“Caribbean sugar plantations constituted the first truly modernized societies in the world where people, mobilized through violence and oppression, were thrust into remarkably industrial settings for their time. The sugar industry also created the economic basis for the European merchant and commercial classes to challenge, gradually, the monolith of the feudal aristocratic order.”
From Dominic Boyer's NO MORE FOSSILS. Here's another bit:
“The automobile has a surprisingly deep and complicated history, one that intertwined with the locomotive for many decades. A rail-less automotive machine was a serious aspiration of inventors no later than the end of the eighteenth century. The locomotive won out for both engineering and infrastructural reasons and was safeguarded by inconvenient legal measures like the British Locomotive Act of 1865 that required non-rail automobiles travel at a maximum speed of four mph and be preceded by a man waving a red flag.”
Personally, I'd love to see a return of the above legislation, but I know I'm in the extreme minority here. Another bit:
“The philosopher Andre Gorz argued back in the 1970s that the class structure of capitalist society was sustained by a phenomenon he termed the 'poverty of affluence.' What he means is that capitalism utilizes scarcity as a means for reproducing social inequality and preserving class heirarchy. New technological achievements and luxuries are enjoyed first only by the elite, which displays them as status symbols to attract the desires of the masses toward them. As the masses gain access to old luxuries, new unattainable luxuries develop to replace them. This treadmill of luxury means that no universal “good life” will ever be enjoyed in a capitalist society.”
One more:
“Green capitalism as a whole is paradoxical. It will never be satisfied by sustainability. What we call capitalism is a metastasizing arrangement of production, trade, rent-seeking, and consumption that constantly fights for more resource usage and technological development. Its hunger is sucropolitical, it thirsts after the sweet taste for more. Its bones and sinews, especially in the rapidly industrializing world, are still surprisingly carbopolitical, driven by machines and coal toward relentless production of more things. Its epidermis is petropolitical, mobile, plastic, ever reshaping itself in response to technology, desire, and fashion.”
NO MORE FOSSILS by Dominic Boyer