This episode explores Cara Daggett's concept of petro-masculinity. It explains how fossil fuel-based power structures depend on a gendered and racial ordering of the world. How do the threats of climate crises feed into reactionary politics? Listen to hear why it is critical to consider democratic society in a global ecological context, one that integrates the natural and social aspects of climate and politics. Our guest: Cara Daggett
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GLOSSARY
Green New Deal (p. 6 in the transcript, 27:24)
The Green New Deal is a proposed framework of policies designed to combat climate change while simultaneously addressing economic inequality through large-scale public investment in clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, and job creation. The term draws inspiration from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which aimed to revive the U.S. economy during the Great Depression through government-led economic programs. The Green New Deal, however, focuses specifically on transitioning to a carbon-neutral economy while ensuring economic opportunities for all, particularly marginalized communities. The most well-known iteration of the Green New Deal in the U.S. was introduced as a non-binding congressional resolution in 2019 by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward J. Markey. It outlined broad goals such as achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by investing in renewable energy, modernizing transportation and infrastructure, and ensuring a just transition for workers in fossil fuel industries. It also emphasized social policies, including universal healthcare, affordable housing, and access to clean water and air. Supporters argue that the Green New Deal is essential for preventing catastrophic climate change and fostering economic justice, while critics claim it is financially impractical and would require massive government spending. Despite controversy, the Green New Deal has influenced climate policy discussions worldwide. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the fourth episode of Season 10 of Democracy in Question. I'm really pleased to welcome today, Cara Newt Daggett, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech and currently a Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability at the Helmholtz Center in Potsdam, Germany.
Her research addresses a timely topic, namely the politics of energy and the environment. It draws on a rich tradition of radical feminist and eco-feminist work to illuminate key contradictions at the heart of climate crises today. Her first book titled “The Birth of Energy, Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work”[i] received the Clay Morgan Award for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory. It traces the genealogy of our dominant conception of energy back to the 19th century and makes a strong argument for transforming the politics of work as a precondition for overcoming the historical impasse of the energy problem in the Anthropocene. She's also published widely on issues of energy justice, energy and domination and feminist energy systems.
Today we'll take our cue primarily from her important article on petro-masculinity[ii], as she calls it, which has now been expanded into a book published in both French and in German. In addition to her academic achievements, Cara has also been a core member of the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, together with her Virginia Tech colleagues, Shannon Bell and Christine Labuski.
The collective is a collaborative research project actively engaged with the broader public on matters of climate and energy politics from a feminist perspective, and we'll have occasion to talk about the collective as well. But first, I'll ask Cara to explain why it's imperative to embed our visions of democratic society today in a global ecological context, because she's long argued against the compartmentalization of the natural and the social of climate and politics, which have been treated, unfortunately, as distinct spheres.
This compartmentalization has weakened our ability to fight against the overlapping and mutually reinforcing attacks on democracy, on gender equity, and on the principles of climate justice and sustainability. I'll ask her for elaboration on her fascinating concept of petro-masculinity, which captures the contemporary convergence of resurgent authoritarianism with toxic misogyny and the destructive pursuit of fossil fuel-based activities.
I'll ask her to explain the significance of affective aspects of petro-culture, which has its own symbolic iconographies imbued with nostalgic fantasies for an older division of gender and racial hierarchies. I'll also invite Cara to comment on the formidable policy challenges ushered in by the new Trump administration in the U.S. and their wider ramifications. I look forward to discussing with her the tactical alliance between big oil, and big tech, that is between leaders of the political economy of petro-masculinity and what she refers to as the “eco-modernist paradigm” epitomized by people like Elon Musk. I hope that she'll also share with us her insights about fossil authoritarianism in other parts of the world as well.
And we'll conclude our conversation today with some reflections on the paradoxes of refusing the imperatives of climate and gender justice, and how alternative visions of energy justice offered by eco feminist perspectives might resolve this kind of impasse in the future. Cara, welcome to the podcast, and it's a real pleasure to have you as my guest. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Cara Daggett (CD): Thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to this conversation a lot.
SR: Let's start with the entanglement of the natural and the socio-political world in contemporary capitalism. Your first book traces the historical genealogy of the still dominant paradigm that shapes our conventional understanding of energy. A concept pregnant with the capitalist logic of endless accumulation, which also depended on the background conditions of imperial conquest, colonial extraction, and racial as well as gendered hierarchies which permeate modern societies. One of my previous guests here on the podcast, Nancy Fraser, with whose work I'm sure you're familiar, talked about her book that expands our understanding of global capitalism in a similar direction. And in that book, she called for an adequate trans-environmental eco-politics. So, let's begin with your own arguments on the need to relate the natural with the social world and why in your view must the fundamental concepts of a modern democratic imaginary be embedded in a planetary ecological context.
CD: Nancy Fraser's work has been inspirational for me and particularly her arguments about how the economy is not this separate free-floating place where the rules of the market appear as if by nature, thatthey're connected to the work of care, the work of the earth, and also the work of the state. And I would add in, a large part that has been imperial kinds of work, both within state boundaries and without. So, there's no better place to start than Fraser's conceptualization. For energy, when I started research, I started by asking, what is the history of this word, which I took to be a scientific word. And I expected like matter or force that it would have this ancient pedigree that I would go back to andwatch it change over all the canon of philosophy and science.
And I was really quite surprised, especially because I studied science as an undergraduateto find that the science of energy is a fossil fuel science. And by that, I mean, it came out of engineers trying to make coal-fired steam engines more efficient in the 19th century. It's a very new science.When I looked back at the science, it became clear to me that energy is a capacious, poetic, and even in science, very weird term. There's a lot about it that is metaphor, that is the name for the unknown.
For example, now, theoretical physicists talk about dark energy as all the things that need to be unknown and named in order for things to make sense in the cosmos. And I say that because when energy comes into politics and engineering, it sheds a lot of this complexity and poetics and metaphor. And instead, it becomes a very technical thing that is connected to work. And that's because when energy gets so-called “discovered”, it's discovered for the purposes of putting engines to work, putting people to work, putting empires to work. There's nothing in the physics of energy that says what is good use of energy, what is good energy, what is bad energy, what is waste.
Those things were all determined through the northern industrial imperial cultures in which energy and fossil fuel practices spread and that's important to recognize. Because I think the word energy has this scientific cachet where it's a very technical and technocratic field. And those values around what is productivity and what is value and what is work are often not asked in a moral register; they're assumed to be ratified by so-called nature. So I think this very history of energy helps to show how always the social and ecological are entangled.
SR: You've argued that our increasingly voracious appetite for fossil fuels should not be reduced, therefore, to a technical debate about energy consumption and its negative externalities. Instead, you've proposed a broader analytical framework that relates this historically very specific Western epistemology structured by particular forms of fuel-based production and expansion, as you just explained, to such phenomena as what you call petro-subjectivities and petro-power.
And in your more recent work, you've outlined a rather ambitious theory of what you call petro-masculinity. I'd like you to expand on this concept to explain how gender comes into this story. It seems to me this concept of yours is meant to capture what you call the toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny, and the way in which it underpins new forms of far-right authoritarianism in the U.S., but not only there. So, as a reactive, andindeed, one could say reactionary, conduit of identity formation, petro-masculinity in your account serves as a modality of what you call “violent compensation for the twin crises of traditional patriarchal masculinity and the climate crisis”. What exactly is the connection that you see between these two?
And let me quote here just one sentence from your path-breaking article on petro-masculinity: “If people cling so tenaciously to fossil fuels, even to the point of embarking upon authoritarianism, it's because fossil fuels also secure cultural meaning and political subjectivities.” So, could you talk about this psychological political approach to authoritarian resurgence that we are witnessing today and relate it to this gendered optic that you have chosen with which to understand our climate crises?
CD: The function and role of gender and race, of misogyny and racism was very evident in the historical research I did in the emergence of energy in the 19th century, both because of the need to extract labor and resources and to do so through justifications and narratives of why certain people's work was worth more, or why certain people could be managers of others. Or why empires had a right to produce or extract resources in other places that were not “able to do so productively”.
