IT'S STILL EMPIRICALLY EMPTY WORDNOISE.

Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you "Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire."  Here's the abstract.

As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny. Rather than consider these resentments separately, this article interrogates their relationship through the concept of petro-masculinity, which appreciates the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity is helpful to understanding how the anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene can augment desires for authoritarianism. The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit; fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics. Moreover, through a psycho-political reading of authoritarianism, I show how fossil fuel use can function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble.

Apparently if you know how to do various kinds of "readings" of a situation, you can produce a Minimal Publishable Unit without doing any analysis.  I think Jeff Davidson diagnosed the type.  "These self-loathing liberals, nonetheless, feel morally superior to everybody else. As such, they display an odd psychosocial characteristic which social scientists will be examining for decades to come: How individuals, programmed en masse to loathe themselves, despoil every facet of our western culture which they don't meet their highly subjective standards."

Think that's harsh?  Let's dip into the article.

A nascent fossil fascism is already evident in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and the conservative capture of the US Congress. In a short time, the Trump Administration and the Republican Party have shored up fossil fuel systems by denying climate change and dismantling a host of environmental policies including: withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, installing a climate denier (Scott Pruitt) to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, taking steps to kill the Clean Power Plan, weakening the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, lifting a moratorium on new coal leases on federal land, ending a study on the health effects of mountaintop coal removal, and moving to open nearly all US coastal waters to offshore drilling for oil.

There are numerous opportunities to evaluate the possible gains and losses from any of those policy moves, and, no doubt, there are researchers either in policy shops or working in the university, contemplating the gains and losses of each of those actions, as well as the possible consequences of their subsequent reversal.  That sort of serious work doesn't lend itself to the polemical, does it?

Climate denial obviously serves fossil-fuelled capitalist interests. However, coal and oil do more than ensure profit and fuel consumption-heavy lifestyles. If people cling so tenaciously to fossil fuels, even to the point of embarking upon authoritarianism, it is because fossil fuels also secure cultural meaning and political subjectivities. Since the new imperialism of the 19th century, fossil fuels have become the metaphorical, material, and sociotechnical basis of Western petrocultures that extend across the planet.⁷ In other words, fossil fuels matter to new authoritarian movements in the West because of profits and consumer lifestyles, but also because privileged subjectivities are oil-soaked and coal-dusted. It is no coincidence that white, conservative American men – regardless of class – appear to be among the most vociferous climate deniers, as well as leading fossil fuel proponents in the West.⁸

Apparently it isn't required to consider the possibility that people perceived some benefit in using Otto-cycle engines and other technical breakthroughs rather than what came before?  There are limits to making an argument from preference, but mightn't there be a simpler explanation for the emergence of a fossil-fueled economy than "privileged subjectivities?"

Buckle up, it gets better (and funnier).

This article undertakes a feminist reading of climate denial and fossil fuel boosterism in new authoritarian movements in the West in order to interrogate the entanglement of masculinity and fossil fuels. Through the concept of petro-masculinity, I emphasise the relationship – both technically and affectively, ideationally and materially – between fossil fuels and white patriarchal orders. While misogyny and climate denial are often treated as separate dimensions of new authoritarian movements, a focus on petro-masculinity shows them to be mutually constituted, with gender anxiety slithering alongside climate anxiety, and misogynist violence sometimes exploding as fossil violence.⁹

Despite a growing interest in gendered analyses of climate change,¹⁰ the intersection of gender and energy remains understudied, with most research located in the development field, where the focus is on equal access to fuel.¹¹ Meanwhile, research into masculinity and energy, as well as environmentalism, is even more limited.¹² Nevertheless, masculine identity, and the patriarchal orders that it supports, is important for understanding (the lack of) political responses to climate change, especially in the global North. Sherilyn MacGregor, for example, argues that environmentalism itself has become masculinised as a result of the dominance of science and security frames for understanding climate change. These ‘hardened’ framings result in a preference for ‘the kinds of solutions that are the traditional domain of men and hegemonic masculinity’, which lead to a ‘downgrading of ethical concerns’ like justice, health, or economic equity.¹³

