing, whereas the main purpose was merely to underline that addressing problems does not necessarily mean solving problems. In many cases, rather, the displacement consists of the two steps of first identifying something as a problem and then re-interpreting this problem in such a way that it appears to become solvable. Re-interpretation relocates the issue within a larger problématique, which – drawing on twentieth-century French philosophizing – is ‘the matrix or the angle from which it will become possible and even necessary to formulate a certain number of precise problems’; problematizing is ‘an operation on the very substance of our ordinary life’ (Maniglier, 2021, p. 33 & p. 34; see also 2012, p. 21 & p. 23; see Árnason, 2025, for reflections on parallels in Max Weber's thought).
As Aurea Mota and Stefan Aykut point out, there are certainly a number of related concepts, that could have been used or at least connected with the notion of problem displacement. My intention was to be more focussed than broader terms, such as ‘unintended side-effects’ or ‘transformation’ but also to widen the angle more than rather narrowly conceived terms, such as ‘externalities’. That which is addressed by these three concepts is explicitly thematized in Carbon Societies as well, even though with qualifications. Anna Tsing's notion of ‘feral effects’ requires a separate note. It suggests the potential, or even likely, futility of problem displacement, maybe vaguely akin to the idea of a return of the repressed if detached from the latter's psychoanalytical origins. My focus on fossil fuels, rather than living nature including bacteria and viruses, did not lend itself towards adopting exactly this term. But the underlying idea that powerful interventionist action will tend to face the resistance is accepted. 14
The social logic of fossil fuels
Evoking Tsing's notion immediately raises the question, underlined by Stefan Aykut, of how far problem displacement is indeed the characteristic way of using fossil fuels or rather a more general way of addressing problems (as Luhmann also had it). Again, I may not have been sufficiently explicit in answering this and will try to use this occasion to remedy.
Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – have certain material features, or maybe better socio-material features, given that specific material features become relevant when fossil fuels are being used in human societies. Most importantly, first, they have a high energy density, much higher than wood or peat (the latter being sometimes, but not always, also considered to be a fossil fuel). They are concentrated energy, which is exactly what has made them attractive for satisfying – variably defined – energy needs as well as enabling higher per capita use of energy for satisfying needs. Second, they have geographical locations in space, which allows them to be appropriated by certain actors rather than being accessible to all actors, in contrast to wind. This raises issues of property rights, as private property or state sovereignty over resources. Third, they have locations in depth, be it under terrestrial or maritime surfaces, which makes their extraction and exploitation dependent on availability and mastery of techniques and, to different degrees, on workers. Given these geographical and geological features, the use of fossil fuels is fourthly conditioned by their transportability from sites of extraction to sites of consumption. Transportability, in turn, varies across types of fuels – coal versus oil or gas – but also depends on transport technology and cost considerations.
The latter three characteristics all, mutatis mutandis, lend themselves to making the usability of fossil fuels dependent on concentrations of economic and political power: Power to set and enforce property rights over the sites of extraction; power to develop, own and use technology as means of extraction and power over workers using those means; and power to develop, own and use the means of transportation. In other words, there is an affinity between the concentration of energy – bearing in mind that ‘energy’ can also be termed ‘power’ – in fossil fuels, on the one side, and the concentration of economic and political power, on the other. Concentration of the latter forms of power, in turn, tends to create and/or reinforce social hierarchies. Due to this affinity, fossil fuels have tended to be exploited in hierarchical settings and, in turn, their exploitation has tended to make social hierarchies more entrenched. Such hierarchies are the settings that make problem displacement possible onto those over whom hierarchical power is exercised – and it makes such displacement suitable for dealing with issues that are identified as problems for those who are in the hierarchical positions. In maybe the shortest possible description, neglecting all variation according to circumstances, this is the social logic of fossil fuels. While the above may go some way in addressing the societal conditions under which problem displacement occurs, as Stefan Aykut requests, I agree with his observation that the above-mentioned features are not exclusive to fossil fuels. Thus, the logic may well need to be generally rethought from the angle of constellations of power.
The societies that started embarking on the fossil-fuel trajectory were marked by those hierarchies: Domestic hierarchy of aristocratic landowners and bourgeois capital owners, hierarchy in relation to other societies through the use of military power to enforce asymmetric commercial relations. But they also elaborated conceptual tools for the dilution of forms of hierarchy that were considered unwanted or unjustifiable. With regard to economic power, the idea of self-regulating markets composed of a multitude of economic agents, but also the idea of organizing production in cooperatives of workers, were such means. In political terms, the idea of a social contract with its leanings towards democracy and the notion of equality of states in international law, both at best hinted at but not practiced at the origins, were similar means. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, interpretative and material struggles went on over, on the one side, the relation between economic and political power, and on the other side, the relation between the concentration of power and the dilution and justification of power. In my reading, the 1970s witnessed something like a crisis and climax of this struggle, which shaped the global configuration of power until the present. But this is detailed in the final chapters of Carbon Societies, to which the preceding paragraphs have hopefully added some explicitness that was missing.