There was definitely energy sexism and energy racism happening in terms of whose energy is more valuable. And that's important to understanding the connection today. I wrote “Petro-masculinity” because I noticed in the first election of Trump, in2016that there was this blatant misogyny and racism and an embrace of fossil fuels and climate denial. And they were almost always discussed as separate things, which is a very liberal understanding that there's this thing called the economy where energy happens; and then there are these identity things that are sort of private personal matters. But of course, having done this history and been informed by people like Nancy Fraser, (and) other critical eco-feminists, I understand that those things go together. The development of a fossil fuel power, a petro-state relies upon gendered and racial orders of work and how the world is geographically ordered. And so, first of all, I wanted to write about petro-masculinity to say these things aren't coincidentally coming together. There's a reason that we see them converging as a pattern. And second, to point out thatso often when we analyze fascism, we can connect it to material interests Someone wants power. They are claiming power. This is a movement of strength. But I actually think a lot of these movements are a reaction coming from a sense of weakness or failure, from a sense of threat because these systems that we're living in are still very powerful, and yet they are breaking down and they are under threat.
They're under threat from social movements, decolonial movements, feminist movements. They're under threat, you could say, from ecological breakdown itself from the fact of climate crisis and from people demanding change and revolting. And so the reactionary politics is very much a doubling down, a refusal to acknowledge that those orders and those systems might have contributed to problems. And instead saying we double down on them, and we need violence now to enforce the borders of things that used to perhaps have more consent in addition to coercion but no longer really have as much social buy-in.
SR: So, the concept of petro-masculinity has a complex, multidimensional, referential field and it evokes a whole range of affective images, symbols. But if I may single out one of your most fascinating examples from the U.S., and there is this ostentatious reenactment that you point out of rolling coal. The modification of truck engines so that they would emit thick plumes of dark exhaust smoke. And I guess that choosing to drive large gas guzzling SUVs is part of this iconography. So is the gung-ho attitude towards drilling and fracking in the broader political economy, and I was quite struck by the fact that the slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill” even made its way into President Trump's inaugural address. And it's part of his strategic agenda. Could you run us through some other examples from your research and relate them to ultra conservative attempts to revive nostalgic ideals of gender and race hierarchies in American society and discuss the contradictions and tensions that these generate today when earlier forms of hegemonic masculinity try to reassert themselves even asand I put it in your words, “even as the fabled past of innocent fuel consumption is irretrievable”.
CD: The other examples that I could pointto are: during the first Trump administration Rick Perry, who was formerly the governor of Texas and became the Secretary of Energy, even though he had once said, when he ran for president, that he wanted to cut the Department of Energy. When Trump won, he then named Rick Perry the Secretary of Energy and he went around promoting fossil gas from the U.S. and when he was in Europe, he started calling it “freedom gas” and said, just as American soldiers liberated Europe from the Nazis, so too now the U.S. is exporting molecules of freedom. And I think there you can see very clearly a connection between the power of the nation, which is represented in this body of a soldier and in a military power with the molecules of fossil gas, which are carrying a certain kind of freedom. But it's a very specific kind of freedom, it's freedom as independence, and by that I mean a refusal of dependency, a refusal of the fact that life is interdependent, not only with other humans, all the people that we rely on to help make our lives possible from childhood to old age, but also all the different moments of our life when we are vulnerable and need help. But more deeply, we are interdependent with the earth. There is no human life without the ecologies in which we are living.
And so that call of freedom is to say, we will overcome dependency. Another example is that the current policy is called “energy domination”. All of the discussion of what is going to happen now with energy policy is just riven with these words of power, strength, and aggression. So over and over it's described as “unleashing” American energy as if there's this energy that's been contained. And I think that very much is that sense of the containment, the way certain kinds of white men who have been drawn to this message feel that feminist movements or so-called DEI movements, diversity, equity and inclusion movements, have asked white men to contain themselves. And now there is an unleashing of masculine and fossil fuel energy, for example, Mark Zuckerberg recently said that DEI had led to a lack of masculine power, or lack of masculinity, in the workplace and getting rid of that would help restore this kind of energy. I'm not sure he used the word energy, but there's very clear connections between those feelings when these men are talking about DEI and when they're talking about fossil fuels, this idea of “unleashing”.
And then also over the course of the last decade in the U.S., a lot of far-right marches on streets, for example, counter-protest to women's marches or Black Lives Matter marches, you will see people in women's marches and Black Lives Matter, mostly on foot on the street. Most of the far-right has been in trucks Orthe “freedom convoy” that happened in the U.S. and Canada, which was big semi-trucks, those big vehicles are very much symbolic of the movement. they're not just vehicles for getting from one place to the other. Their very size and the way they take up space on the street, the way they are used as deadly weapons at times are making a kind of statement about what power is being demanded.
Shalini: Drawing on the work of people such as Christian Parenti, you acknowledge that the inevitable sacrifices demanded by the climate justice movement today are met with resistance from the relatively privileged regions of the uneven global capitalist world system. Parts of the Global North respond to such demands with “climate fascism” and the “politics of the armed lifeboat”, to use two of the terms in the discussion, based on ever more radical forms of exclusion and segregation.
Regarding this authoritarian turn that you've spoken about, the writing was already on the wall seven or eight years ago, when you first coined the term petro-masculinity during the first Trump presidency. Now that Trumpism has returned with a vengeance with the new administration pulling out immediately out of the Paris Climate Accord and turning against green politics as well as the fundamental principles of gender justice, many corporations in the U.S. seem to be very quickly abandoning their environmental, social and governance principles, so called ESG principles, along with large financial institutions abandoning their climate pledges. And there is a call for universities and public administration to give up on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. What do you see as the main directions of further convergence between climate change denialism and toxic masculinity? What kind of repercussions do you think there will be internationally to this U.S. change in policy?
Cara: Those are big and good questions. I do think it's, it's not surprising to see corporations shift tactics. This historically has happened with fascist movements, there have been alliances with capitalist elites. And so that's really alarming to see that happening. At the same time, I'm not surprised because I think it's good to point out that these kinds of connections are historically long running. And the difference: this is drawing on the work of someone like Aime Césaire from the middle of the 20th century, who pointed out that fascism in Nazi Germany, was the boomerang of colonial violence, that doing all the colonial violence abroad had sickened the heart of Europe and that inevitably that kind of violence would return, or at some point be necessary; in the so-called core.
And so it's worth understanding that, those kinds of strategies and that kind of racism, misogyny, and even authoritarianism, those have happened in quieter ways in the U.S. for a long time. And the U.S. has been complicit, or directly involved, in doing those kinds of actions in other places. And so it's both recognizing that there is something new happening and it is frightening to see it intensify within the United States and also to see the historical continuity. What that historical continuity tells us, is that this is why it's important to always insist on the connections between the social and the ecological and the political. So we don't divide our resistance movements, so that we see that there should be solidarity between people who might be doing the work in feminist justice, anti-racist justice and climate justice.
These things can be very interconnected. So going forward, I will not be surprised to see a further intensification of petro-masculinity, one. Two, I feel a lot ofsolidarity with resistance movements that continue to be strong in the United States and elsewhere. And three, I guess another concern I have is that sometimes in reacting to fascist uprisings, particularly I'm talking about in the U.S., the leftist approach becomes more difficult. And so, some liberal approaches, many of which I might term eco-modernism, become the sort of main opponent to fascism. I think in some ways they both can share similar problems in terms of organizing work and how they separate humans from nature and wanting to smooth the way for ongoing extraction that ultimately cannot be just and sustainable. And so, my concern in the U.S. is to try to find, and more space for leftist ideas in our politics.
SR: I want to go back to one typological question before we get to political action. You've carefully distinguished between two hegemonic energetic masculinities, petro-masculinity,and the ostensibly progressive eco-modernism of the tech bros, who insist that the capitalist drive to endless unlimited growth does not necessarily conflict with the environment. They seem to cling with a stubborn optimism to the technological fix of alternative fuels and renewable energy sources, refusing to consider either the ethical or the physiological limits of even the most wasteful lifestyles among the privileged. Rather than a more equitable distribution of scarce resources, or a radical change in our patterns of consumption and production, these eco-modernists plead for just more of the same. And they would make us believe that technologically driven rationality, what Evgeny Morozov has termed solutionism, untouched by gender sensitive concerns can allow people to have their cake and eat it, too. So, could you elaborate in this context on your critique of the Green New Deal and the limitations of a green transition that is limited to liberal centrist visions of capitalism but doesn't really address any of the deeper fundamental structural questions?
