After Fossil Modernity

Sociology is a late child of western modernity.As an institutionalised system of knowledge, it was born of accelerated urbanisation, the spread of capitalist labour relations, and other fundamental social changes that were part of the overall process known as industrialisation (Smil 2018).Machines powered by energy from burning fossil fuels -especially coal and oil -were the driving force of the process.The western societies studied by the classic thinkers of sociology were formed on this basis.Not only did the use of fossil fuel energy increase production, it also accelerated the circulation of goods and people.European expansion would not have been possible without these resources and the "invention of speed" (Studeny 1995).Colonial empires, whose bloodstream consisted of sea and land transportation routes secured by armies moving at unprecedented speeds, could not have been built (Ward 1994; Birtchnell et al. 2015).The forced or voluntary mobility of people -migration for work, education, or better living conditions on the one hand, and travel or tourism on the other -were associated with the development of public and individual means of transportation.In this regard, the best metonymies of modernity are the train and car.While they use different kinds of fossil fuel (coal and oil), both have permanently shaped our civilisation (Seiler 2008; Esposito 2020)

Energy economics · Environmental impact of the energy industry · Fossil fuel · New energy · Sustainability · Global Energy and Sustainability Research