Infrastructure and Social Change

Richard Heinberg writes about social change based on Marvin Harris's principle of "probabilistic infrastructural determinism".  When our physical environment changes, then social relations are forced to adapt.  And it's clear that climate change and resource depletion are going to drive infrastructural changes.

When the basic relationship between a society and its ecosystem alters, people must reconfigure their political systems, economies, and ideology accordingly, even if they were perfectly happy with the previous state of affairs.

As the availability of cheap fossil fuel comes to an end, it's replacement is unlikely to maintain our current lifestyles.

With less useful energy available, the global economy will fail to grow, and will likely enter a sustained period of contraction. Increased energy efficiency may cushion the impact but cannot avert it. With economies no longer growing, our current globally dominant neoliberal political-economic ideology may increasingly be called into question and eventually overthrown.

Heinberg argues that new ideas for organizing society will need to fit in with the emerging infrastructure.  He points out that European-style industrial socialism has been just as dependent on cheap energy as our consumerist/corporatist culture.

Heinberg wants to encourage world-changing ideas.  There may not be much room for error.

Once useful fossil energy supply rates begin to falter, this could trigger an unwinding of the global financial system as well as international conflict. It is also possible that the relationship between carbon emissions and atmospheric temperatures is non-linear, with Earth’s climate system subject to self-reinforcing feedbacks that could result in a massive die-off of species, our own included.