CD: Here is where I find that Nancy Fraser's work is important because she frames what she calls in one essay the three hidden abodes. Marx had production as the hidden abode. He said, (with) all these things happening in the market, we forget the exploitation in the production of things. And Fraser has said, well, we forget, care (and)the way the state holds up capitalism and ecology.
There are many ideas about the Green New Deal and actually there are leftist visions for Green New Deal that don't necessarily come off as eco-modernist, so I don't want to say every Green New Deal is bad. But, for example, the way climate legislation worked in the United States, and the Infrastructure Act that we got under Biden, while it did make some really positive moves, you can look at each of those hidden abodes and say, what is it doing to address care and the extraction of reproductive work? What is it doing to address the way the state upholds capitalism, property. The whole point of this was U.S. superiority over China, this kind of national competition. And then what is it doing to change our relationship to the earth, to appreciate interdependency and doesn't assume that the earth is there as a resource for us to use and then dump into. I believe that on those three measures, it doesn't really do much at all. And in fact, there were some moves towards, especially the care piece in the original legislative proposal in the United States. There were more holistic ideas that climate legislation should address, healthcare, education should try to integrate more social justice issues. Very quickly that was divided into something called the “hard plan” and the “soft plan”. So right there you have the gendered language, and the soft plan was scuttled right away as just irrelevant to climate because it was about so-called social things. And the hard plan, which became the Infrastructure Act got bipartisan support. So again, you can see this pattern of how social and natural are decoupled in a lot of liberal politics as well, which then makes it impossible to address those things together. And then you end up with this continuation of the status quo, which is (that) we're going to keep growing and extracting, but we're now going to do it with solar and wind power.
SR: So, let's dig a little bit deeper into that. Big oil and big money or big tech may, in fact, then be complicit partners in crime here, despite superficial differences in their respective aesthetics or lifestyle choices. Like their petro-masculine counterparts in your account, these eco-modernists also tend to adopt what you call an extractive approach to the earth, one that seeks an unlimited amount of cheap fuel and, therefore, cannot deliver a truly sustainable, much less, a just transition.
Here you've explicitly singled out Elon Musk as the paradigmatic example of this kind of eco-modernist masculinity. So, what are the kinds of tactical alliances between petro-masculinity and eco-modernism that you see, both of whom seem to be extremely well represented among the new power elite at the top of the Trump administration? And do you see potential friction developing between these two camps?
CD: There will inevitably be friction if we're thinking about just the personalities of someone like Trump and Musk. I mean, they're very transactional. I think everyone expects a kind of soap opera. I don't mean to minimize the seriousness of their alliance, but there will be some entertainment value when inevitably these two megalomaniacs no longer find themselves able to share space, but the bigger and more structural question is that these are figures who represent much broader movements. One, the so called right or the tech bros and the authoritarian traditional, the “trad bros”. They have really important differences in how they understand the relationship of technology and masculinity.
In a lot of the fascist literature historically and today, there sometimes the nostalgia is actually very anti-modern, very anti-industrial, that industrial technology has emasculated men, that what we need is some kind of fictional neo-medieval, neo-Viking. It is imagined that there were ethnically pure white communities where men had weapons to secure their families and their communities. Other times the traditional right is the 1950s when we had the innocence of fossil fuel-burning and the idea of the breadwinner patriarch ruling over the housewife with all the consumer goods supplied by cheap oil. When you look at the tech- right, you have a very different philosophical lineage and some of my Russian colleagues have alerted me that Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, these figures in Silicon Valley are reading Russianphilosophy that goes back to the 19th century. And that is very much about a transhumanist urge to use modern technology to essentially achieve immortality and infinity to overcome the problem of energy is very central.
One of the subbranches of these movements has been called Extropianism, after this term “extropy”, which is supposed to be the opposite of entropy. And entropy is the scientific term for the fact that energy tends to dissipate. And it's another way of saying things fall apart and we die. I think these are really different visions about the way technology and masculinity works. But how do they relate to each other? One common thing they have, again, is this fear of dependency. The desire is to be dominant but to not have to be dependent. So gender orders and the racial orders that have existed in our societies have allowed for domination to happen, but have not removed this kind of underlying anxiety of any system of domination: which is that, even if you're dominating and relying on people to extract their labor, there's always at least a little bit of instability in that system and risk and threat of resistance, of it breaking down.And so, I think there's almost this extreme version in this tech-right world, which is that technology might actually allow us to not have to deal with the dependency problem of living on the earth with other people who we need.All that is to say is it's really complicated: in some ways they share a lot of desires and views about having a system of gender and racial hierarchy. But in other ways, the specific kinds of companies and technologies and policies that they might want to advance that view are not always going to be the same.
SR:Your work has been focused primarily on the North American, on the U.S. context, and obviously you are right to point out that a lot of these are entangled with neoconservative American, politics, in particular, but the rest of the world doesn't present a very rosy picture either. Even in a Scandinavian social democracy such as Norway, more than 160 new oil and gas field development licenses were approved in the last four years. So, I'd like to take you a little furtherafieldinto the rest of the world and ask about the configurations of petro-masculinity in other extractive economies governed by authoritarian regimes such as Russia or the Gulf states or Iran and how you think these differ from the U.S.
CD: You can definitely see this pattern persist. You mentioned Putin in Russia, where you have a really strong association between oil and gas and national power. And you also have vehement anti-feminist, but also anti-queer politics. One wonderful thing about being in Germany is, I've had the opportunity to work with Russian exiles here and Ukrainian refugees, who are now here. And they have told me that in Russia too, these things are not often put together, that the importance and insistence on petro-power, and then also this gender anxiety are not often interrogated together. What I'm finding more and more is that Russia and the U.S. are very much like twins throughout the 20th to 21st century. There's a lot of influence happening back and forth. Of course, they thought of themselves as enemies during the Cold War. At the same time, some of the propaganda, state propaganda and advertising around electricity and energy and oil in the middle of the 20th century in both places are strikingly similar: images of these strong men who are doing energy work for the good of the state. And then, like I mentioned too there's this back and forth right now between some of the philosophies of the tech-right in Russia and also in the U.S.
You see alliances with Hungary, with Milei in Argentina. It's also very anti-feminist misogynist kind of hyper neoliberal regime; Bolsonaro in Brazil. There's a lot of direct connections back and forth between the far right. But there are specificities to the histories of every place, and the same thing goes with energy, so I think you can find a fairly consistent kind of climate denial in right-wing movements and governments, but that will look different depending on that place's history with oil and gas. So, the petro-states, of course, are going to be more likely to have historically associated oil and gas with national power. But in other places, it might look like extraction of other kinds of things, or an insistence on growth. And an anti-environmentalism, anti-globalism, emphasis on nationalism, on the importance of national power against the world. So, I think that's the key difference is that the energy component, what is always there is the demand for ever-expanding energy. Whether or not fossil fuels historically have been so strongly and symbolically connected to national power, that is what varies the most probably.
SR: Your historical analysis interests me greatly. But I want to focus now towards the end of our conversation, Cara, on thispoint of climate denial and refusal to acknowledge it that you've just mentioned. There seems to be a paradox at the heart of fossil authoritarianism and its conspicuous pollution insofar as its supporters seem to find a perverse pleasure in openly embracing and enacting practices clearly recognized as ecologically destructive. And I quote you here, you say, “an attachment to the righteousness of fossil fuel lifestyles and to all the hierarchies that depend upon fossil fuel produces a desire to not just deny, but to refuse climate change. Refusing climate change is a distinct form from ignoring climate change. Refusal is active, angry, it demands struggle”.
Could you explain this refusal cum denial, or versus denial distinction, and say something about why you think there is this affect associated with it. Is it because if one were to recognize the extent of radical changes which an acknowledgement of climate crises would need, and climate justice would definitely need, do you think the sacrifices that people would have to make, the changes they would have to make in their own lives, but also in larger societal patterns, are such that are just too alarming?
CD: Yes.What I find ironic is that in some ways, this climate defiance of the far-right is less of a denial than what I see sometimes in centrist liberalism. And by that, I mean, there is an emotional recognition that the climate crisis demands an existential reflection and transformation. And yes, that is often understood in the language of sacrifice, like this is demanding that I give up my hamburgers, and I give up my truck. In part that is an unfortunate predicament that environmentalists have been backed into that corner of being the ones who are asking for sacrifice, because I don't think that's necessarily how we should look at that. And because I think it's only sacrifice if we stay in in our current systems where people's only pleasure at working and laboring is the pleasure of consuming.
Those things are very connected. So, I think a transformation of labor, a transformation of our relations to each other, a transformation of value, there are so many things to be gained from system transformation. But back to this question of denial and defiance. This is why I think there's a recognition that the climate crisis demands transformation, and that transformation will not just be a technical little adjustment at the edges. It does actually demand looking at all of these systems of extraction and exploitation. And so, it is especially threatening to some people who perhaps have benefited more from it, but it's also frightening even if you haven't. Even if you're not one of the elites, you're in a system where you don't have a safety net, you're really struggling, you're working really hard, it's hard to pay your bills, everything is, feels expensive. If the message is either you get to keep having cheap things or, there's nothing else on offer except stop doing that, that might indeed feel difficult and make you vulnerable.
I think taking pleasure in the violence is another thing altogether. And that again has to do with the failure of a liberal politics of climate. A lot of how the system has worked, especially in the U.S., or in the global North has been hypocrisy, has been making these things invisible, having stories that tell us that these things are about freedom. And if some bad things are happening, it's because they just haven't been developed yet. And eventually they too will be extended, this lifestyle that we enjoy here.That language is actually very hypocritical because it has failed to acknowledge all the violence that has happened to make this way of life possible.
And so I think a lot of the joy in the violence comes from a sense of shame and having that hypocrisy be no longer supportable. It's harder and harder to ignore and not see what's happening. And the shame that might come out of that, then feels good if you instead are offered shamelessness. How about you just say, yeah, okay, these things are violent. And so what?I embrace that. And so, the problem to me, is also that the only other thing on offer is also missing affectively and emotionally. It really doesn't offer much as an alternative.
SR: So, let's turn to the alternatives in our last question, you've been part of a collaborative research project, the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, which has set itself the ambitious goal of elaborating alternative epistemologies and also practices that would foster feminist energy systems. And as you formulated this agenda, feminist energy systems need to be articulated along four major dimensions, namely the political, the economic, the technological, and the socio ecological. Could you talk about the shared vision and talk a little bit about the collective? How does it differ from earlier eco-feminist initiatives? Who are the people whom it addresses itself to? What kind of reception have these views had?
CR: The collective is so far myself and my two co-authors and friends and colleagues Shannon Bell and Christine Labuski. We all had separately done work on extractive cultures and gender. So, we had seen these problems and in conversation we thought, what would a feminist energy system look like? Who are we addressing? And I think at first and right now, we decided to address the field of energy studies as small as that is. And people in energy studies, who are interested in justice and in gender. And our experience had been that there have been some moves to consider, and appreciate, social justice in energy transition including gender and racial justice. But that often those had been interpreted in the case of gender in a liberal feminist way. So, it is very much about representation and very much about a fair distribution of harms and benefits from energy. Are there women who are part of energy work who are making energy decisions? Are women fairly provided with energy or unfairly suffering from extraction sites? These are crucial and important problems.
However, they miss these deeper structural insights that we've been talking about today that feminism offers. Feminism, we argue, is a lens for understanding how power works. It's not the only one. I think it's in solidarity with all these other interlocking oppressions and scholars who are studying those as well. And so that's why we came up with, like you said, these four coordinates. To have a feminist energy system is not just to say women are sitting at the table. It's to say how do we address care work? How do we address dependency? How do weaddress ourselves politically to each other? And so a lot of the task, the relationship to ecofeminism, which you asked about, was one of curation and collecting together. The wisdom that already exists in critical energy work, in eco-feminist work, in energy justice work, and to put it together and draw attention to those voices.
Because our experience sometimes when we've been able to speak with engineers or policymakers is that we're asked to come up with something new, like, well, what's the new idea? And we've started to answer, we don't need new ideas. There are really great ideas that already exist. There are people trying them. We need to understand how do they get the resources to do them? How do we stop them from being blocked or attacked? How do we even make it possible that they can be heard? How do we make energy into a thing that communities plan and that communities democratically manage and own rather than a commodity that is supposed to make profit for investors because most renewable energy now is privately owned and financed, which is also a related problem.
So that's where we are so far. And I think that group forming was also just an act of feminist solidarity. For me it was really important because I was harassed by the right after writing about petro-masculinity and I felt very alone. That was a bruising experience that many people have been facing of late. And so it was to write together in a voice with others. To feel more of a connection, and that's been important to my work, too.
SR: Thank you so much, Cara, for this fascinating conversation. It's been a really wide- ranging one starting with the history of energy to current petro-masculinity and U.S. politics. and ending up not only with alternative visions, but thinking about the dystopias, which some of the leading characters in the story have also been part of propagating. So thank you very, very much for this great interview and look forward to continuing this privately.
CD: My pleasure. Thank you so much.
SR: Cara began by tracing for us the historical genealogy of our modern concept of energy. She compellingly showed its emergence in the context of imperial and industrial capitalism and its close links to racial and gender hierarchies.
From the very beginning, this approach led her to focus her own research on the nexus between misogyny and racism on the one hand, and climate change denial together with the continued use of fossil fuels on the other. This nexus has been the hallmark of the first Trump administration. It will no doubt also play an even bigger role in the second one.
Echoing Nancy Fraser on this podcast last year, Cara insisted on the inseparability of questions of identity and the economy, a point that should help us transcend the false dichotomy between these two realms. Unfortunately, many liberals also fall into the trap of opposing these two spheres when defending liberal democracy today.
Cara Daggett's concept of petro-masculinity grasps precisely the dependence of fossil fuel-based power structures on the gendered and racial ordering of our world. Moreover, it explains the social psychological mechanisms whereby the threats of climate crises feed into a reactionary politics, a politics that refuses to accept its societal effects worldwide by reaffirming our environmentally catastrophic socioeconomic order as both natural and just.
For example, for the American far right, fossil fuels are turned into a symbol of freedom and of independence that evokes raw power and masculine strength freed from the constraints of an oppressive regime of progressive rights of equity and inclusion. Petro masculinity, as she points out, is thus very much on an ascendant trajectory in the United States of America under the Trump administration, though of course it has also varieties elsewhere, such as in Russia or in Saudi Arabia. Cara noted that the liberal response to the climate crisis is often inadequate as it too takes for granted the artificial separation of the natural and the socioeconomic. Such a separation undergirds even well-meaning policies that thus limit themselves to mere technical fixes.
This is what she calls an eco modernist paradigm, a paradigm that in her view is equally tainted by a masculinist mode of thinking about the world. Cara reminds us that the likes of Elon Musk represent an even more extreme and aggressive form of eco-modernism that fully embraces a toxic masculinity.
Neither techno fetishists nor eco-modernist pseudo solutions will be able to counter climate change, denial and defiance. Cara argued that any real solution will need sacrifices, sacrifices that far too few people are willing to make when it comes to the deeply ingrained patterns of consumption and lifestyle choices.
It is for this reason that she believes that a more radical transformation of work value and interpersonal relations is necessary, one that goes beyond merely technical adjustments to critically rethink the tacitly accepted logics of exploitation and expropriation. This entails questioning the invisible and violent foundations of capitalist opulence, which seduces ordinary people to, with its promise of illusory freedom.
The feminist approach to energy systems that Cara and her collaborators thus advocate addresses how energy, including even renewable energy, could be seen not as a profitable commodity, but as something that communities could own, plan for and democratically manage.
This was the fourth episode of Season 10. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks’ time when my guest will be Soli Özel, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Istanbul Kadir Has University. I’ll be discussing with him the fate of democratic politics in Turkey, where there are currently mass protests against the jailing of the mayor of Istanbul, who is he mail opponent of the President Erdogan.
Please go back and listen to any episode that you might have missed. And of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you’ve enjoyed it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www. graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
[i] Daggett, C. (2019). The birth of energy: Fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work. Duke University Press.
[ii] Daggett, C. (2018). Petro-masculinity: Fossil fuels and authoritarian desire. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47(1), 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817