Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity

Hughes, David McDermott

ISBN 10: 0822362988 / ISBN 13: 9780822362982

Published by Duke University Press (edition Illustrated), 2017

About this Item

It's a well-cared-for item that has seen limited use. The item may show minor signs of wear. All the text is legible, with all pages included. It may have slight markings and/or highlighting.

Seller Inventory # 0822362988-11-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity
• Publisher: Duke University Press (edition Illustrated)
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822362988
• ISBN 13: 9780822362982
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: Illustrated.
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

David McDermott Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and the author of Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging and From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier.