Page 27 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

1 CARBON, CAPITALISM, COMMUNICATION 9

citizens as members of moral and social communities with responsibilities
to contribute to the quality of collective life and installing the identity of
consumers, pursuing personal satisfaction and advancement through
market choices, as the dominant social imaginary. Consumers were
encouraged to purchase more products more often, internalize the logic of
rapid obsolescence and disposability and reject the ethos of retention and
repair that had characterised relations to big ticket items in the post-war
period. These shifts were propelled by a massive extension of personal debt
as credit and store cards displaced cash payments, and by a concerted push
to present consumer goods as preeminent arenas of self-expression and
self-realisation. The utilitarian appeals to convenience and value for money
that had underpinned sales of mass consumer durables in the period
between 1950 and 1973 were progressively overtaken by a promotional
culture that emphasised the unique qualities of particular brands and
cemented their associations with desirable life styles. Increasingly, as
incomes in emerging economies rose, this new consumer system achieved
global currency. At the end of 2016, eight of the world’s ten largest
shopping malls as measured by ‘gross leasable area’ were in Asia (Touropia
2016).
These shifts in the organisation of production and consumption gen-
erated rising demands for both energy and essential materials, prompting a
marked escalation in extractive activities and a concerted push to identify
and exploit hitherto untapped reserves, moving into areas that had previ-
ously been untouched and utilizing new, and potentially hazardous,
methods of extraction, such as fracking.
Much contemporary debate has been underpinned by a “narrative of
ecological awakening”, which sees awareness of impending climate crisis as
relatively recent (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 171). This ignores the long
history of concern dating back to the early phase of industrial capitalism.
In 1857, a provincial French lawyer, Eugene Huzar, published The Tree
of Science, drawing attention to the finite nature of the planet’s resources.
“For us, our planet is limited, very limited. …When one sees something as
limited as the earth, and a power as unlimited as man using science, one can
only wonder what impact this power will have, one day, on our poor small
earth” (quoted in Fessoz 2007: 335). He warned against the dire envi-
ronmental consequences of capitalism’s coal fuelled pursuit of profit,
writing “As man becomes more involved with industry and uses more coal
you can predict that in one or two centuries, the world being criss-crossed
by railroads and steamboats and being covered by factories and industrial