Power Plants - by James Palmer (Hardcover)

About the Book

Power Plants exposes the underappreciated stakes of an expanding global bioenergy sector. As the pursuit of net zero climate targets comes to rely heavily on the industrial burning of crops and trees, this book argues that a closer attention to plants could yet foster energy futures concerned not with growth, but human satisfaction and wellbeing.

Book Synopsis

Power Plants offers an unflinching assessment of society's underappreciated but growing addiction to the industrial burning of crops and trees for energy. As vehicles increasingly run on fuels made from sugarcane and oil-palm, wood pellets replace coal, and scientists rush to engineer crops to produce renewable jet fuel, this book blows apart bioenergy's reputation as a simple, benign substitute for fossil fuels. Scrutinising modern bioenergy systems in the UK, Europe and United States, Power Plants shows how vegetal lifeforms are being enrolled to reinforce energy cultures centred around logics of efficiency, productivity and economic growth at all costs. Nonetheless, the book insists that a closer attention to plants could yet provoke a rethink of the social and economic purposes of all kinds of energy, with radical implications for ideas about growth, waste, prosperity and even pleasure.

From the Back Cover

Across the global energy sector, efforts to identify more sustainable, climate-friendly fuels are converging on plant photosynthesis--on bioenergy--as a large-scale alternative to coal, oil and gas. In Power Plants, James Palmer offers an unflinching critique of prevailing understandings of modern bioenergy as socially and ecologically progressive. Drawing on case studies from the UK, European Union and United States, Palmer contends that the growing use of plants as fuels constitutes as an explicitly political project--one in which plants are expected to naturalise human commitments to efficiency, productivity and perpetual economic expansion. But Power Plants also makes a more daring argument--plant life, however it is managed, will always inevitably exceed productivist logics. In listening more closely to plants, therefore, we might yet sow the seeds of quite different energy cultures--cultures less concerned with work and growth for their own sakes, than with alternative values of human satisfaction, wellbeing, and even pleasure.

About the Author

James Palmer is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Governance at the University of Bristol