Abstract
Energy has re-emerged as an important inroad for social scientists to understand the political economy of the world around us. It is not that energy has been ignored; it has featured prominently in the resource curse debate, in research on the social and environmental impacts of resource extraction in extractive frontiers or in the Global South, and in other areas of enquiry. What is more recent (or recently revived), however, is the perspective on energy as a pervasive and ubiquitous material foundation of modern society. Scholars are raising questions about how our relationship with energy influences our mindsets and political visions, in particular when it comes to future energy scenarios. John Urry’s (2013) Societies Beyond Oil, Timothy Mitchell’s (2013) Carbon Democracy are prominent examples of this. It is perhaps not coincidental that such issues are raised when the spectre of climate change is well known without being significantly reflected in policies or behavioural change. Can the symbiotic interrelations between the fossil fuel economy and modern forms of life explain why the low-carbon economy appears so distant?
Matthew T Huber has emerged as one of key voices posing these types of questions within human geography. Lifeblood furthers his existing work, published in article form. In the introduction he poses questions similar to other scholars of this perspective, by stating his intention to assess how energised practices shape particular forms of thinking and feeling about politics, and whether energy can ‘do political work’ (p. xi). His approach to tackling those questions, however, is both useful and potentially novel. He avoids the conspiratorial tales of our oil addiction being simply the result of corporate boardroom decisions. Instead he outlines the historical development of ‘oil fetishism’ in the USA as a cultural and social phenomenon. The empirical lines are drawn from the era of between the World Wars, the early age of private automobility, to the politicisation of oil obsession in post-9/11 America, including George W Bush’s notion of ‘pain at the pump’.
His main argument is that the cause of the affliction of oil dependence is not simply ‘Big Oil’ or the deep pocketbooks of the energy lobby, but that it is as a special regime of capitalism, rooted in the architecture of 20th-century American capital accumulation, that the problem has to be understood. Theoretically his perspective is founded upon historical materialism. Whether or not one subscribes to historical materialism, it must be admitted that a theoretical perspective taking seriously the roots of social forms in material conditions is, ideally, well suited to study the relationship between oil and society. He advances a particular form of historical materialism, familiar to many geographers through the work of David Harvey, arguing that processes of capital accumulation have a spatial expression. The arrangement of spatial functions in society, a ‘spatial fix’, can be traced to a particular form of capital accumulation. In other words, the fossil fuel-based regime of capital accumulation has a distinct spatial expression – particularly the expansive post-war period growth of suburbia.
Along this vein, suburbanisation and the culture of suburban living is, in Huber’s account, a manifestation of the fossil fuel-based regime of capital accumulation. By showing the advertisements of car manufacturers and oil companies from the 1920s on, he illustrates how private car ownership and suburban living was constructed as equal to freedom and progress. Some of these are both humorous and telling in the hindsight of the present, for example the energy company Humble’s advertisement bragging that they daily produce enough energy to melt seven million tons of glacier.
It can of course be questioned how much advertisements tell us about popular culture, and at times it feels as if Huber exaggerates their importance. What the advertisements underline, however, is how fossil fuel-based suburban life was couched in something more than simple material comforts and distance to the deteriorating urban cores. They attempted to construct a particular cultural subject – mobile, free and materially secure. Huber builds on this to argue that the decentralised geography of suburbanisation is conducive to private, individual entrepreneurialism. In line with neoliberal logic of treating one’s life as capital, suburban culture convinces people to measure their life’s accomplishments through the accumulation of particular material commodities – a house, a car, a garden. Life in suburbia mirrors the impersonal and decentralised market, in contrast to the centralised site of the city with its public spaces. The privatisation of living and mobility created what is referred to as ‘hostile privatism’, with a political expression in the disdain for taxes, government and any notion of ‘the public’.
In other words, suburbia is the material foundation of the political developments of the 1970s and 1980s, which saw a gradual shift of political power to the right. Therefore the contemporary predicament, where the price of a gallon of fuel serves as a meter of the wellbeing of the nation, must be understood as the product of the cultural logic of American petrocapitalism developed throughout the 20th century.
It is a compelling account, and is highly recommended. It is a subject that reads well in a book-length treatment. This enables the author to draw up the long historical lines, and to make connections between high-level energy policy and cultural politics of oil. Of course, the particular perspective Huber adopts, what I would call spatialised historical materialism, precludes certain things from the frame of vision. To investigate a phenomenon as embedded in a regime of capitalism means that the author is concerned with the broad strokes, rather than the complexities and ambiguities internal to the regime. This theoretical framing largely gives away how the story ends; it is a relatively dystopian tale with few cracks in the wall for the light to shine through. The rightwing anti-tax, anti-state discourse is accepted as mainstream, or the real sentiment of the nation.
There is, of course, a certain degree of truth in this. At the same time, there is also a different story that could be told about energy politics, popular culture and urbanism; one that recognises the cracks in the wall of the regime of petroculture. For example, ‘peak car’ is now an observed tendency in both Europe and the USA. Among the explanations offered is the notion that for the generation of young adults, private car mobility does not offer the same prestige and sense of freedom it used to. Suburban living may not be very attractive for families with two working parents. And there is a strong movement to revive postindustrial urban cores and make them more livable. These tendencies are indicative of how the contradictions inherent to the regime of petrocapitalism are beginning to show. It is tempting to suggest that these things fall below the radar of Huber’s historical materialist account because they are not cracks in the wall of capitalism itself.
Nevertheless, as Huber convincingly shows, the geographically embedded path-dependencies of 20th-century suburbanisation will be significant constraints on the low carbon transition for a long time to come. The landscapes of this carbon culture are resistant to change, and they will affect economies, politics and social practice for decades to come. But unless we also take into account the ways in which they are contested, converted and abandoned, we risk reproducing the industry’s narrative of the inevitability of oil.