Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes

Description

Jeff Diamanti describes the destructive relationship between climate and capital through the exponential growth of the petroleum industry over the last 40 years. Building on key insights in the environmental and energy humanities, Diamanti introduces the concept of the 'terminal landscape' as a site of storage, transformation and transition, essential to critical ecology in the 21st century.Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum presents these scenes of transformation as sites through which post-industrial capitalism distributes fossil fuels into the world. Diamanti uses this concept to redefine the post-industrial landscape by revealing the global flows of exchange and storage that precede the distribution of fossil fuels into the world as social form. Advancing a new media theory of energy, fossil fuels and other finite resources become new types of distributable media. Through this line of thinking, the book makes solid connections between media technologies and energy cultures that help to shape a radical critique of the current energy infrastructure that characterises global capitalism. Arguing that this infrastructure rests on millennia of compact matter, centuries of colonial violence, and decades of technological development, Diamanti's analysis deepens our understanding of the environment as a 'terminal landscape' through case studies of oil companies, countries, artworks, and historical events. Using his under-examined typology of global energy further theorises and politicises the climate crisis for scholars and activists alike. Cover page Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Third-party Material Introduction: To the Terminal! Reading across climate and capital Part One From Coal Capital to Petroculture 1 Our Future is Still the Future of 1973: Shell’s Foresight and the Petrocultural Penumbra Energy futures in the present tense “Shooting the rapids” and the metaphor of oil Energy and climate 2 The Cultural Work of Architecture: Fixed and Social Capital at Fiat Fordism and Futurism, or, “architecture or revolution” Social capital and its organic composition 3 Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy Energyscapes and the infrastructures of accumulation Postindustrial landscapes Landscape infrastructures Philosophy and the problem of energy Part Two From the Postindustrial Environment to the Concerns of Climate 4 Elemental Ethnography Between Hydrocarbons and Hydrology: Thinking with Greenland’s Moraine Centering the end(s) of the earth Thinking with the moraine The cost of current 5 Contrapuntal Ice Sila Mixed signals The Dead Glacier Qivittoq: mediating contrapuntal ecology The ends of the terminal: enjambment as reciprocity 6 Heliotropism at the Terminal Beach of Critique Leviathan ’s mood Adorno’s tan lines and the scene of modern boredom Sunburn The weather as social form Conclusion: “Hail Horrors” Notes References Index Plates