The Bradlow Report — 31 May 2025

On "the climate factory"

31 May 2025
Volume 4, Issue 1

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First, some good news about my recent book Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg (Princeton University Press 2024), which has recently received awards from the American Sociological Association’s sections on Sociology of Development and Collective Behavior & Social Movements, the Latin American Studies Association’s section on Subnational Politics and Society, and is a finalist for the Foreword INDIES in the political and social sciences category.

I am still giving talks about this book, and continue to be gratified by its reception and the interest across so many colleagues in different academic institutions across the world. I have been especially happy to hear from government officials who are engaging with the work.

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Meanwhile, I have been working on my next book, which is titled (at least for the moment) The Climate Hinge: Green Industrial Transitions in the Global South. I wrote about this ongoing work in a short essay published this past week in the quarterly newsletter of the American Sociological Association’s section on Environmental Sociology, and reproduce the essay here in this newsletter.

From Factory Floor to Climate Future: The Social Life of “Climate Projects” in Brazil and South Africa

Is the future of a climate changed world to be found in a factory?

As I write, headlines shift on an hourly basis about the spiraling trade war between the United States and much of the rest of the world. The tariffs enacted by the Trump administration are being justified on the basis of the need to bring manufacturing “back” to the United States.

The Trump administration is remarkably hostile to efforts at inducing a decarbonized energy transition. But there are surprising continuities between the Trump administration’s industrial vision and dominant policy paradigms that have emerged from more explicitly climate-oriented efforts. These include efforts to reshape global markets away from a free trade paradigm, a pivot away from reliance on global supply chains, and the introduction of industrial policies aimed at incentivizing investments in specific technological pathways. Across the political spectrum, statecraft is being retooled to shape markets in accordance with perceived strategic imperatives—whether to protect certain categories of jobs, shore up energy “security,” or encourage innovation and scaling in decarbonizing technologies.

This emergent “postneoliberal” paradigm, for all of its evident chaos and inchoate form, has a certain affinity with the rise of “climate projects” that Araos, Bhardwaj and Klinenberg (2024) recently defined as “purposeful responses, or plans for responses, undertaken by individuals, groups, or institutions in the face of the reality of climate change.” This essay explores the social life of climate projects through a particular site: what I call the climate factory—a place where visions of environmental, economic, and political futures are materially assembled and socially contested.

These “projects” do not exist in a vacuum. They are embedded in global political economies and constrained by histories of uneven development. Their life is necessarily global and transnational. And here, the role of the Global South is especially significant.

Middle income countries in the Global South have long pursued the development of automobile manufacturing as a critical sector through which to develop labor-absorbing industrialization. In fact, no country has graduated from middle income to high income status, according to conventional definitions, without making cars in significant volume.

I have been conducting fieldwork in Brazil and South Africa since 2023 to understand how their auto manufacturing sectors are navigating one of the most consequential global and transnational “climate projects”: the rich world transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) to electric-powered vehicles (EVs). I have so far conducted 75 semi-structured interviews with auto firm executives, metalworker union officials, auto parts engineers, and policymakers at the national, state / provincial and municipal scales across both countries. The transition from ICE to EV technology is not merely an environmental “project,” but also a radical restructuring of global industrial geographies. Such a technological transition opens up new forms of competition and cooperation, and it creates new opportunities for capturing value, especially around battery technologies, critical minerals, and low-emission manufacturing processes. But it also threatens to further marginalize those regions that are already disadvantaged in the global political economy.

For nearly half a century, Brazil and South Africa have built internal combustion engine auto manufacturing sectors on the backs of investments from large multinational firms. Each produces significant volumes for export. In fact, more than half of South Africa’s annual output goes to Europe and the United Kingdom, precisely the geographies that have instituted bans on the sale of ICE cars within the coming decade.

In my fieldwork, I am seeking to understand how key actors in their automotive manufacturing sectors—government agencies, multinational firms, and labor unions—are navigating this global EV transition. These countries are not merely passive recipients of change; they are active sites of contestation, experimentation, and institutional innovation.

