Book review: No More Fossils, by Dominic Boyer
By Jeremy Williams
Forerunners is a series of short books from the University of Minnesota Press, where authors can offer “thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.”
No More Fossils is part of that series, probing the ‘fossil’ aspect of the term fossil fuels. What is a fossil? How do they form, and what sorts of ideas does it provoke when we think about climate change and our current oil dependency?
Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist in the environmental department of Rice University, and he begins with a historical overview. Modern capitalism was born in the age of plantation slavery, and the enormous wealth created from sugar. This sucro-politics was overtaken by carbo-politics, where the work was done by coal, and then more recently by the petro-politics of oil. In each case, the source of wealth and power shaped politics in profound ways. Structures and institutions arising around one source of power echoed into the next.
Fossils, by nature, persist through time. They ossify and endure. In the same way, we can observe the “generational character of political power”, as those who made their money in a particular way continue to hold influence into the future. Gerontocracy develops, with decisions made in the interests of a generation that is very literally invested in the status quo.
In our case, that is oil. The power of oil has fossilised into petro-culture, petro-states, petro-habits, and this constantly holds us back from addressing climate change effectively. “The petro-political imagination is paralyzed, completely unable to comprehend a world beyond the glories of its youth,” writes Boyer. His words certainly resonate in the UK, where the government keeps doubling down on North Sea oil and gas like it’s the future.
We all know it isn’t. What follows petro-politics is electro-politics, and that will reshape power dynamics in all sorts of new ways. There will be winners and losers in this new reality, but it can’t be avoided. Fossil fuels must end if we are to avoid catastrophic warming. And that means that “petro-state decomposition must be our primary political objective.”
“Decompositional politics” is about extricating ourselves from the hold of fossil fuels, taking apart the power structures that keep us embedded in petro-politics. It’s also a hopeful term. Like Samuel Alexander’s call to “compost capitalism”, it implies that something good will come out of the decay. As petroculture rots down, it will provide a growing medium for what comes afterwards.
It’s interesting to me that the idea of moving beyond fossil fuels should be part of the Forerunners series. In many ways it should be obvious – a sustainable future has to move past a dependency on a depleting resource that destabilises the climate. Of course it does, and how is that a radical idea? And yet the Paris Agreement doesn’t mention fossil fuels. The COP process is being led by a petrostate this year. Governments that pride themselves on their environmental credentials, like Norway or the UK, continue to invest in oil and gas. Get past the rhetoric and into the cold reality of geopolitics, and fossil fuels still hold immense power. Doing without them is more or less unthinkable.
How best to contribute to the decomposition of these power structures then? Boyer argues that it’s to invest our energies in the “revolutionary infrastructure” that will directly challenge and replace fossil fuels. And “let the sediments of history bury what we can’t use to make a better world.”
First published in The Earthbound Report.