Abstract
Petromilitarism is a complex social formation comprising the following elements: consumer patterns that depend on fossil fuels for energy, reliance on military weapons, strategies, and alliances that protect the extraction of fossil fuels, the many features of climate change, and a profound crisis marked by vulnerabilities to the planet, nations, regions, and, ironically, to the US military itself. Petromilitarism also includes cultural attributes that obscure popular appreciation of its overall shape and make it more difficult to formulate viable alternatives. The institutional order of petromilitarism includes energy companies, government agencies, and the Pentagon. There are temporal dimensions, especially as the crisis it contains is evolving rapidly, perhaps more quickly than anyone can fully grasp. And there are spatial features as the social formation is constituted across the global, national, regional, and the local. Understanding petromilitarism as a social formation helps bring these diverse dimensions together in simultaneous and mutual focus, thereby calling attention to the depth and danger of the historical moment. For the purposes of the Climate Change: Impacts and Responses conference, my paper briefly illustrates the main elements that make up petromilitarism and offer some suggestions of how these elements might be considered in their sociological totality. This is a speculative, preliminary outline that attempts to capture the intersections of these elements thereby creating a dynamic and dangerous situation.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Human Impacts and Responsibility
KEYWORDS
Fossil Fuels, Militarism, Climate Change, Social Processes
