Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity

ENERGY WITHOUT CONSCIENCE This page intentionally left blank ENERGY WITHOUT CONSCIENCE Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity David McDermott Hughes Duke University Press Durham and London 2017 © 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾ Cover designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Arno Pro & Meta by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, GA. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Hughes, David McDermott, author. Title: Energy without conscience : oil, climate change, and complicity / David McDermott Hughes. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016035965 (print) | lccn 2016037765 (ebook) isbn 9780822363064 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822362982 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822373360 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: 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. Classification: lcc hd9502.t72 h84 2017 (print) | lcc hd9502.t72 (ebook) | ddc 338.2/72820972983—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035965 Cover credit: Close-up of pitch at the world's largest natural pitch lake, Trinidad, 2007. Photo © Robert Harding. FOR JESSE AND SOPHIA This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 PART I. ENERGY WITH CONSCIENCE 1. Plantation Slaves, the First Fuel 29 2. How Oil Missed Its Utopian Moment 41 PART II. ORDINARY OIL 3. The Myth of Inevitability 65 4. Lakeside, or the Petro- pastoral Sensibility 95 5. Climate Change and the Victim Slot 120 Conclusion 141 Notes 153 References 165 Index 183 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As a scholar of southern Africa, I came to Trinidad and Tobago rather un- prepared. Individuals, rather than institutions, took me under their wing and inducted me into the secrets of the country and its oil sector. Among these friends, I want especially to thank Gerard and Alice Besson, Joan Dayal, Dax Driver, Simone Mangal, Jeremy and Michelle Matouk, Patri- cia Mohammed, Krishna Persad, Marina Sal andy- Brown, Mary Schorse, Eden Shand, Teresa White, and Mark Wilson. My informants, who include many of these people, assisted the research and, obviously, made it possi- ble. These women and men are too many to name, and more than a few wish their identities to remain confidential. In the course of the research and writing of this book, four of my informants passed away: Norris Deon- arine, Rhea Mungal, Denis Pantin, and Julian Kenny. In all but the last case, these environmental activists died young and unexpectedly. Their loss im- poverishes Trinidad and Tobago of voices that could grapple critically with hydrocarbons. Some of the protagonists in this book will disagree violently with its tone and conclusions. I hope they will find their views fairly repre- sented, if also sufficiently refracted to teach something new. In the United States, colleagues and student colleagues helped beat the manuscript into shape. With gratitude, I acknowledge Hannah Appel, Jacob Campbell, Isaac Curtis, Daniel Goldstein, Angelique Haugerud, Dorothy Hodgson, Judith Hughes, Enrique Jaramillo, Mazen Labban, Ar- thur Mason, Melanie McDermott, Benjamin Orlove, Peter Rudiak- Gould, Marian Thorpe, Michael Watts, and Paige West. For images, primary doc- uments, critical commentary, or pivotal conversations, I am indebted to Andrew Matthews, Gerard Besson, Selwyn Cudjoe, Marlaina Martin, Mike Siegel, Genese Sodikoff, Steven Stoll, Humphrey Stollmeyer, Anna Tsing, and Richard York. I benefited from speaking engagements at Bard College, Brown University, Carleton University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, DePauw University, the International Institute of Social Studies, New York University, the New York Academy of Sciences, Rice University, University of Alberta, University of Leeds, and Wellesley College. The Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis provided me with a small fellowship to assist in writing the manuscript. I acknowledge the journal American Anthropologist for allowing me to publish, as chapter 5, a revised version of the article “Climate Change and the Victim Slot: From Oil to Innocence” (115, no. 4 [2013]: 570–81). I also thank McGill- Queen’s University Press for allowing me to include, in chapter 4, text from my contribution to the volume Petrocultures: Oil, Energy, Culture (2017), edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman. Finally, Gisela Fosado at Duke Univer- sity Press believed in this project before I knew what it was and brought the ship in to shore with skill and grace. Beyond this one book, I benefit from an infrastructure that is both po- litical and emotional. The climate justice movement and 350 .org allow me to anticipate an energy transition that will happen. Without such hope, the manuscript would have slipped into a despair too tedious to read. The academic labor movement—and its faculty union at Rutgers—cultivates a different kind of hope: the affirmation that fieldwork, writing, teaching, and university service still constitute a life’s calling. And in that life, there is no one more important than my wife, Melanie, who has supported and sacrificed for this calling over two decades. It would seem grandiose to dedicate Energy without Conscience to the billions- strong victims of fossil fuels. So, with Melanie, I choose two people enduring and resisting climate change: our children, Jesse and Sophia. Beginning in Trinidad, you have expressed curiosity, concern, outrage, and activism for a sustainable and just world. May you inspire others to feel and do the same. x Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION How does it feel to change the climate? This question seems more absurd than impolite. It implies a chain of causation and responsibility that still remains invisible and mostly unacknowledged. In fact, some people—a billion high emitters—burn oil and otherwise pump carbon dioxide c( o2) into the atmosphere at a rate dangerous to societies and ecosystems everywhere (Chakravarty et al. 2010). A slice of this population—overrepre- sented in the United States—disputes the science and scenarios of climate change. But explicit denial is less widespread than silence and disregard. The bulk of informed consumers simply don’t care a great deal about carbon emissions and their consequences. Tobacco provokes stronger re- actions, indeed sometimes a disgust verging on revulsion. Where is the revulsion over flood, drought, and myriad other catastrophic shifts in the conditions for life and society on planet Earth? Menacing as it increasingly is, climate change has yet to become a moral issue for most people. Energy without Conscience seeks to explain this persistent banality. I am not trying to expose—as others have done—the greed of individuals, firms, or governments. Capitalism and convenience certainly underwrite the status quo. Yet mea ns- to- ends reasoning does not account fully for the abundance of support for fossil fuels. Cultural meanings also sustain hydrocarbons. In the oil profession itself, people drill for noneconomic, as well as economic, motives. “The romance [among oil geologists] was not really based on money, which was only a way of keeping score,” reminisces the Texan John Graves (1995, xi–xii) in an essay on prospecting. His nos- talgia exceeds his greed. I am interested in such cultural dispositions and discourses. As I argue, they obscure responsibility for carbon emissions among those most responsible and those most susceptible—technicians in and local bystanders to the fossil fuel business (who are often the same people). Certain modes of thought inside and outside the industry push a more critical consideration of oil to the margin. Hydrocarbons—as I refer to oil, natural gas, coal, and bitumen—seem both invisible and inevitable. One notices them only when something goes wrong—when, for instance, massive volumes gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Water- borne pollution of this sort triggers professional concern as well as public outrage. This book, on the other hand, describes the everyday, intended functions of our energy system. When platforms, pipelines, and pumps work properly, oil arrives safely at the gas tank of a motor vehicle. Then, combusted in the engine, the hydrocarbon spews carbon dioxide into the air unnoticed and without protest. One might refer to this form of pollution as “the spill everywhere.” It far outweighs local contamination, both in volume and in planetary effects. Oil, in other words, is most dangerous when it behaves ordinarily and when people treat it as ordinary—that is, as neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. Investigating such a nonevent—really the partial absence of meaning—requires an indirect approach. One has to detect the meaning and sentiment that prevent an accumulation of feeling around oil or carbon emissions. Why do hydrocarbons not inspire disgust—or romance for that matter—among more people more often? To answer this question, one has to measure the subtle effort expended as informed people avoid reflect- ing ethically or emotionally upon oil. The right circumstances will throw this making of ordinariness into the sharpest relief. I found those conditions at the birthplace of petroleum: Trinidad in the southern Caribbean (map i.1). Here, Walter Darwent drilled the world’s first continually pro- ductive oil well in 1866.1 This larger island of Trinidad and Tobago shares deposits with nearby Venezuela. Until recently, it contributed the lion’s share of gas imported to the United States. But it does not rank among the traditional petrostates, either in production or in reputation. I lived in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, for the 2009–10 academic year and conducted ethnographic research among energy experts, anti- industrial activists, and policy makers preparing for climate change. At that point, Trinidad (as I abbreviate the nation- state) had never suffered a major spill. In terms of environmental harm, the industry was primarily committing climate change through co2 emissions.

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