1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910166649803321

Autore

Hughes David McDermott

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Durham NC, : Duke University Press, 2017

Durham : , : Duke University Press, , 2017

ISBN

9780822373360

082237336X

9780822363064

0822363062

9780822362982

0822362988

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (209 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

338.2/72820972983

Soggetti

Energy industries - Environmental aspects

Energy industries - Moral and ethical aspects

Slavery - Trinidad and Tobago - Trinidad - History

Petroleum industry and trade - Colonies - Great Britain

Petroleum industry and trade - Trinidad and Tobago - Trinidad

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Plantation slaves, the first fuel -- How oil missed its utopian moment -- The myth of inevitability -- Lakeside, or the petro-pastoral sensibility -- Climate change and the victim slot.

Sommario/riassunto

'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.