Energy without conscience : oil, climate change, and complicity / David McDermott Hughes.

Main entry:

Hughes, David McDermott, author.

Title & Author:

Energy without conscience : oil, climate change, and complicity / David McDermott Hughes.

Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2017.
©2017

Description:

x, 191 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-181) and index.
Introduction -- Part I. Energy with conscience. Plantation slaves, the first fuel -- How oil missed its utopian moment -- Part II. Ordinary oil. The myth of inevitability -- Lakeside, or the petro-pastoral sensibility -- Climate change and the victim slot -- Conclusion.

Summary:

"[This book] investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. [The author] examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and therefore exempt from ethical evaluation. [The author] 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. [The author] shows how both forms of energy rely upon a complicity that absolves producers and consumers from acknowledging the immoral nature of each. [The author] ... 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."-- Back cover.

ISBN:

9780822363064 (hardcover alkaline paper)
0822363062 (hardcover alkaline paper)
9780822362982 (paperback alkaline paper)
0822362988 (paperback alkaline paper)
(electronic book)
9780822373360

Subject:

Energy industries Environmental aspects.
Energy industries Moral and ethical aspects.
Slavery Trinidad and Tobago Trinidad History.
Petroleum industry and trade Great Britain Colonies.
Petroleum industry and trade Trinidad and Tobago Trinidad.
Industries énergétiques Aspect de l'environnement.
Industries énergétiques Aspect moral.
Pétrole Industrie et commerce Grande-Bretagne Colonies.
Pétrole Industrie et commerce Trinité-et-Tobago Trinité (Île)
Petroleum industry and trade.
Slavery.
Industries énergétiques Aspect environnemental.
Pétrole Industrie et commerce Trinité-et-Tobago.
Pétrole Industrie et commerce Colonies Grande-Bretagne.
Esclavage Trinité-et-Tobago Histoire.
Great Britain.
Trinidad and Tobago Trinidad.

Form/genre:

History.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 296503
Call No.: BIB 242871
Status: Available

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