Carelessness is part and parcel with fossil fuel combustion

Fossil fuels built the modern world. There remains an appreciation for fossil fuels – or, at least, for the high energy consumption they provided – as a catalyst of mass liberal democracy. This is evident in ecomodernist calls for a good Anthropocene that would decouple the benefits of fossil fuels from the fuels themselves.17 After all, while industrialisation wreaks planetary destruction, its spread was coterminous with humanist victories like the abolition of slavery, increased literacy rates, gender equality and poverty reduction. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that this cannot be a coincidence, and that ‘the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive’.18 However, in addition to the ecological harms caused by oil and coal, fossil fuels have also done serious political harm. Timothy Mitchell argues that fossil fuels have had contradictory effects in terms of assembling democracy.19 On the one hand, due to coal’s material traits, its extraction and supply were vulnerable to choke points that could be exploited by a growing labour resistance in the 19th century. In contrast, oil systems were less vulnerable to democratic hijacking. The global oil systems of the 20th century required a host of illiberal and violent measures on the part of Western states and oil companies in order to ensure oil scarcity and, in turn, a profit. In the case of oil, the West touted a democratic creed while simultaneously benefiting from and supporting authoritarian regimes and extremist movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Likewise, fossil fuel and mineral extraction were secured, both within the US and abroad, by racist regimes of differential pay and access to benefits that were aggressively anti-democratic on the part of corporations and the states that supported them.20 Carbon democracy thus arose in tandem with, and reliant upon, authoritarianism. Put more strongly, authoritarian politics have historically been part and parcel of the project of securing Western (fossil) rule. By fossil rule, I mean a logic of governing that is dependent upon intensive fossil fuel consumption in both material and, as I will explore below, psycho-political ways. Fossil rule is mobilised through ‘fossil capital’, Andreas Malm’s term to describe how modern capitalism was erected around a belief in ‘selfsustaining growth … welded to the combustion of fossil fuels’.21 Fossil capital requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of other people and things, and this necessitates authoritarian tactics in certain sites and moments, a phenomenon that has been exhaustively catalogued by postcolonial theorists and thinkers in the global South.22 As a result, authoritarianism, rather than a perversion of modernity, or a lurking risk of mass industrial society to be avoided, appears instead as the very marrow of a contemporary life predicated upon burning fossil fuels. We cannot take comfort that, over time, creativity will shed its destructive possibilities.23 The novelty and freedoms enabled by fossil-fuelled civilisation are entangled with horrific violence, such that to embark upon fossil-fuelled life is to spark off mass species extinction just as much as it is to make possible the internet or global social movements. Carbon democracy strives to conceal this underbelly of mass destruction from privileged publics, whether in subterranean pipelines, in zoning plans that place heavy industry alongside poor communities and people of colour, and in the very notion of throwing things away. Similarly, the authoritarian practices required by fossil capital in the global South were often geographically separated from liberal forms of governance in the West. This made it possible for many Westerners to remain ignorant of their complicity in fossil authoritarianism, and to continue to believe that fossil fuels and liberal democracy are natural and inevitable partners. The narrative of righteous fossil democracy is crucial not only to American identity writ large, but to its hegemonic white masculinities. However, as Aimé Césaire pointed out more than 60 years ago, the violence that Anglo-Europeans have practiced abroad returns with ‘a terrific boomerang effect’, and that despite efforts to turn [away] a blind eye or justify the violence, ‘colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize [them] him in the true sense of the word, to degrade [them] him, to awaken [them] him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism’.24 The American public understands Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ mission as an homage to a mid-20th century fantasy of American life, when white men ruled their households uncontested, a formula that relied upon widespread full-time employment for white men with wages that could support housewives and children. In the words of reporter Zoe Chace, reflecting on the 2016 election, ‘for a lot of people, “Make America Great Again” was about “make men great again”’.’25 Trump’s motto is a kind of petro-nostalgia,26 in that the achievement of the mid-20th century patriarchal ideal in the US was predicated upon an ongoing supply of cheap fossil fuels. Cars, suburbs, and the nuclear family, oriented around white male workers, formed a triumvirate that yoked the desires of Americans not only to wage labour, but to the continued supply of cheap energy that made the dream possible. These privatised consumer perks, along with New Deal infrastructure and policies that supported them, were intended to inoculate the American public against the twin threats of communism and fascism, both of which lurked in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II.27 On the supply side, and especially prior to the 1970s’ oil crisis, the state helped to secure an artificial oil scarcity that ensured profits for oil companies.28 On the demand side, the state also helped to cultivate oil desires, such that fossil fuel consumption became necessary to achieving the American dream. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this article, the American way of life was centred around a version of white, patriarchal rule in which the achievement of hegemonic masculinity required intensive fossil fuel consumption and, for the working or middle-class, jobs within or reliant upon fossil fuel systems (jobs and wages that, like state welfare benefits, were unequally distributed by race, often with the conscious corporate intention of dividing labourers in order to prevent unrest).29 For many, extracting and burning fuel was a practice of white masculinity, and of American sovereignty, such that the explosive power of combustion could be crudely equated with virility. No wonder that access to cheap and plentiful gas and energy became the sine qua non for American well-being, and a right demanded both of the state and for the state. Even as Americans in the 21st century disagree about whether health care or food should be considered a right, there is a widespread, bipartisan assumption that Americans deserve cheap energy, and that the state has a duty to ensure it.30 In turn, any threat to energy supply appears simultaneously as a threat to the American dream and, in turn, the dominant position of the US in the world. Make America Great Again thus insists upon a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ innocence about fossil fuel burning – that there are no downsides to burning more oil and coal, or at least none for white Americans. Exit polls show that it was a campaign message that resonated not only with white men, but also with just over one-half of white women voters,31 some of whom may also find security in the status quo, and therefore resent threats to fossil fuel systems and/or hegemonic white masculinities. Through the rosy nostalgia afforded by petro-masculine identity, the affront of global warming or environmental regulations appear as insurgents on par with the dangers posed by feminists and queer movements seeking to leach energy and power from the state/traditional family. Petro-masculinity approaches masculinity as a socially constructed identity that emerges ‘within a gender order that defines masculinity in opposition to femininity, and in so doing, sustains a power relation between men and women as groups’.32 Masculinities are always multiple, and involve ongoing struggles over which version of masculine identity will become socially dominant, or hegemonic, to adopt R.W. Connell’s influential concept. Petro-masculinity draws upon aspects of a traditionally hegemonic masculinity, but at the same time, its appearance in the American far-right today is better understood as a kind of hypermasculinity, which is a more ‘reactionary stance. It arises when agents of hegemonic masculinity feel threatened or undermined, thereby needing to inflate, exaggerate, or otherwise distort their traditional masculinity’.33 Petro-masculinity is reactionary in part because it is not the only hegemonic masculine identity available in the late industrial US; it is perhaps not even the most dominant one in terms of the gendered experiences of energy or electricity systems.34 Ecomodernism, for example, has become a prominent environmental disposition with arguably masculinised dimensions, and is especially popular among elite men (think of Elon Musk).35 Instead of the ‘limits to growth’ mood of the 1970s, which proposed decreasing energy consumption, ecomodernists claimed that ‘there was no conflict between economic growth and environmental problems’ and that technological solutions, often private and market-based, would solve any difficulties,36 a belief that continues to reign in much of Western corporate culture. Not only was growth not a problem – it was the solution, the very foundation of the innovation and entrepreneurship required to fix things.37 According to Martin Hultman, ecomodernism arose alongside a shift in hegemonic masculinity in the West, which Hultman traces through the changing roles played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became a globally influential ecomodernist figure. Older, industrially-aligned masculinities, embodied by Arnold Schwarzenegger in his youthful days of machismo and pumping iron, were discarded for the hybrid masculinity of Governor Schwarzenegger of California, an ecomodernist champion of fuel cells and greenwashed Hummers. Ecomodernism contributed to a new style of masculinity ‘in which toughness, determination and hardness was mixed with appropriate moments of compassion and care’.38 However, like Sherilyn MacGregor, who critiques the masculinisation of climate security, Hultman insists that ecomodernism, and the Silicon Valley masculinities often aligned with it, are ‘asymmetric’ in how they organise these values. Care and compassion remain subordinate to techno-rationality, toughness, and economic growth.39 In contrast to ecomodernist masculinities, petro-masculinity disdains any veneer of hybridity or care, and it also has no truck with sunny, California technoscientism.40 Ecomodernist masculinity may seek to adapt itself to new energy technologies and cultures, but petro-masculinity, as a reactionary stance, aims to defend the endangered status quo, entrenching the petrocultures that have historically propped up Anglo-European fossil-burning men. And while petro-masculinity is built upon mid-20th century fantasies, there is nothing nostalgic about its orientation to fossil fuels. After all, the fabled past of innocent fossil fuel consumption is irretrievable. In the US post-war economy, fossil fuel systems functioned as the means to becoming a real man – if burning them entailed violence, this was constructed as an unfortunate side effect to be made invisible to privileged consumers. But fossil fuels have become a dead end, both for the planet and for the goal of middle-class jobs. In this context, burning fossil fuels can come to function as a knowingly violent experience, a reassertion of white masculine power on an unruly planet that is perceived to be increasingly in need of violent, authoritarian order.