Situated among small Caribbean states existentially vulnerable to increasing CO2 emissions, Trinidad and Tobago emerges as a paradox: an island nation allied with other low‐lying countries pushing for global action on climate change while simultaneously the fourth highest per‐capita emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. As a mature petro‐state, Trinidad and Tobago has one of the highest per capita GDPs among Caribbean and Latin American nations while offering a situated landscape to examine the normalization of oil production contrasted against environmental uncertainty. How does a country resolve the contradiction between hydrocarbon exploration and spearheading climate change vulnerability negotiations?
Here, the reader finds the importance of David McDermott Hughes's Energy without Conscience. Through a concise narrative, Hughes focuses on the larger of the two islands, Trinidad, where he traces its history from renewable‐energy abandonment to the present miniscule faction of environmental activists opposing the petro‐economy. Through detailed archival research as well as interviews with policymakers, energy experts, and antiindustrial activists, Hughes moves the reader between Trinidadian epochs while carefully explaining the energy systems used and the opportunities that could have avoided its current petro‐state status. In this way, he ascribes blame for climate change to those who participate in the carbon economy; even his research informants do not escape the condemnation: “Complicity, in a word, is the chief concern of this book” (4). This “chief concern” drives the remainder of the plot, where Hughes explores how guilt and complicity have been disconnected as the island has sought to become an economic powerhouse.
Part 1 of Energy without Conscience studies how Trinidad's primary energy source started as bonded human strength, then slowly transformed into hydrocarbons. The author foregrounds the individuals who unsuccessfully tried to transition the island towards more sustainable infrastructures. Through attempts at economic stability, island administrators created a popular imagination of slaves as faceless fuel for the plantation culture. Hughes asserts that slavery nearly became an “energy without conscience” (40), yet the regularity of manumission and the imposition of antislavery regulations from British colonial powers choked this reality before it could establish.
Chapter 2 situates the emergence of the first Trinidadian “energy crises” through the postslavery collapse of the British sugar trade and the obligation of wage labor. European socialites attempted energy fixes through fantastical mid‐nineteenth century solar‐powered robots and disastrous settlement regimes only to discover that the convenient replacement for the loss of somatic energy was the hydrocarbons that bubbled into the pitch lake on the island. Oil then becomes a transition “from one form of morality to another. Or, rather, the amorality of oil replaced energy systems saturated with religious and ethical meaning” (59).
The history of mid‐nineteenth century Trinidadian petro‐state formation dominates part 2 of the book, as key Trini citizens pushed for indigenous oil exploration and export through hyperbolical oil‐ and gas‐reserve reports. The geologic descriptions hypnotized policymakers who encouraged production and refinement in the early twentieth century. But how did the experts arrive at their reserve estimates? Hughes patiently walks the reader through the way geologists render the subsurface visible and details how these petroleum reserve estimates are created. During a 2008 policy meeting, prominent Trinidadian officials continued to rely on these estimates as a demonstration of the enduring reserves in progressively deep waters off the coast, while journalists read between the lines of the reports and announced the crumbling end of the petro‐state.
The political and cultural momentum found in petro‐normativity is described through three island projects: a proposed aluminum smelter, a commuter rail line, and a power plant. This “petro‐pastoral” (97) lens values preservation of petroleum‐based landmarks, such as the environmental protection of the large pitch lake on island. There is even some petro‐nostalgia as residents longed for the old flame of the oil refinery now replaced by stacks of a natural‐gas export facility.
Despite this petro‐pastoralism, Trinidad and Tobago has positioned itself in global negotiations as a victim through its leadership in island consortiums combating climate change. Perhaps the most valuable book section, chapter 5 explains how Trinidad meticulously drove the global discourse on climate change impacts to small island states without admitting complicity. Indeed, what the author most sought during his fieldwork was a carbon conscience that, as evidenced in the rest of the book, has never existed on the island and is only starting to emerge through the actions of the few “climate intelligentsia” (120).
Energy without Conscience is a thoughtful take on how climate change complicity can exist without a countrywide collective conscience of wrongdoing, and this is where the story excels. Many of Hughes's arguments are clever, tight, and theoretically well connected to work by Bill McKibben, James Scott, Tania Li, Michael Watts, and others. Strong as it is, there are still moments of weakness. Hughes portrays oil and gas companies—and the individuals that work for them—as monolithic and insensitive. However, the reader would benefit from seeing these classes of individuals and corporations untangled. Also, several of Hughes's broad secondary claims felt unfulfilled, such as his assertion that a “century and a half of petroleum production and consumption have imprinted the arts and literature relatively little” (5). While I agree insofar that there has been insufficient academic literature on the subject, popular culture has always been quick to engage as many of his nonacademic citations demonstrate.
These complaints though are relatively minor compared to book's main contribution, clarifying how petroleum production and consumption are normalized at nation‐state scales. Energy without Conscience can easily serve in an undergraduate class on political ecology, or it can be paired with Fernando Coronil's Magical State (1997) in a graduate seminar as a way to compare and contrast Trinidad and Tobago's petro‐state with Venezuela's. In sum, Hughes offers a persuasive account of how self‐recognition of climate change complicity is critical to understanding global policy initiatives at curtailing greenhouse gas emissions.