Energetic Affordances: Climate Change and Industrial Transformation

Climate change is reorganizing the material foundations of economic life. Why do some countries coordinate low-carbon industrial change while others stall? This article argues that the answer lies in “energetic affordances,” defined as what inherited energy infrastructures make politically possible. Drawing on interviews with 116 informants (including automotive executives, union officials, and policymakers), factory visits, and documentary analysis, I compare efforts to shift from manufacturing internal combustion to electric vehicles in Brazil and South Africa. Despite similar levels of development, democratic institutions, and integration into global automotive value chains, the cases diverged because their energy infrastructures made different responses politically viable. Brazil’s renewable grid and ethanol infrastructure afford multiple technologies that can credibly meet its emissions goals, enabling coalitional alignment among automakers, labor, and agricultural producers; institutional coordination across administrations; and sovereign partnerships with Chinese manufacturers. South Africa’s coal dependency forecloses those options: zero-sum conflicts fragment coalitions, paralyze institutions, and channel the country toward restrictive climate finance. Energetic affordances thus specify a cross-sectoral form of path dependence, in which the energy base shapes downstream industrial change, working through markets, coalitions, institutions, and geopolitics. The concept reorients the sociology of climate change toward classic questions of industrial transformation.