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6 books match the query 'Energy consumption'

cover of Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption

Burning Up

A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption

Simon Pirani

Pluto Press, 2018

Coal, gas, and oil have powered our societies for hundreds of years. But the pace at which we use them changed dramatically in the twentieth century: of all the fossil fuels ever consumed, more than half were burnt up in the past fifty years alone, the vast majority of that within a single generation. Most worrying of all, this dramatic acceleration has occurred against the backdrop of an increasingly unanimous scientific consensus: that their environmental impact is devastating and potentially irreversible.
            In Burning Up, Simon Pirani recounts the history of the relentless rise of fossil fuels in the past half century, and lays out the ways in which the expansion of the global capitalist economy has driven it forward. Dispelling common explanations that foreground Western consumerism, as well as arguments about unsustainable population growth, Pirani offers instead an insightful intervention in what is arguably the crisis of our time.
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cover of Digital Energetics

Digital Energetics

Anne Pasek

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Exploring the connections between energy and media—and what those connections mean for our current moment

Energy and media are the entangled middles of social life—and also of each other. This volume traces the contours of both a media analytic of energy and an energy analytic of media across the cultural, environmental, and economic relations they undergird. Digital Energetics argues that media and energy require joint theorization—not only in their potential to universalize but also in the many contingent and intermeshed relations that they bind together across contemporary informational and fossil regimes. Focusing specifically on digital operations, the coauthors analyze how data and energy have jointly modulated the character of the materiality and labor of digital systems in a warming world.

Anne Pasek provides a brief energy history of the bit, tracing how the electrification and digitization of American computing propelled a turn toward efficiency as both a solution and instigator of parallel crises in the workforce and the climate. Zane Griffin Talley Cooper traces these concerns within cryptographic proof-of-work systems and the heat they necessarily produce and seek to manage. Following heat through the twinned histories of thermodynamics and information theory, he argues that such systems are best approached as a paradigmatic, rather than exceptional, example of computing infrastructures. Cindy Kaiying Lin focuses on the practical and political frictions created as database and management designs move from the Global North to South, illustrating how the energy constraints and software cultures of Indonesia open new spaces of autonomy within environmental governance. Finally, Jordan B. Kinder offers a theorization of “platform energetics,” demonstrating how public energy discourses and settler land claims are entangled in the digital infrastructures of data colonialism in Canada.

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cover of Energy in the Nordic World

Energy in the Nordic World

Mogens Rüdiger and Anna Åberg

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

Norway and Sweden are among the biggest consumers of energy per capita, yet the Nordic nations also lead the world in clean power production and have ambitious goals of decarbonizing their energy systems by 2050. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland vary drastically in geography and the availability of natural resources, but each consistently generates electricity from renewable sources at multiple times the average rate of other high-income countries.

Mogens Rüdiger and Anna Åberg present a concise and timely history of energy production, trade, and consumption in Norden, starting with a review of the regional energy mix—from wind, solar, tide and wave, geothermal, biomass, nuclear, coal, and gas sources. Brief chapters describe the diversity of Nordic energy markets, assess how far the green transition has come, and explore what comes next as global crises, domestic politics, and technological developments present novel challenges and opportunities. Energy infrastructures and economic activities, Rüdiger and Åberg argue, serve as unique cultural focal points in the region. The coauthors summarize the national policy frameworks for the sector as well as the key energy and economic indicators used in infrastructure planning, regulation, and the opening of the electricity and gas markets to free competition. 

Energy in the Nordic World is the essential primer to the power markets at the heart of Europe’s energy transition.

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cover of Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Floating Power

Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Gökçe Günel

Duke University Press, 2026

Floating Power considers the role of energy production on an international scale, challenging the idea that new infrastructures wholly replace older sources of energy. Shifting the discussion from energy transition to energy accumulation, Gökçe Günel engages with a range of electricity producers including hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar power plants, noting their intersections as societies work to expand their supply at large rather than focus on one type of source. Günel uses the Ayşegül Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, as a prime example and vehicle to explore how state and corporate intervention impact energy technologies as every nation strives toward infrastructural expansion. Floating Power challenges the linear thinking and substitutive logic of mainstream energy discourse, instead showing how various power sources often expand and grow symbiotically.
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cover of Our Energy Future

Our Energy Future

Lincoln Davies

University of Utah Press, 2025

One of the greatest challenges of our time is the transition to clean energy. As climate change disrupts natural and human systems, a successful clean energy transition offers hope to a world upended by an overreliance on carbonbased fossil fuels.

In Our Energy Future, Lincoln Davies shines a bright light on the challenges the transition presents, including energy equity, political partisanship, the need for holistic solutions, and adaptability in the face of change. Our Energy Future makes the case for why the United States’ current transition to clean energy provides our world with something we so desperately need today: hope.
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cover of The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work

The Birth of Energy

Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work

Cara New Daggett

Duke University Press, 2019

In The Birth of Energy Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resource-based concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work. As Daggett shows, thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion, in part through a hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans. By systematically excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only by transforming the politics of work—most notably, the veneration of waged work—will we be able to confront the Anthropocene's energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled.
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