‘Fossil fuel wealth hides its violence — as climate change shows this, right-wingers are embracing it’

Cara Daggett is Associate Professor in Political Science at Virginia Tech. She tells Srijana Mitra Das at TE about ‘petro-masculinity’ — and the political voices of oil:
The world of fossil fuels offers an archaeology — delving beneath the surfaces of these energy sources helps us see the ways much of our world is organised. Here, scholars like Cara Daggett illuminate what would otherwise be lost in darkness. Daggett tells TE, ‘My research looks at energy as more than fuel — I am interested in understanding how the shift to fossil fuels in the 19th century changed our cultural relationships. These include our view of work, capitalism and everyday life — I look at how fossil fuel use changed the organisation of power. My first book ‘The Birth of Energy’ looks at the discovery of energy in the 19th century — just then, the science of energy also came about. Importantly, these understandings — energy and output — became justifications for empire and Western nations putting the entire planet to work.’
How did fossil fuels change our relationship with work? Daggett explains, ‘Prior to fossil fuel capitalism, notions of work, especially in European cultures, were partly tied to religious understandings of ‘virtue’ — this was used to discipline the poor and colonised people. Fossil fuels intensified this.’ They also changed foundational ideas of what could be done. ‘The fact that you could measure energy, track efficiency and quantify movements, plan, build and deploy the efficiency of everything, from engines to working bodies or factories, all this came about with the science of energy,’ Daggett says. ‘There were close links between ideals of productivity and fossil fuels. The latter changed people’s imagination of what was even possible — so much power, packed into relatively transportable things, fuelled a notion that you could have unlimited growth. That became the bedrock especially of the American way of life — US exceptionalism is premised on this concept of unlimited, cheap access to energy.’

Alongside, fossil fuels helped insert sharp hierarchies into the world of work. Daggett says, ‘Thermodynamics, the study of heat and energy, aided the idea of economies of ‘productivity’ — and ‘reproductivity’. With the arrival of thermodynamics, some engineers, administrators and empire-builders thought you could find, in the laws of science itself, a justification for productivity. This also meant activities associated with nature, women and so-called less developed civilisations were devalued as ‘reproductivity’. There was a powerful melding of cultural beliefs thus about work of the ‘highest value’ and technology serving that, merging with new sciences which were creating fresh abilities.’
Those hierarchies remain powerful today — with resonance in politics. Daggett describes this in what she terms ‘petro-masculinity’. ‘I had just written my book on ideas of productivism and energy science when Donald Trump won the first Presidential election in 2016 — in that campaign, you saw misogyny, racism and this very vocal defence of fossil fuels with climate denial. These two facets are often understood separately but because I’d researched this history of energy and the separation that ensued between different kinds of work, I saw connections. The reactionary defence of patriarchal households — where things that are ‘feminised’ are accorded less value than ‘masculine’ things, work and people — is connected to a vision of unlimited energy consumption,’ Daggett emphasises, ‘The accumulation of profit under fossil capitalism itself depends on the under valued energies of others — the justification for why some people have to do harder or under-paid tasks is precisely these categories of gender and race.’

Fossil fuel economics is also underlaid by tremendous — and often overlooked — violence. Discussing 20ᵗʰ century militarism, Daggett says, ‘There is a link materially between fossil fuels and the violence they made possible — there is a fossil fuel mentality seen even in nuclear weapons, in terms of extreme energy. Violence has grown much more intense with fossil fuels. Added to that are complex structural connections between destruction and fossil fuel capitalism — there is a political psychology in societies that depend on ecological violence for their wealth. They often handle that by geographical distance, putting the violence in ‘sacrifice zones’, hiding it underground, keeping it away from a select culture that doesn’t have to face what Naomi Klein calls ‘the shadowlands’ of capitalism. A geographical and psychological distancing happens — this shows in climate denial. But a lot of everyday life is premised on a great deal of violence and the climate crisis is now putting this upfront — in the US, many people didn’t necessarily have to see the violence which made their way of life possible. A right-wing response to this growing feeling of complicity in violence is — let’s embrace it. Let’s protect the households which are important to us,’ Daggett is cuttingly emphatic now, ‘Fossil fuel capitalism has led us to this shameless embrace of violence.’

She has also written about a ‘feminist energy system’. When asked this, Daggett smiles gently. ‘I wrote about this with Christine Labuski and Shannon Bell. We’d all been studying gender, energy and violence separately, looking at why women are disproportionately harmed by ecological violence or not fairly represented in energy decision-making. We then wondered what a feminist energy system would look like — we made a framework with dimensions of energy systems, including technological, socio-ecological or between culture and nature, political and economic. Each draws from existing movements, ecofeminism and feminist imaginings of different ways of living.’ This idea presents an entirely different concept of energy. Daggett says, ‘We should ask, how much energy do communities actually need to have a good life? How should we build and store that, in a way that also notes our interdependencies with other people, workers and regions and the more than human world? To ask all this, you need radical democracy, where people can discuss these issues, and democratic ownership where communities can control and gain from energy systems.’

Daggett adds a warning here. ‘Currently though, with the energy transition, most solar and wind systems are privately financed. There isn’t deep democratic involvement and again, we are developing energy for profit. If we become beholden to shareholders, then we’re not thinking about energy as a cultural system or a balance for a good life — we are thinking about it as an extraction frontier. And we will continue seeking more of it for greater profit.’ With losses to those at the smallest ends of this enormous bargain.