The emerging hypercarbon reality, technological and post-carbon utopias, and social innovation to low-carbon societies

Abstract

Emphasis has shifted in climate change politics from fear to dreams and opportunities. This article demonstrates that many social science analyses of anthropogenic climate change are characterized by utopian presumptions, including technological mastery of nature, and that key concepts such as post-carbon society, decarbonization, low-carbon transitions, ecological direction of travel, and ecological modernization have not been defined in terms of the absolute amount of emissions appropriate for anthropogenic global warming. It shows that time-cost discounting is erroneous. These misleading conceptions give false positives for improvement and sustain wishful thinking in societies that have locked themselves into carbon-based infrastructures where default options are fossil fuels leading to an emerging path-dependent hypercarbon world. The article explains how those concepts can be reconceptualized to increase validity and also suggests accurate concepts like time-cost exacerbation, low-carbon and decarbonization transition searches, and ecological modernization niches. By comparing longue durée emitting societies, it documents the superiority of (1) social democracy over neoliberalism in transitioning to low-carbon economies while enhancing democracy, equity, and prosperity, and (2) multitasking of international mitigation commitments with local mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. The article seeks to stimulate research into learning from better performing societies to innovate transitions of institutions and culture to robustly defined low-carbon economies.