The Carbon Republic: Global Warming and American Political History
Tuesday 7 May 2024, 4pm
Rothermere American Institute, 1a South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3UB
Climate change has emerged as the most pressing political and ecological challenge of modern history. Understanding the intensification of atmospheric carbon over the past three centuries has also sparked new collaborations between historians and the range of natural scientists whom, as Jo Guldi and David Armitage have written, “have unknowingly become historians” as they sample ice cores, measure tree rings, and collect lake bed sediments, generatings new archives of past climates. American political historians, however, have largely ignored climate history, despite the fact that sources in the United States have emitted 20% of atmospheric carbon that exists today, the largest single amount from any nation-state (China is a distant second at 11%). Beyond studies of the energy crises of the 1970s, fossil fuel use and its embeddedness in American history remain peripheral to 20th century American history, years in which the US led what John McNeil has termed “the Great Acceleration.”
Focusing on three core narratives of the 20th century – the increasing power of the federal government, the rights revolution, and the production of inequality – this essay explores how to incorporate the great acceleration of carbon emissions into 20th century American political history. By inserting the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels as a key element of the relationship between citizen and state, political history’s traditional focus, it argues both for the advantages of a “shorter durée” climate history and for a more planetary and ecologically mined American political history.
