In this Book
- Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity
- Book
- 2017
- Published by: Duke University Press
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
summary
In Energy without Conscience David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. He examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and therefore exempt from ethical evaluation. Hughes centers his analysis on Trinidad and Tobago, which is the world's oldest petro-state, having drilled the first continuously producing oil well in 1866. Marrying historical research with interviews with Trinidadian petroleum scientists, policymakers, technicians, and managers, he draws parallels between Trinidad's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave labor energy economy and its contemporary oil industry. Hughes shows how both forms of energy rely upon a complicity that absolves producers and consumers from acknowledging the immoral nature of each. He passionately argues that like slavery, producing oil is a moral choice and that oil is at its most dangerous when it is accepted as an ordinary part of everyday life. Only by rejecting arguments that oil is economically, politically, and technologically necessary, and by acknowledging our complicity in an immoral system, can we stem the damage being done to the planet.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Introduction
- pp. 1-26
- Part I. Energy with Conscience
- 1. Plantation Slaves, the First Fuel
- pp. 29-40
- 2. How Oil Missed Its Utopian Moment
- pp. 41-60
- Part II. Ordinary Oil
- 3. The Myth of Inevitability
- pp. 65-94
- 5. Climate Change and the Victim Slot
- pp. 120-140
- Conclusion
- pp. 141-152
- References
- pp. 165-182
Additional Information
ISBN
9780822373360
Related ISBN(s)
9780822362982, 9780822363064, 9781478091059
MARC Record
OCLC
1103702387
Pages
201
Launched on MUSE
2019-06-24
Language
English
Open Access
Yes
Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND
Copyright
2017