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Question: Historical Pathways to Climate Change

Answer: When it comes to climate change, the past is present. As natural scientists have demonstrated, the increase of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere is cumulative through human history unless active measures are taken to reduce it, for example through the creation of carbon sinks, reforestation or algae farms. For an analysis of the already changed climate, the concept of sociogenesis must therefore turn to history, and, in turn, history must be re-written through the lens of climate change.

There is no ambition here to provide a world history, and in any case, it is not clear what such a history might deliver. Instead, the approach in the following chapters is to take some specific historical pathways to climate change of particular societies at times of significant transition. The aim of this approach is to advance understanding of the political, economic and social processes involved in sociogenic climate change. In this chapter two contrasting pathways provide the principal examples: the British industrial revolution together with the early nineteenth century slave plantation, and an example of settler colonialism in the United States. Neither of these historical pathways have been written through the lens of climate change, although there is a vast historical literature of both these transformatory processes. By focusing the climate change lens on these pathways, the schematic accounts that follow are necessarily partial, covering neither the British industrial revolution as a whole nor the expansion Southwards and Westwards entailed in the enlargement of the United States. Whereas coal will figure in the case of the British industrial revolution, cattle will form an important element of the United States pathway. Slave plantations are the bridging link between these two pathways. And just to note here that the particular significance of cattle in the United States story is only a distinctive but representative example of a major and yet little heralded phenomenon of huge climate change significance: the introduction of cattle from Europe and India into the Americas as a new and invasive species (Bowling, 1942; Ficek, 2019). Cumulatively, it was a multi-million ‘cattle drive’ of truly gigantic proportions, all animals emitting methane.

In the first chapter, it was argued that the concept of sociogenesis was complementary to, rather than contesting or replacing, the natural science understanding of the anthropogenesis of climate change. There is a need to weld together the societal dynamics of climate change with the environmental dynamics. This approach underpins the analysis of the two historical pathways, and subsequent chapters, by asking particular questions of the historical and contemporary pathways to climate change. Below is a diagram which serves as a tool-kit for asking these questions. In environmental science, the diagram represents what has been called the food-energy-climate change trilemma (Tilman et al., 2009). The diagram thus pictures the natural science bare bones to which the sociogenesis approach will add the historical and social flesh.

Taking a walk through the diagram, we follow the arrows using contemporary examples from research into today's food-energy-climate change trilemma (Harvey, 2014; Harvey & Pilgrim, 2011). The arrows 1 and 2 represent the main sources of greenhouse gases driving climate change, the burning of fossil fuels for various types of energy and the use and changes in use of land for food, energy, and materials. Increased demand for energy for transport, and power generation for industrial and domestic uses directly drives the increased generation of GHG from fossil fuels (arrow 3). Likewise, increased and changing demand for food, increased consumption of meat, nutrition and growing populations directly drives the intensification of land use and land-use change converting uncultivated land (e.g. forests, savannahs) into agricultural land

(Source: , 28 Sep 2021)

Source Link: https://doi-org.onlinedatabase.librarynet.com.my/10.1108/978-1-80043-330-420211003