Over the past 250 years, energy transitions have occurred repeatedly—the rise of coal in the nineteenth century, the explosion of oil in the twentieth century, the nuclear utopianism of the 1950s and 1960s. These transitions have been as revolutionary as any political or economic upheaval, and they required changes in infrastructure and behavior. Yet new energies never wholly replace old ones. This volume historicizes energy production and consumption while demonstrating how energy use has reshaped everything from social life and economic organization to political governance. It foregrounds the importance of energy for big historical questions about capitalism, democracy, inequality, the environment, and identity, and it argues that energy systems themselves merit attention as key agents of historical change. Given the urgency of climate change, and the central position that energy plays in causing and potentially solving global warming, this volume engages history as a discipline in the debate over what may be most monumental energy transition of all time: the shift away from fossil fuels.
Author(s): Stephen Gross, Andrew Needham
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 338
City: Pittsburgh
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a New Energy History | Stephen G. Gross and Andrew Needham
Part I. The Rise of Oil and the Transformation of Coal: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention
1. The Oil from Our Soil: French Alcohol Fuel versus Foreign Oil, 1918–1957 | Joseph Bohling
2. The Politics of Creative Destruction: West German Hard Coal and the Postwar Oil Transition | Stephen G. Gross
3. Accounting the Dead: The Moral Economy of the Coal-Fired Social Contract | Trish Kahle
4. Hard Hat Cowboys: Energy Workers and Coalfield Capitalism in the Anthropocene | Ryan Driskell Tate
Part II. Oil Transition in Crisis: The 1970s
5. American Politics and Energy Transitions in the 1970s | Victor McFarland
6. The Decade of the “Energy Transition”: A Critical Review of the Global Energy Debates of the 1970s | Duccio Basosi
7. Reversing the Transition from Coal to Oil?: The International Energy Agency and the Western Industrialized Countries’ Restructuring of Energy Supply in the 1970s | Henning Türk
8. From State to Market: A Transition in the Economics of Energy Resource Conservation | Thomas Turnbull
Part III. A Stalled Transition? Nuclear Energy’s Dilemmas and Possibilities
9. Nuclear Energy and the Dream of Independence: The Case of Eastern Europe | Sonja D. Schmid
10. Contamination without Representation: Fetal Citizenship and Atomic Power in the Postwar United States | Natasha Zaretsky
11. The Rise of Counterexpertise and the Anti–Nuclear Power Movement in West Germany | Dolores L. Augustine
Part IV. The Transition off Fossil Fuels: Challenges and Possibilities
12. A Future Foreseen and Transition Delayed: Big Oil and Global Warming, 1959–1986 | Benjamin Franta
13. Renewable Energies in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1970s–1990s: Discourses, Contexts, and Policies | Eva Oberloskamp
Notes
Contributors
Index