In Brazil, policymakers are seeking to leverage the country’s existing industrial capacity and one of the world’s greenest electricity grid (nearly nine-tenths of which is powered by water, wind and sun) to attract investment in EV manufacturing. Longstanding multinational automakers remain wary of the high upfront costs and uncertain consumer demand for EVs in a market where price sensitivity remains high. New entrants from China, however, see an opportunity. In a development full of geopolitical symbolism, Chinese firm BYD — the largest EV-maker in the world — has refurbished an abandoned factory in the town of Camaçari in the state of Bahia, which was previously owned by Ford.

Furthermore, ever since the global oil crisis of 1973, the Brazilian government has invested in the homegrown development sugar cane-based ethanol fuel. These efforts helped to spur the growth of generations of engineers in the auto sector. Today, nearly 90% of the cars on the road today in Brazil have a so-called “flex” motor that can run on both gasoline and ethanol. While policymakers and automakers across the globe are debating a technological future between electric and gasoline powered cars, their Brazilian counterparts are vigorously contesting what role ethanol fuel might have in future auto production. When I interviewed metalworker officials in late 2023, their preference was to maintain ethanol combustion motors in a hybrid ethanol-battery technological path; this, union officials believe, will maintain jobs that otherwise would be lost to the simpler production process associated with battery electric vehicles.

In South Africa, the situation is even more fraught. The country’s automotive sector is deeply integrated into global value chains, especially through its exports to Europe, which account for more than half of the country’s total auto production. As the European Union tightens emissions standards and moves toward banning the sale of ICE vehicles, the South African operations of multinational automakers face intense pressure to pivot — or to even disappear entirely. The domestic context presents steep challenges: South Africa’s electricity supply is dominated by coal, and its power grid is plagued by chronic blackouts. Transitioning to EVs under these conditions would mean decarbonizing both the grid and the factories. This is a double burden in the context of limited fiscal space. As I write, the country’s governing coalition is teetering on the edge of a break-up due to an inability to agree to a budget framework.

Brazil and South Africa are wrestling with a fundamental question embedded in all “climate projects”: who actually benefits from the green transition and what political coalitions do those benefits construct? Will the move to EVs replicate patterns of exclusion and inequality, or can it serve as a vehicle (so to speak) for more inclusive development?

What we are seeing in these cases is a collision of multiple temporalities and imperatives: the urgency of climate action, the global upheaval of industrial transformation, the immediate demands of workers, and the long arcs of national development strategies. The EV transition is not simply a matter of technological substitution; it is a deeply social and political process that reshapes how states and societies relate to one another and to the planet.

For environmental sociologists, this moment presents a unique opportunity. We can and should examine how climate change is being materialized not only through carbon measurements or policy targets, but through the mundane infrastructures of everyday production: factories, supply chains, labor contracts, and investment flows. The “climate factory,” if we can call it that, is emerging as a critical site where questions of environmental justice, economic sovereignty, and global inequality converge. These are the territories of what Fisher and Jorgenson (2019) described as an “Anthro-shift,” in which “risk drives a reconfiguration among social actors that in turn leads to a different relationship between society and the natural environment.”

Indeed, “climate projects” are not only about reducing emissions—they are about reimagining development itself. For countries in the Global South, the stakes are particularly high. They must navigate the twin challenges of mitigating climate change and addressing persistent poverty and inequality. Their efforts to localize and reinterpret global climate projects are about shaping the social terrain of climate change in contexts in which the potential contradictions of such projects are at their most acute.

Are the sociological foundations of a climate-changed world to be found in a factory? Perhaps. But only if we understand that the factory is not just a place where things are made. It is also a site where visions of the future are contested and constructed; where climate action takes on material form, shaped by inherited histories and socially organized attempts to chart new paths forward.

References

Araos, Malcolm, Ankit Bhardwaj and Eric Klinenberg. 2024. “The social life of climate projects.” Sociological Forum. 39: 149-152.

Fisher, Dana R., and Andrew K. Jorgenson. 2019. “Ending the Stalemate: Toward a Theory of Anthro-Shift.” Sociological Theory. 37(4): 342-362.

A recent photo in “the field” at the Stellantis factory complex in Betim, Brazil on April 2, 2025.