Interpretation and matter
The relation between what I call societal self-understandings on the one side, and resource regimes, on the other, is guided by an underlying theme, though mostly rather implicitly, as some of the comments, provoke me to be more explicit about this issue. I do not assume any primacy – to use a once-common language – of self-understandings over resource regimes in explaining historical change. Carbon Societies does not propose an ideational explanation of history, which would have been at odds with my intention to bring the use of biophysical resources back into the historical social sciences. Vice versa, I am not inclined either to speak about a fossil logic of social change rather than the social logic of fossil fuels, as Andreas Folkerts recently suggested in a discussion (for his approach see the forthcoming Fossil Modernity, 2026), for this would mean overemphasizing materiality, leaning almost towards biophysical determinism. Rather, my reading of history leads me to a material-ideational approach, as I put it at a later point (Wagner, 2025c), considering both how changing resource availabilities have an impact on societal self-understandings, and societal self-understandings that had changed for non-material reasons lent themselves to alterations in resource use. In the course of these investigations, infrastructures have come to stand out as, in a sense, a site at which both self-understandings and resource regimes become visible and readable (Clot-Garrell & Wagner, 2025; Wagner, 2022b; Wagner, 2025).
In recent years, interpretative approaches to social change have often used the terms ‘imaginaries’ or ‘imagination’, rightly emphasizing how projections of change contribute to bring change about. In the reconstruction of the fossil-fuel trajectory, I have referred to the democratic political imaginary as such a projection during the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries. But I have not explored in any detail fossil imaginaries, as pointed out by Tracey Skillington, thus renouncing any closer investigation of what one may call the cultural history of fossil fuels. More could indeed have been done along those lines. As Jonsson (2020) had underlined, coal was prominently displayed at the 1851 World Fair in London, which celebrated Britain's achievements in entering the industrial age. Images of coalminers became a key representation of the workers’ movement and its power. In the twentieth century, smoking chimneys could be shown as signals of a new and unprecedented prosperity. Nevertheless, I tend to think that claims that ‘petro’ or ‘fossil imaginaries’ played a significant role in paving the fossil-fuel trajectory are overstated. There have been strong imaginaries that referred to fossil fuels, such as the mobility provided by rail travel and much more so by cars or the prosperity signalled by consumer plastics, but these references were indirect. Coal and oil were invisible, even hidden – and arguably so because they are dirty and thus did not lend themselves well to positive images of the future.
Present and future post-fossil imaginaries
And with this remark we turn to the role of imaginaries of the future from the viewpoint of the present. Frank Adloff is certainly right in pointing out that even narratives that emphasize the contingency of historical developments convey a sense of inevitability. The critical junctures of the past in which alternative trajectories were possible have in such narratives the status of roads not taken. Their present significance resides in showing that possibilities existed in the past, which allows us to assume that, in principle, possibilities may also exist in the present. The future is not determined and closed.
What is at issue here is the relation between the historical narrative of contingency and the elaboration of future imaginaries in the present. More precisely: Rather than remaining satisfied with recognizing that the past was full of unrealized possibilities, we need to ask what insight we derive from the fact that some possibilities were realized and others not. While insisting that nothing has to be as it is, Michel Foucault once warned of pursuing ‘empty projects’ and called for historical inquiries and reality tests for all imaginaries of desired future change. I would claim to have provided some historical inquiry of climate change in Carbon Societies but the test of present reality and its possibilities is only insufficiently addressed in the last two chapters.
Maybe I just need to admit, not least to myself, that I am somewhat averse to existing imaginaries of the future – even though I entirely agree with Frank Adloff about their necessity and with the reflections offered in his comment. The imaginaries of the future that I see in the social sciences as well as in public political debate tend to be of one of two kinds: Either they assume, for a variety of reasons, some necessity and inevitability of the current state of organized social life and prolong this assumption into the future, as mentioned above; or they dwell in empty projects of a change that is highly unlikely to come about. It is difficult to avoid the one or the other pitfall. In a sense, I have probably seen my task more in enhancing the sense of future possibilities rather than in sketching out any particular one of them. As the late Claus Offe once said in a conversation, what we can try to do is to raise the level of public debate.
Nevertheless, a word about how the future may look like shall be added. Both Tracey Skillington and Frank Adloff refer to political backlash and mention the possibility that advancing climate change itself may have an impact on the social world such that the societal self-understanding changes and, maybe, effective climate action emerges. I tend to agree with the observation, but I am sceptical about the outcome. My scepticism concerns less the changing political situation, both globally and in many countries, as problematic as it without doubt is. If we are right in seeing the global history of human societies as a contingent concatenation of a multitude of human actions, as I think we are, then political reversals are possible, and the democratic political imaginary is alive, even though many political practices do not mirror it. But climate change is a very specific political issue, created through extended catenations of action and entrenched in social practices. The consequences of both extreme weather events and more gradual temperature shifts are already experienced and of widespread high concern, but we see that the given power constellation makes effective coordinated action difficult and improbable, even though not entirely impossible. When the climate alteration leads to a major social transformation, even regardless of the type of transformation, it will be very late – it is late already. Even though the history of human societies is marked by contingency, for human temporalities global warming has a high degree of irreversibility (for more discussion see Wagner, 2025d).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