Apparently, before we get to the petro-political reading, we get the feminist reading.  Nowhere in those paragraphs do I find cause to reconsider my "Do I have any reason to modify my characterization of "theory" as the humanities types use the expression as empirically empty?"  Dear reader, in that passage comes a shining example of why I find contemporary academic use of "interrogate" so silly.  Nowhere in that word-noise is there any introduction of evidence.  You want real interrogation?  It runs like this:  "Mr Smollett, can you tell us why you bought that five dollar footlong just before midnight?"  Or:  "Mr Oswald, these are your fingerprints on that rifle."

And what, pray tell, does "the intersection of gender and energy remain understudied" mean?

Of late, though, the nation's sissy classes have positively been wetting themselves over "toxic car culture."  Common Dreams contributor Stan Cox, in escalating the wetting, gets off what might qualify as a Friday short take.  "White nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone."  The photograph and some of the autobiographical observations in the columns will confirm what many already suspect of Common Dreams types.  As does the sneering.

There's already plenty of theorizing, Cara Daggett. There's also plenty of evidence that might be to the contrary.

You'd think, after fifty years of doomsday predictions, the true believers would be more modest about tying the End of Life As We Know It to any human action, particularly human action involving motor vehicles.  You'd hope, dear reader, that the true believers would understand that political action to destroy domestic fossil fuel production, simply because it's possible, might make the choice of bigger trucks more political, even if George Carlin and South Park tagged the smug long before Mr Cox bought his hybrid Civic and vehicle registrations began to correlate more closely with party registrations: and the hybrids and straight electrics became symbols of metrofexual weeniedom.

Perhaps we'd take the doomsday environmentalists more seriously if we had serious evidence that fossil fuel depletion was a thing.  Then the incentives would be there to purchase smaller trucks.  But the deprivation is deliberate, and the backstop technologies are not yet available.

Perhaps this Cara Daggett could offer some evidence that would persuade me to rethink my stance.  Oh, wait, equal or unequal access to fuel (and petrochemicals) is the sort of mundane thing best left to development economists.  It only gets better from there, are we supposed to trust the science, or is there too much phallogocentrism in the Western scientific method?

What, exactly is the research question?

Appreciating the historic relationship between fossil fuels and white patriarchal rule is helpful in terms of understanding the authoritarian desires and anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene. A feminist reading of fossil fuel systems points to the emergence of another dangerous ‘catastrophic convergence’, to adopt Parenti’s phrase: in this instance, the convergence is between climate change, a threatened fossil fuel system, and an increasingly fragile Western hypermasculinity. For Parenti, convergence does not ‘merely mean that several disasters happen simultaneously, one problem atop another’, but ‘that problems compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through another’.¹⁴ Analysing petro-masculinity alerts us to those perilous moments when challenges to fossil-fuelled systems, and more broadly to fossil-soaked lifestyles, become interpreted as challenges to white patriarchal rule.

There used to be this convention in scholarly papers of something grandiloquently called the "literature review" that serves the useful function of structuring an argument.  So-and-so argues this, and I have evidence that calls that into question.  But I'm not corroborating this other scholar, who called it into question in a different way.  There's none of that in this so-called analysis of petro-masculinity, let alone any even a taxonomy, let alone some cross-tabs or an equation, identifying precisely when conservation of nonrenewable resources provokes resource wars, or obnoxious pickup trucks.

It's not that there aren't testable implications in "Petro-Masculinity."  It's just that they're never tested.

Fossil fuels built the modern world. There remains an appreciation for fossil fuels – or, at least, for the high energy consumption they provided – as a catalyst of mass liberal democracy. This is evident in ecomodernist calls for a good Anthropocene that would decouple the benefits of fossil fuels from the fuels themselves.¹⁷ After all, while industrialisation wreaks planetary destruction, its spread was coterminous with humanist victories like the abolition of slavery, increased literacy rates, gender equality and poverty reduction. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that this cannot be a coincidence, and that ‘the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive’.¹⁸

However, in addition to the ecological harms caused by oil and coal, fossil fuels have also done serious political harm. Timothy Mitchell argues that fossil fuels have had contradictory effects in terms of assembling democracy.¹⁹ On the one hand, due to coal’s material traits, its extraction and supply were vulnerable to choke points that could be exploited by a growing labour resistance in the 19th century. In contrast, oil systems were less vulnerable to democratic hijacking. The global oil systems of the 20th century required a host of illiberal and violent measures on the part of Western states and oil companies in order to ensure oil scarcity and, in turn, a profit. In the case of oil, the West touted a democratic creed while simultaneously benefiting from and supporting authoritarian regimes and extremist movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Likewise, fossil fuel and mineral extraction were secured, both within the US and abroad, by racist regimes of differential pay and access to benefits that were aggressively anti-democratic on the part of corporations and the states that supported them.²⁰

Carbon democracy thus arose in tandem with, and reliant upon, authoritarianism. Put more strongly, authoritarian politics have historically been part and parcel of the project of securing Western (fossil) rule. By fossil rule, I mean a logic of governing that is dependent upon intensive fossil fuel consumption in both material and, as I will explore below, psycho-political ways. Fossil rule is mobilised through ‘fossil capital’, Andreas Malm’s term to describe how modern capitalism was erected around a belief in ‘self-sustaining growth … welded to the combustion of fossil fuels’.²¹ Fossil capital requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of other people and things, and this necessitates authoritarian tactics in certain sites and moments, a phenomenon that has been exhaustively catalogued by postcolonial theorists and thinkers in the global South.²²

As a result, authoritarianism, rather than a perversion of modernity, or a lurking risk of mass industrial society to be avoided, appears instead as the very marrow of a contemporary life predicated upon burning fossil fuels. We cannot take comfort that, over time, creativity will shed its destructive possibilities.²³ The novelty and freedoms enabled by fossil-fuelled civilisation are entangled with horrific violence, such that to embark upon fossil-fuelled life is to spark off mass species extinction just as much as it is to make possible the internet or global social movements.

Carbon democracy strives to conceal this underbelly of mass destruction from privileged publics, whether in subterranean pipelines, in zoning plans that place heavy industry alongside poor communities and people of colour, and in the very notion of throwing things away. Similarly, the authoritarian practices required by fossil capital in the global South were often geographically separated from liberal forms of governance in the West. This made it possible for many Westerners to remain ignorant of their complicity in fossil authoritarianism, and to continue to believe that fossil fuels and liberal democracy are natural and inevitable partners. The narrative of righteous fossil democracy is crucial not only to American identity writ large, but to its hegemonic white masculinities. However, as Aimé Césaire pointed out more than 60 years ago, the violence that Anglo-Europeans have practiced abroad returns with ‘a terrific boomerang effect’, and that despite efforts to turn a blind eye or justify the violence, ‘colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism’.²⁴

There are lots of possible hypotheses to test, and I can suggest shelves of books written on some of them. But this extended literature review masquerading as a minimal publishable unit does none of that. Better, it is, to slag on the Normals. "White power pledges, breakfast cereals and masturbation may at first appear as adolescent pranks, but in the context of Trump’s America, they are all too serious."  The only thing that's missing from this essay is the autobiographical reflection, maybe something about having been blown off by the Leader of the Pack in high school.

It is probably a good thing I am retired, as the opportunity to serve as dean's delegate at a dissertation defense that does one of these readings would cause casualties.  Either I would die laughing or the dissertation committee would wish harm on me.  There is one bit of good news.  "This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors."