From the Coal Age to Carbon Democracy: The Co-Evolution of Energy Regimes and Economic Thought

Da era do carvão à democracia do carbono: a coevolução dos regimes energéticos e do pensamento econômico

Abstract

The study argues that the material and networked properties of energy carriers have co-evolved with the language of economics. It periodises the transformations from coal’s debates on stocks and efficiency, through the grid logic of electricity, the oil era’s regime of abundance and stability, and the post-1973 discourse of intensity and conservation, to the atmospheric budgeting of the carbon age. Methodologically, it combines close reading and comparative discourse analysis of disciplinary texts with cross-readings of administrative regulations, engineering reports, and public writing regimes. Through mini-cases on the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe, it maps the shift of efficiency from the machine to system operation and rule design; of scarcity from underground to the atmosphere; of substitution from price signals to infrastructural embeddedness; and of externalities from the local to the global scale. The findings indicate that, under high uncertainty, quantity instruments (budgets/caps) outperform price-based approaches and that effective policy architectures require the sequencing of scale–distribution–allocation. The contribution is to reconstruct the theory–measurement–rule chain by bringing to light the bidirectional processes of translation and circulation between energy regimes and economic thought.