front cover of Energy without Conscience
Energy without Conscience
Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity
David McDermott Hughes
Duke University Press, 2017
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. Only by rejecting arguments that oil is economically, politically, and technologically necessary, and by acknowledging our complicity in an immoral system, can we stem the damage being done to the planet.
[more]

logo for Rutgers University Press
Nullify!
How to Sabotage Fossil Fuels, Defend the Climate, and Get Away with It
David McDermott Hughes
Rutgers University Press, 2027

This book is a plea and a plan for a more daring form of climate politics. In the United States, the climate movement has failed in the all-important task of shutting down fossil fuels. Elected politicians – even those who support renewable energy - remain committed to the extraction of petroleum and methane. Those industries have effectively captured the federal government, converting it into a petrostate. What is to be done? Hughes proposes a widespread and sustained campaign of sabotage against fossil fuels. His strategy is risky and unlawful – but not entirely unpopular. Libertarians and other lovers of private property object to the construction of pipelines across farms and ranches. In trials of saboteurs, they could exercise the little-known power of jury nullification to make pipelines unprotectable. With trepidation, Hughes offers this last resort against the approaching climate catastrophe. Time is short, unfortunately, and we are running out of better options. 

[more]

front cover of Proposals for a Caring Economy
Proposals for a Caring Economy
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Offering models of care beyond capitalist constraints

For too long, questions of care provision and inclusion have been shaped by economic justifications. This has led to the deprivation of care to individuals and communities based on capitalist assumptions about what and who can be cared for. Proposals for a Caring Economy takes these assumptions to task. Moving between examples focused on immigration and agriculture, patients and art audiences, green energy transitions and unhoused people, prison abolitionists and clients of domestic violence services, the contributors here argue that we need new ways to conceptualize care and its applications.

Proposals for a Caring Economy articulates an economy that situates care at the forefront; sees the preservation of individual, community, and environmental wellbeing as the primary good; and focuses attention on building a sustainable economy of caring that will radically transform social connections and possibilities.

Contributors: Chelsey R. Carter, Yale U; David McDermott Hughes, Rutgers U; Stephanie Delise Jones, U of California, Riverside; Sameena Mulla, Emory U; Katy Overstreet, Saxo Institute, U of Copenhagen; Michelle Parsons, Northern Arizona U; Adair Rounthwaite, U of Washington; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine; Emily Yates-Doerr, Oregon State U.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter