Environmental Politics

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fenp20

Energy and domination: contesting the fossil myth

of fuel expansion

Cara Daggett

To cite this article: Cara Daggett (2020): Energy and domination: contesting the fossil myth of fuel
expansion, Environmental Politics, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2020.1807204

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1807204

Published online: 17 Aug 2020.

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ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1807204

Energy and domination: contesting the fossil myth of

fuel expansion
Cara Daggett
Department of Political Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

ABSTRACT
A just and sustainable energy transition will require not only new fuels, but new
energy stories. The dominant, ‘fossil’ myth of energy, depoliticizes the forward
march of energy intensity over human history. Instead, we need energy stories
that more fully account for the role of political domination in major energy
transitions of the past. Fossil domination is historically unique in its marriage of
racial capitalism and imperialism, but it may also reflect broader patterns of fuel
transition. I draw upon recent research on two momentous energy transitions –
the rise of grain states and fossil fuel empires – that show how political innova­
tions in labor extraction and domination were the main catalysts for transition,
rather than superior fuel technologies or a public thirst for more energy.
Emphasizing the role of domination across energy history disrupts the fossil
myth, while also making space for more transformative energy stories.

KEYWORDS Sustainable transition; energy politics; energy history; fossil fuels; energy humanities;
climate justice

If we are part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the
story written in coal.

- Naomi Klein

Introduction
Global warming and attendant planetary crises demand an energy transition
from fossil fuels to more sustainable energy sources. At the same time, energy
scholars are increasingly critical of the very concept of energy transition, as
its adoption by many engineers, economists, policymakers and the public has
focused too heavily upon fuel substitution and technocratic assumptions
about change. In a special issue on ‘Rethinking Energy Transitions’ in the
journal Science as Culture, Frank Laird observes that although many energy
scholars have emphasized the political and social dimensions of transitions,
‘in recent decades official discussions of energy transitions have returned to

CONTACT Cara Daggett cdaggett@vt.edu

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 C. DAGGETT

a very narrow framing that focused exclusively on fuels and technologies’

(2013).
The narrow focus on fuel and technology reflects a dominant narrative, or
myth, about how humans have changed fuel systems over time. This story,
which has proven difficult to dislodge in the popular imagination, fore­
grounds the trend of energy expansion as technological progress across the
long arc of human species history. It gains its authority in part by universa­
lizing and naturalizing its claims, appealing to deep history and supposed
human nature. According to this potent fossil fable, humans as a species
desire ever more energy, and a series of technological innovations have
provided it. Any attendant exploitation and injustice are mostly understood
as externalities: ungainly appendages to the human drive for fuel that can be
repaired by further technological innovation.
Stories are important in stabilizing hierarchical relations of power. The
overall effect of the fossil myth is to depoliticize the forward march of energy
intensity over human history. Instead, we need energy stories that more
accurately account for the role of political domination in major energy
transitions of the past. Domination makes sense as a focal theme because,
contra the fossil myth, domination best characterizes modern fossil fuel
systems. As Naomi Klein (2014, p. 363) reminds us, ‘running an economy
on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their
extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones – whole subsets
of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poison­
ing in the name of progress somehow acceptable.’ For Klein, the primary
problem is not fuel, technology or human nature, but capitalism, whose
‘market logic, with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paral­
yzing almost all serious efforts to respond to climate change’ (23). Market
logics imbue the fossil myth and its techno-centric, economistic perspective
on human-fuel relations.
Capitalism requires domination. Scholars of racial capitalism have led the
way in demonstrating that capitalism necessitates exploitation and inequality
for the accumulation of profit, and that racial logics have been instrumental
to organizing bodies and lands along hierarchies of value (see, for example,
Robinson 2000, Pellow 2007, Nixon 2011, Pulido 2017). Cedric Robinson
(2000), who developed the concept of racial capitalism, argues that racial
domination pre-existed the rise of capitalism and colonial conquest, and
imbued feudal European social relations. Capitalism and a changing world
system then opened up ‘new instruments’ and opportunities for European
bourgeoisie and state elites who had, since the twelfth century, ‘nurtured
myths of egalitarianism while seizing every occasion to divide peoples for the
purpose of their domination’ (26).
As Robinson’s analysis reveals, domination on the basis of human differ­
ence is a more far-reaching social force than any specific economic or
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 3

technological system; capitalism became a favored instrument for the exten­

sion of Western racial domination, as did its partner, the modern nation-
state. Indeed, Laura Pulido (2017), who draws upon Robinson’s work to
understand the persistence of environmental racism, urges environmental
justice movements to treat the modern state as an adversary, rather than an
ally (6–7). The state consistently ‘refuses to implement meaningful initiatives
in order to maintain racial capitalism,’ and she concludes that ‘environmen­
tal racism must be understood as state-sanctioned racial violence’ (6). Pulido
reminds us how stories that are alert to political domination will significantly
impact how we think about system change – and fuel change. They explain
why more radical strategies are needed to counteract state and industry
exploitation, and to achieve truly just and sustainable energy futures.
These insights about political domination are specific to the modern era of
racial capitalism and fossil fuel violence, and it is important to appreciate the
unique disastrousness of our fossil fuel world. But it is also worth considering
how fossil domination – singular as it is – may also reflect deeper historical
patterns of major fuel transition. In other words, while the fossil myth offers
a techno-centric view of human history – extending modern biases onto the
human species – a focus on domination suggests a counter-history of fuel
change.
To illustrate this possibility, I draw upon critical reappraisals of two
momentous fuel transitions that have functioned as key plot points in the
fossil myth: the rise of agriculture (James Scott) and of steam engines
(Andreas Malm). In opposition to the fossil myth, these cases suggest that
transition was catalysed by political innovations in the use of new fuel
systems to extract labor and to entrench relations of domination, rather
than by the appearance of a more forceful or efficient fuel technology.
I analyse these cases as building blocks for an energy story that appreciates
the principle role that domination has played in major fuel changes.
Critical energy researchers, and many transition scholars, have also stu­
died the role of power in understanding energy transitions, insisting that
energy transitions are political and cultural events, and not just moments of
fuel substitution. The political and social dimensions of energy are being
explored in the energy humanities (Szeman and Boyer 2017, Howe 2019),
sociotechnical transitions (Geels 2019), ecosocialism (Moore 2015, Malm
2016), degrowth (D’Alisa et al. 2015, Kallis et al. 2018), energy democracy
(Stephens 2019), and a call for feminist energy futures (Bell et al. 2020).
Those seeking just transitions go beyond asking which fuel technologies are
used, and pay attention to which groups and interests control and benefit
from energy systems (e.g. Tokar 2015, Angel 2016, Jasanoff 2018, Daggett
2018, Szulecki 2018).
Reconsidering these two historic cases as part of a story of energy
domination can push the analyses of fuel power and people power
4 C. DAGGETT

further. They suggest that the fossil myth of energy expansion-as-

progress is not only flawed, but upside down, in how it conceives of
the relationship between power and fuel technology. In these moments of
change, the drive for domination led to transitions that rested upon the
development of inferior technologies – not just from the perspective of
human and ecological well-being, but also from the perspective of price,
quality, and/or efficiency. In other words, these stories of energy dom­
ination can help to dismantle the fossil myth on its own economistic
terms, using its chief cases, and according to its preferred metrics:
Domination can lead to suboptimal fuel outcomes (except for an elite
minority). This does not mean that technology is unimportant to energy
transitions; these new fuel technologies were agentic forces, but they
triumphed not because they were the best fuels or prime movers, but
because they were best suited to the development of extractive political
arrangements.
In what follows, I first establish the persistence of the fossil myth, which is
common even among many renewable energy advocates. New fuels alone are
insufficient to achieving just and sustainable futures, and yet many promi­
nent energy researchers remain wed to this assumption, and friendly toward
state and industry, which helps buttress the status quo of fossil fuel power.
Next, I turn to the reassessments of the historic rise of grain states and fossil
fuel empires as disruptive energy transition stories that resonate with each
other in terms of their extractive patterns. Lastly, I discuss the advantages of
recognizing the role of political domination in the stories we tell about
energy and its history.
In highlighting domination, my intention is not to replace one uni­
versalizing myth (human desire for more energy) with another (human
desire for domination, or the primacy of violence). Instead, stories about
power relations serve to make clear that only some people sought dom­
ination, and that they often failed to sustain it. Moreover, since the early
modern era, the global extension of European domination, along with its
narrower, Eurocentric epistemologies (Go 2020) – of which the fossil myth
is one – has further obscured that there have been, and still are, many
ways that people live with and govern energy. There is not a single energy
story that explains how humans relate to fuel (Daggett 2019). Indeed, most
people have lived outside of, at the margins of, or in struggles against,
extractive energy systems across the vast timescape of human life.
Attending to political domination makes space for a richer, and more
diverse, landscape of energy narratives.
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 5

New solar panels, same old story

Renewable energy use is expanding and becoming cheaper, but this does not
alter the need for more and better energy stories. The growth of renewable
energy alone does not ensure a just and sustainable transition. For one, many
large renewable projects are developed through extractive models. Cymene
Howe (2019), in her study of a failed wind mega-project in Mexico, observes
that ‘renewable energy transitions risk repeating old conventions that end in
ruin’ (6) and that transition requires not just fuel, but understanding ‘human
energetic desires’ and their relationship with other lifeworlds (2) – in other
words, better energy stories.
Moreover, renewable energy alone has not significantly mitigated the
problem of fossil fuels. Shannon E. Bell and Richard York contest the term
energy transition itself as a ‘misleading’ concept, since it infers that one fuel
system replaced another in past transitions, and thus creates the expectation
that by developing renewable energy, fossil fuel use will wither away and
carbon emissions will eventually decrease (York and Bell 2019, 41). Instead,
they argue that, historically, new fuel technologies have led to ‘energy addi­
tions,’ in which energy and other resource consumption simply expanded,
with older fuel systems continuing alongside the newer ones (41). An ‘energy
additions’ perspective explains our current predicament: While we have
added more renewable energy sources to the global energy mix, York
(2012) shows that most of those renewables only contributed to expanded
energy consumption, rather than to replacing fossil fuels. Bell and York
conclude that ‘simply promoting renewables will not lead to a full transition,’
which will involve struggling against the fossil-fuel industry and the broader
commitment to economic growth at all costs (43).
An ‘energy additions’ perspective is immensely important in highlighting
the need for political action against fossil fuels. However, as a story, it risks
being folded back into the fossil myth, which, after all, presumes that humans
(as an undifferentiated species) instinctively desire ever more energy, and
have developed technology to provide it. Such expansionist assumptions
appear consistently in prominent avenues of energy research, and they help
to explain why many energy researchers are not taking up the struggle
against fossil fuels. Geels et al. (2014) observe that policymakers and many
energy researchers ‘have high (probably unrealistic) hopes that “green”
innovation will be sufficient to bring about low-carbon transitions,’ and
that ‘a strong focus on new innovations may serve to protect existing regimes
by detracting attention from the fossil fuel burning problem.’
Not only are many leading energy and climate researchers not struggling
against business-as-usual, or paying much attention to its resistance – they
have partnered with it. Fossil fuel interests have poured hundreds of millions
of dollars into the energy and climate research at many of the most
6 C. DAGGETT

prestigious institutes and universities, including at Harvard, MIT, Stanford,

Princeton, and the University of California at Berkeley. After a years-long
study, Franta and Supran (2017) conclude that fossil fuel interests ‘have
colonized nearly every nook and cranny of energy and climate policy
research in American universities, and much of energy science too,’ in an
intentional effort to capture ‘informed influentials,’ leading to serious and
systemic conflicts of interest. In a 2008 report, The Center for Science in the
Public Interest (2008) noted that universities have ‘accept[ed] extensive
industry controls over the research process,’ that threaten academic freedom
and integrity, and have built fossil fuel-funded programs that provide ‘a fig
leaf for large corporations seeking to green their image.’ The fossil fuel
divestment movement has raised awareness of institutional investments in
fossil fuel companies, but the degree to which fossil fuel money has captured
energy research itself has largely escaped public notice. As John Perkins
acknowledges, modern democratic publics are easily overpowered by the
influence of industrial lobbies, and ‘with vastly uneven resources, energy
debates quickly become David-Goliath face-offs, except that in this case
David usually loses’ (2017, p. 212).
There are economic reasons for fossil fuel influence over academic
research. Here I want to also observe the importance of the fossil myth –
expansion as human nature, driven by technological progress – in providing
a justification for these research partnerships, and for the participation of
fossil fuel industries in a sustainable transition. For instance, at the launch of
a carbon capture technology initiative, ExxonMobil’s chief executive, Darren
Woods, explained that ‘our industry has gone through transitions over the
decades. I don’t see it [climate change] as a threat. It’s an evolution. We know
from past experience that evolution is typically driven by technology’
(Tabuchi 2019). The company’s 2018 Summary Annual Report claims that
it will meet ‘the growing demand for affordable and reliable energy, while at
the same time reducing environmental impacts.’ Here again, the belief in
humans’ energy expansion as an evolutionary force, and technology as the
solution, functions to remove politics from the analysis.
The problem is that these narratives are not confined to corporate plati­
tudes and press releases; Woods’ version of energy history remains popular
in academic energy research. The director of Princeton’s Andlinger Center
for Energy and the Environment repeated ExxonMobil’s view of transition
almost verbatim – meeting the demand for energy while reducing ‘impacts’ –
in announcing a major collaboration with ExxonMobil, calling the partner­
ship a ‘win-win’ (ExxonMobil 2016). But as Big Oil touts its green efforts, and
benefits from its co-branding with respected universities, energy researchers
Fulton and Sperling (2019) observe that fossil fuel companies have ‘no clear
road map’ for a sustainable transition. Renewable energy accounts for only
1.3% of the oil and gas sector’s 2018 capital expenditures (Fletcher et al.
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 7

2018), with U.S. companies like ExxonMobil devoting only .02% and lagging
behind European ones (Pickl 2019). At the same time, a report from the
financial think tank Carbon Tracker (2019) found that, since 2018, oil
companies have invested 50 USD billion in new oil and gas projects that
would not be financially viable if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees
Celsius.
Of course, there is little reason to believe that the struggle against fossil
fuels will be won by the mounting of superior evidence, especially as busi­
ness-as-usual secures trillions of dollars of future fossil fuel profit. Critical
voices are marginalized in a research landscape characterized by heavy oil
and gas funding. But money is rarely enough on its own to stabilize a status
quo. Coal and oil do more than secure profit and consumerist lifestyles. They
also secure worldviews and political subjectivities, narrated through energy
myths (Daggett 2018) – yet another reason why transition cannot simply be
a matter of switching fuels. Critical energy scholars are no strangers to myth-
making and its role in structuring political, economic and cultural systems.
Querying faulty and harmful energy myths on their own terms continues to
provide a meaningful way that critical scholars can take on fossil fuel inter­
ests, especially in academic institutions. Alternative fuel narratives can high­
light how some significant energy transitions of the past were first and
foremost victories for domination and exploitation, which also reveals how
energy has been, and could be, otherwise.

Energy domination: from the ascent of Man [sic] to the ascent of

some men
In most studies of energy transitions, two shifts loom large: the rise of
agriculture and fossil-fueled industrialization (e.g. Smil 2017, Perkins
2017). Both shifts also correspond to dramatic changes in political organiza­
tion. The intensification of grain-based agriculture was connected to the
emergence of the first proto-states, as densely populated cities multiplied at
the heart of fledgling empires. Much later, fossil fuel systems accelerated the
spread of global industrial capitalism, which was organized by imperial states
in the Global North. Because these shifts resulted in dramatic technological
breakthroughs, as well as civilizational splendor, they are widely understood
through a progressive technological narrative, even by those who are other­
wise critical of the effects that agriculture and fossil fuels have had on human
life. According to this narrative, these two momentous energy transitions
were catalyzed by the development of a superior technical system that
addressed material limitations facing human communities, which in turn
allowed for the spectacular accumulation of goods and power. Meanwhile,
major changes in energy systems that do not feature progressive technologies
are not usually called transitions; those are collapses, dark ages, or
8 C. DAGGETT

depressions. Or, in the case of the Atlantic slave trade and the establishment
of plantation economies, their importance is downplayed; critical race scho­
lars have worked hard to ensure that the practices of slavery and land theft
are recognized as, in Robinson’s (2000, p. 4) words, ‘historical and organic
rather than adventitious and synthetic’ to the rise of the modern world
system.
But while the agricultural and industrial transitions are held up as key
events in the dominant story of energy, recent research complicates their
progressive characterization. First, in Against the Grain: A Deep History of
the Earliest States, James Scott (2017) upends the ‘civilizational narrative’ of
the agricultural transition. Grain-based agriculture intensified because it was
particularly conducive to political domination and the interests of elites in
proto-states, not because it was a beneficial system for improving human life
or solving resource problems. Meanwhile, Andreas Malm (2016) relates
similar patterns in the rise of ‘fossil capital’ in nineteenth century Britain.
He argues that fossil fuels were chosen not because they were superior in
terms of price and propulsion, nor because they solved problems related to
population growth or resource scarcity. Rather, capitalist elites preferred
fossil fuels primarily because they were superior in terms of exploiting
laborers and sidestepping their rising demands. In both cases, it appears
that an important catalyst for the transition was not the appearance of
a technically superior fuel system, but the development of a new political
technology that could organize and extract other humans’ labor. Grain
agriculture and fossil fuels proliferated because they were especially attractive
to those pursuing hierarchy through extractive methods. The materials and
technologies involved were crucial determinants of the transition, but more
as a result of their alignment with power accumulation, extraction, and
enclosure, rather than their contribution to human progress writ large.
The effects of these transitions were so explosive not only because of their
energetic bases, but because their respective energy systems were organized
to support the accumulation of resources in core nodes (usually urban
centers), resulting in both creative beauty and destructive inequality.
A central motivation was the desire to amass political power through enclo­
sures of land, of women’s and animal’s bodies, and of energy supplies, with
the effect of concentrating power in fewer hands. Likewise, what needed
overcoming was less a material constraint (e.g. food or timber shortages),
and more a political constraint: people are difficult to organize in large
numbers for the purposes of exploitative labor. History is replete with
ongoing, organized resistance to the concentration of power in the hands
of elites (Scott 2017, p. 219–220). Resistance to hierarchical orders, and to
centralized power, has necessitated novel uses of fuel systems on the part of
elites in order to break strong social networks of intransigence. Energy
transitions often mark the historic moments when hierarchical political
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 9

systems succeed in these efforts with the help of new fuel technologies. It was
not the ascent of Man [sic], ever improving his control over nature, but
rather the ascent of some men through efforts to domesticate people, animals,
plants, and fuel.
Malm and Scott are studying two vastly different historical periods, with
distinct political and economic orders. By comparing them as moments of
energy transition, I risk minimizing or erasing their differences, which in the
past has been done in the name of constructing an archive of human progress
and technological innovation. Moreover, when these two periods, thousands
of years apart, are elevated as key turning points for human civilization, this
can reinforce the tendency to treat the intervening centuries as relatively
static, and unimportant, in terms of energy and technology. Energy transi­
tion stories need to be expanded beyond these minimalist plot points, but it is
worth revisiting these two historical moments precisely because they are so
widely featured as touchstones of progressive energy history, as moments of
decisive fuel shifts – and because they, too, were driven by power relations
and exploitation.

Taxable energy: grains and states

Scott describes the ‘civilization narrative’ as a story that has been developed
by hierarchical states in order to emphasize their superiority over the mobile,
egalitarian, and subsistence ways of life that characterize roughly 95% of
human history (7–8). The civilization narrative is nothing less than
a mythology, Scott shows, and it rests upon the false assertion that sedentary
life, based upon grain agriculture and organized according to hierarchical
political systems, represented a progressive improvement for humans, ‘an
epoch-making leap in mankind’s well-being . . . at long last, a settled life that
promoted the household arts and the development of civilization’ (9).
The historical record suggests otherwise, especially if we recognize that
most existing archives are biased toward the state and its interests (13). First,
the state neither invented agriculture nor sedentism, and so cannot take
credit for these technical and material developments; Scott emphasizes that
agriculture and small-scale sedentism preexisted early state formation by
thousands of years. Archaeological evidence of the Neolithic era shows that
humans were fully capable of domesticating both plants and animals, and
even living in larger towns, without needing highly stratified political
arrangements in order to do so. Instead, domestication and sedentism
appears to have emerged in ‘ecologically rich and varied, preagricultural
settings – especially wetlands bordering the seasonal migration routes of
fish, birds, and larger game’ (10), and represented additional tactics by which
humans sought to diversify their food supply as part of their subsistence
regimes. Moreover, Scott suggests that we can also infer from this evidence,
10 C. DAGGETT

as well as from the persistence of ‘determined resistance by mobile peoples

everywhere to permanent settlement,’ that humans (rightly) sought to avoid
state formation and state-arranged settlement, both prior to the rise of the
state, and all the way into the twenty-first century (8). Indeed, Scott points
out that much of the Earth, and many of its peoples, lived either outside the
state, or at the margins of state control, until the modern era, which is only
‘the last two-tenths of one percent of our species’ political life’ (14).
Avoiding the state made perfect sense for people, despite the civilization
narrative’s insistence on progress. Unlike the diverse subsistence regimes of
pre-state wetlands, which first innovated agricultural techniques, state-based
agriculture tied people to a particular dwelling, and to a narrow range of food
options that were anchored upon grain crops. The state also significantly
expanded the institutions of patriarchy and slavery, and exerted new forms of
discipline to govern the productive and reproductive activities of women and
domesticated animals. The result for state subjects was poorer food quality,
increased vulnerability to crop failure and hunger, and exponentially
increased risk of disease, given higher population densities and living more
closely with domesticated animals. Life in the state, for most people, was
grim: worse health, less leisure time, and a greater risk of early death
compared to non-state life.
In short, what Scott illustrates is that the first great energy transition was
neither a moment of uncomplicated progress, nor a moment of technological
innovation in energy use. Humans already knew how to do domestication
and sedentism, and even how to organize town-based commerce; the result­
ing ‘multispecies resettlement camps’ were ‘an autonomous achievement of
the Neolithic’ that owed nothing to state power (117). The state cannot take
credit for the advent of agriculture or town life. Rather, the state innovated
new political technologies that parasitized these existing energy systems;
early state elites learned how to capture the energy flowing through multi­
species camps in order to accumulate privilege at centralized nodes (117).
The state’s aim (power centralization and control over food provision) also
helps to explain why states only arose on the back of grain agriculture, given
that there were plenty of other domesticated plants that offered better quality
food. Cereal grains were not the healthiest or most energy dense food, but
they were the most conducive to the project of taxation – a key technology by
which power was accumulated – because they were harvested all at once, and
they were easy to count, divide, store, and move, unlike domesticated plants
like lentils, taro, or yams, none of which formed the basis of an early state
(129). Some forms of energy, in other words, are more conducive to cen­
tralized power than others – a phenomenon that is relevant to understanding
the fossil fuel transition.
In terms of progress, the state indeed became the site for the production of
magnificent art, architecture, and writing itself – all of which appear to many
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 11

modern peoples as progressive. At the same time, its effect on daily life was
regressive for the majority of its subjects, most particularly for domesticated
animals, for women and their reproductive and productive autonomy, and
for those enchained by the rapidly expanded institutions of slavery (178–­
179). In other words, the later achievements of the state should not prevent
us from understanding that its formation appears to have been in most cases
violent and exploitative – pursued in the name of greed rather than emanci­
pation or necessity, contrary to how states and political philosophers justify
hierarchical orders (9, 27). The ambivalence of energy-based progress also
appears in the story of the fossil fuel transition, to which I now turn.

Stock energy: fossil fuels and capitalism

While Scott tackles the civilization narrative, Malm’s Fossil Capital overturns
the ‘Ascent of Man’ story, which is based upon the widespread assumption
that scarcity drove the transition to fossil fuels. The scarcity paradigm draws
heavily on Malthus and Ricardo, with a healthy mix of social Darwinism
(21–23). It assumes that human societies tend to overwhelm their ecological
surroundings, at which point they either stagnate, devolve, or invent
a technological breakthrough that allows them to do more on the same
terrain and resources. In each case of breakthrough, it is a material stressor –
be it fuel shortages as a result of deforestation, or more general resource
pressures as a result of over-population – that catalyzes a technological
invention. Malm also terms this paradigm ‘the myth of the human enter­
prise,’ which ‘assumes a general form: there is a hunger to consume more
energy in all human societies, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Britain finally managed to satisfy it’ (258, italics original).
The myth of the human enterprise ‘requires the invocation of
a transhistorical factor, some urge shared by all formations in history,’
which often appears variously as ‘the impulse to growth,’ a ‘biological urge
to breed,’ a hunger for energy, and sometimes also a desire for power (258).
Note that the ‘human enterprise’ is a modern update of the ‘civilization
narrative’ that Scott analyzes; the difference is that ‘human enterprise’
appeals to social Darwinism to fill in details about the theory of change
driving the rise of civilizations. The human enterprise myth, in which
dynamic urges inspire innovation, is in keeping with the interpretation of
the Anthropocene as a problem of anthropos – of the entire human species –
wherein burning fossil fuels appears as ‘a lifting of constraints, allowing
humans to behave as they – from the Yangzi to the Thames – had always
wanted to do’ (259). According to some deep histories of anthropos, the
human urge to invent new tools in the face of scarcity, according to basic
survival instincts, is traced all the way back to the emergence of fire manip­
ulation. In short, humans (and perhaps many other living creatures) are
12 C. DAGGETT

inherently ecologically harmful in pursuing their survival. Over time, human

ingenuity devised clever technologies – including grain agriculture to feed
urban centers – with which to master the limits imposed by nature, bringing
the species eventually to the fossil fuel era and the precipice of crisis for
Holocene ecologies.
Malm takes issue with the premises upon which these historiographical
myths are based. Humans have used fire for thousands of years, but only
some developed the fossil economy, even though many human civilizations,
including the Northern Song of China, ‘had immediate access to coal depos­
its and knew how to use them’ (264). Moreover, Malm points out that coal
mining, as well as Watt’s improved steam engine, pre-dated the 19c rise of
the fossil economy by decades. When the transition did occur around the
1840s – when coal-powered steam engines overtook their main energy rival,
waterwheels, as the primary force driving British industrialization – it did
not occur ‘because water was scarce, more expensive, or less technologically
potent – to the contrary, steam gained supremacy in spite of water being
abundant, cheaper and at least as powerful, even and efficient’ (93, italics
original).
It appears that the historical evidence undermines the scarcity paradigm
and its ‘myth of human enterprise.’ Instead, Malm builds an alternative
explanation that is better supported by the evidence. Fossil fuels may not
have been superior to water in terms of price or power, but they were
superior in terms of their congruence with the logics of competitive capital­
ism and private property (118). The best human uses of water power, like
other ‘flow’ energies, have required coordination and centralized planning,
which is anathema to the competitive spirit of capitalism (118). Added to
that, water power tended to disperse factory sites at many points along
a river, and there were fewer laborers at more rural sites, often near the
fastest-flowing water. Many firms constructed ‘factory colonies’ to attract
enough workers, which meant an intimate engagement with the daily life and
care of the laborers (126–127). Those workers were much more difficult for
managers to replace if they organized and went on strike, as they increasingly
did in early nineteenth century Great Britain (141–144).
In contrast, coal, as a ‘stock’ energy, had many attractive attributes in the
eyes of capital. Malm writes that ‘here [in steam power] the private property
of cotton manufactures found a source of energy congenial to its logic:
piecemeal, splintered, amenable to concentration and accumulation, divisi­
ble’ (119). Most importantly, these traits of steam power allowed managers to
get around the demands of labor and to better discipline it. Coal could be
brought to the exponentially growing cities, where a ‘surplus population’ of
workers made labor more manageable and disposable, which ‘allowed the
capitalist to treat his workers as “so many old shuttles”. They could now be
discarded at will, replaced with ease, left to fend for themselves on the
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 13

housing market, unknown and immaterial in any other respect than as

a temporarily hired capacity for labor’ (152). In an era of mounting labor
resistance, Malm finds plentiful evidence that the desire to better manage
labor, and to be protected from its demands, was the main motivation for the
shift from water to fossil power. As was evident in the agricultural transition,
it appears that the fossil fuel transition was less about technological progress
than it was about elite capture for the purposes of power accumulation and
labor domestication. The energy systems that emerged from these so-called
transitions – grain agriculture and fossil capital – came to dominate because
they were uniquely suited to power centralization in the moment of transi­
tion, and not because they were somehow superior energy for humankind.

Political domination and energy futures

Despite vastly different historical periods and contexts, there are several areas
of resonance that travel between the stories of grain states and fossil capital.
Putting these historic cases into conversation with the concept of energy
transition offers some insights for critical energy scholarship. First, if we
understand that these major past energy transitions did not occur because
they were beneficial to humans writ large, but because they were beneficial to
elite interests, then a clearer picture may emerge of the forces that are
blocking a sustainable transition. In the case of grain states and fossil capital,
the technological capacity for agriculture and coal-fired engines preexisted
the ‘transition,’ and the fuel system that emerged was not, at the moment of
transition, superior even by the simple metrics of power and efficiency.
Rather, in both cases, what mattered was the extent to which the fuel type
was superior as a means for centralizing the power of some over others. Both
grains and coal were conducive to power accumulation; yams and water
were not.
Given that energy democracy advocates note that renewable forms of
energy may be less conducive to capitalist orders of private property, profit,
and market logics (Malm 2016), and in the case of wind and solar, more
conducive to democratic and distributed control (Lovins 1979), it becomes
more understandable why, despite the availability of renewable technology,
a transition has not yet occurred. It is not a question of improving under­
standing of the benefits of renewables, but rather that some of the real
economic benefits of renewables do not appear as profits on the balance
sheet of multinational corporations, nor as savings to for-profit health care
systems, nor as advantages to racialized states like the U.S. that have priva­
tized or cut many social services.
A truly sustainable transition – and not just the addition of solar panels
and wind turbines – will challenge the principles of economic growth and
profit as the hallmarks of well-being. Moreover, if dominant elites control the
14 C. DAGGETT

renewable transition, the historical evidence suggests the likelihood of infer­

ior energy outcomes from the perspective of people and planet, but perhaps
also of efficiency, design, and even force. Indeed, many critical energy
scholars worry that a renewable transition, without being led by democratic
and just processes, could just as easily work to entrench existing power
relations, while at the same time failing to produce truly sustainable com­
munities (Rignall 2016, Howe 2019, Boyer 2019, Burke and Stephens 2018,
Weinrub and Giancatarino 2015). These cases of elite capture of fuel systems,
which resulted in poorer outcomes for many who participated in them,
therefore further undermine the notion that technological innovations are
necessarily synonymous with well-being, or are politically neutral.
Second, and relatedly, these cases clarify our understanding of the thor­
ough entanglement of fuel power and people power. A cautionary note is in
order here: any attempt to trace continuities between fossil fuel rule and
historical civilizations risks collapsing the distinctiveness of fossil domina­
tion, organized by racial capitalism and imperialism, and thus diverting
attention from the accountability of Anglo-European elites for the Earth’s
current predicament. As a result, some readers may feel that the singularity
of fossil domination deserves to stand alone as an analytical category.
On the other hand, the benefit of treating fossil domination as an index
case for understanding broader human-fuel power relations is that it makes
possible a more aggressive assault on the fossil myth. As I have detailed, the
fossil myth gains its strength from playing both sides of history: it highlights
the unique benefits of modern fuel systems, but when pressed on fossil fuel
violence, the myth pivots to evolutionary language about human nature, as if
the human species’ desire for energy ineluctably leads us to a warming,
faltering world. A focus on domination counters some of these big historical
assumptions. Alternative energy stories illustrate how many, if not most,
historical peoples did not seek extractivism at all costs. Perhaps more damn­
ing, they show that domination produces more profit and power for elites,
but generally worse fuel technologies from the perspective of people and
planet. Even from a techno-centric perspective, then, it makes sense to build
energy systems that first dismantle and guard against domination.
Indeed, democracy and sustainability are not static achievements; power
is in motion and productive; domination is ever in search of new instruments
for rule. A just energy system will require dynamic safeguards (of human and
nonhuman elements) to channel power (of fuel and people) and circulate it,
to counter its potential amassment in sites where it may tend to pool or flood.
In other words, a sustainable energy system will rest upon the design of
democratic political technologies mapped onto, and expressed through, fuel
technologies.
Third, the focus on domination and extraction illuminates the forced
nature of these historic transitions; they did not proceed automatically, and
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 15

neither did they represent the meeting of broad human (species) desires. In
other words, if domination was the key catalyst for these major transitions,
then this reminds us that there is nothing natural or inevitable, or inherently
good, in the expansion of energy and material consumption. The vast
majority of humans have lived outside of not only fossil fuel systems, but
agricultural systems, across the deep time of our species history. Not every­
one made patriarchal, extractive states, and not everyone pursued fossil
capital, even when they had the technical capacity to do so. Even after such
systems arose alongside centralized political orders (states, empires), many
people have continued to resist, flee, and sabotage them. And not every state
pursued extractive and expansive domination to the same extent; the modern
era stands out in this regard. It would therefore also be a mistake to replace
the lust for energy with the lust for domination as a description of human
nature. Domination may emerge as a theme in the history of major energy
transitions, but it also appears far from universal across the vast record of
human species life.
Finally, these transition stories remind us that the record for states, much
less modern, fossil-fueled states, appears fairly dismal, even in evolutionary
terms (Scott 2017, p. 185–187). From a deep history perspective, states are
unstable and unsustainable political orders when held up against systems based
on more egalitarian and cooperative forms of rule and commerce. The evi­
dence as to whether life in the state is better for the human species is highly
ambivalent. The fossil myth, with its linear trajectory of human ascent, often
insinuates that the only alternative is a return to a primeval past of foraging and
nomadism. More accurate energy stories, however, can help to encourage
a recognition of, and emphasis upon, the plethora of cooperative and commu­
nal practices that persist today, including those within highly capitalized
economies, which depend upon these alternative networks as mostly unpaid
and invisible labor (as with care and housework) (Gibson-Graham 2006).
A more clear-eyed view of human history alerts us to the plasticity of political
and energetic arrangements, and to the paucity of stories that exclude all but
market and state logics. From this perspective, global indigenous movements
for climate justice, such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, which
mobilize around alter- and anti-modern values, better reflect what it means to
be human than does the rapacious Ascended Man invented by global
capitalism.
New stories of energy transition thus disrupt the teleological thrust of
linear history, revealing that energy systems often were, and could still be,
otherwise – that there were and are many modes of human community, and
many dimensions of daily life even in the capitalist core, that have resisted
transition or that invented alternative ways to organize new fuel
technologies.
16 C. DAGGETT

A renewable transition feels unprecedented only from the perspective of

state-biased history, in which the triumph of grain states and fossil capital is
assumed to have negated and vanquished all other ways of life. The multi­
plicity of energy practices is too often erased by, or minimized in, the
historical archives, which is a record of civilizational splendor set against
an unknown and unremembered ‘dark ages’ (Scott 15–16). While this is not
to say that contesting fossil capital will be easy, or even successful, it should
provide more imaginative resources and hope for its possibility. They will be
given prominence only after the fossil fantasy of technocratic, progressive
energy transition is dethroned.

Conclusion: more and better energy stories

To the extent that solar or wind power can be financialized, and can become
objects that promise an attractive return-on-investment to funders, we may see
wind and solar adoption without the need for broader socio-political transi­
tion. But fossil fuel power is unlikely to be challenged according to such a logic,
as intensive fossil consumption remains good for global capital and for
unbridled economic growth (Goldstein 2018). That is why the blossoming of
alternative energy stories that counter patterns of domination by fuel, and that
feature political innovations that more equitably and sustainably organize
energy, will be as important as new energy tools, and perhaps more so.
Ursula Le Guin famously tells us that domination, the weapon, and
conflict are all central to the oft-told story of the Ascent of Man, man the
Hero, the powerful set of myths that ignore the bulk of what is happening to
actual people throughout history as they go about gathering wild food and
carrying it home – ‘with or before the tool that forces energy outward [the
weapon], we made the tool that brings energy home [the container] (1989,
p. 167).’ This informs her ‘carrier bag’ theory of fiction, one that rejects the
tragedy of ‘the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the
Techno-Heroic,’ a ‘killer story’ that we have become tied up in, and alongside
which we may all perish (168–169).
Instead, Le Guin urgently calls for stories that are ‘full of beginnings
without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations,
and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and
delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people
who don’t understand,’ and full, too, of ‘what people actually do and feel,
how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the
universe, this womb of things to be and things that were, this unending
story’ (170). Telling these stories is difficult, Le Guin insists. Over thirty years
later, we are still striving to heed her urgent call, and all the while too much of
energy research and policymaking remains on a steep descent, wed to the
killer story.
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 17

I have returned often to Le Guin’s words, pondering what a carrier bag

story of energy might entail, given that energy is right at the heart of her
musings. One thing I do know is that Big Oil and its weapons will not be the
protagonists. The importance of developing energy narratives and cultures
that are not premised upon the fossil myth of Man the Hunter points to the
need for the social studies and humanities scholars in the study of energy.
But as Benjamin Sovacool (2014) argues in a comprehensive review of the
literature, the social sciences – and I would add, especially the study of power
and domination – ‘remain underutilized, and perhaps underappreciated, in
contemporary energy studies research.’ It is not hard to see why. The study of
politics shows the unlikelihood of a business-led sustainable energy transi­
tion premised upon market logics. Radical political contestation that aims at
broader socio-ecological systems, including the gendered and racialized
politics of work and consumption, will be necessary if a transition is to
align with social and ecological justice.

Acknowledgments
This article benefited from the attentive feedback of the Political Economy Working
Group in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, which included:
Mauro Caraccioli, François Debrix, Deborah Milly, Scott Nelson, Desirée Poets,
Besnik Pula, Andy Scerri, and Edward Weisband. I would also like to thank the
anonymous reviewers and the Editor for their valuable suggestions on earlier drafts,
which helped refine the arguments presented here.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Cara Daggett http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7313-6660

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