Daggett conducts a genealogy of energy in order to gain a new line of attack on the problem of energy transition that doesn’t fall into the contemporary trap of choosing between a future of ascetic sustainability or fossil-fueled growth that leads to cataclysm. She attempts to achieve this by decoupling energy from work. In her words, “Without challenging dominant practices of work and leisure, and the high valuation of waged, productive work in a neoliberal economy, it will remain difficult to dislodge fossil fuel cultures” (2019, 11).
The first half of Daggett’s book looks at the early history of energy science and the development of the first two “laws” of thermodynamics (largely through the study of steam engines), arguing that both the rationalizations of and the motivations for developing these laws can't be adequately explained without considering 1) the influence of Protestant ethics and worldview on scientific thought and 2) the social and political pressures of capitalist industrialization. Once developed, this new thermodynamic understanding of energy set the conditions of possibility for a new geo-theology of energy and a new work-waste mode of energopolitics.
In the second half of the book, Daggett focuses on the latter energopolitical turn, showing how these new ways of conceiving and using energy were taken up and applied as new metaphors and logics for understanding and governing society (primarily centered around maximizing efficiency and profit), arguing that these metaphors and logics enabled the powerful to naturalize and rationalize the various forms of racial, gender, and class oppression that persist to this day.
In her conclusion, Daggett employs a feminist conception of post-work politics to point towards a feminist conception of energy politics, where energy is conceived of as a means of reproducing human and nonhuman life rather than a means for producing commodities and profit.
