Evidence of sociocultural influences on Thermodynamics:
"As Andreas Malm argues, steam engines were not necessarily adopted because they were cheaper or provided superior power, especially given the advantages of water power in the early nineteenth century. Instead, as chapter 1 detailed, steam power was attractive because it better accorded with the needs of industrial capitalists in making a profit while simultaneously dodging the rising demands of laborers." Pg 35
"The two concerns—waste and the dissipation of energy into unusable forms—resonated not only with the capitalist drive for profit, but also with long-standing theological obsessions in Protestantism with sin and sloth." Pg 36
"We should pause here to marvel once again at the underlying irony: energy, which would come to serve as a unit of labor accounting and fuel supply, traceable and governable down to the nth degree as a sign for quantifiable, brute matter, is at its heart theoretical, and tends to escape, exceed, and stymie empirical measurement. Instead of discovering energy through experiment, then, it seems likely that Joule was motivated by a belief that something in nature was conserved, rather than by empirical proof; Joule “harbored a cacodemon that said ‘heat is motion’” and that drove him forward as a prophet of energy conservation." Pg 36-37
"This has led some historians to conclude that energy reflected the desires and beliefs of its discoverers rather than a thing of nature—that “the energy concept was not at all a descriptive entity, but rather an assertion of the very ideal of natural law: the mathematical expression of invariance through time, the reification of a stable external world independent of our activity or inquiry. This ideal, at first so very plausible and reassuring in its form and appearance, was turning out to be a ticket to Bedlam if followed to its logical consequences.” Pg 41
"One might say that energy is always conserved because we merely expand the definition of energy to include what is lost. The laws of energy are semantic entities as well as responses to natural forces." Pg 46
"Entropy and its tragic perspective “laid the foundation for a new cosmological synthesis” between science and Christianity, a synthesis that remains relevant to energy politics today. As the next chapter shows, figuring out steam engines in the nineteenth century was both a practical and a spiritual concern whose solutions touched upon the larger relationship between Christianity, industrialism, and the Earth." Pg 50
"Historian David Noble explains that the engineer’s work “was guided as much by the capitalist need to minimize both the cost and the autonomy of skilled labor as by the desire to harness most efficiently the potentials of matter and energy.” Pg 167
Evidence tying energy to work:
"...one of the hallmarks of energetic thinking, and of industrialization, is the universalization of energy as the unit that underlies all activity. The machine, the horse, and the human were all energy transformers when they worked, and their power (rate of work done) and efficiency (minimization of energy wasted) could be compared, as in the evaluation of engines according to horsepower. Watt’s standardization of the unit of horsepower is an exemplary precursor to the logic of energy. Work captures this larger sense of the planet conceived energetically and dynamically through the new sciences of energy and evolution." Pg 83
"But it was only with the advent of thermodynamics that the operations of heat engines, the preeminent industrial prime movers, could be explained in any detail. Henceforth, heat engines could be treated not only as metaphor, but as a practical model. They were functionally analogous to any other organ or body that transformed energy from heat into motion, and they could be governed as such. A machine’s inputs and outputs were systematically related as forms of energy, and the optimization of energy flows ensured both time well spent (now measurable as efficiency) and the maximal transformation of energy into commodity form (captured by productivity)." Pg 90
"The logic of energy thus involved a care regime, but it was care ex- tended in the pursuit of maximizing work. In critiques of overwork, the value of work itself was rarely, if ever, in question. For capitalists and many reformers, the goal in reducing work hours was to produce dedicated laborers who would perform their tasks with alacrity. Calls for better nutrition, more breaks, or shorter hours were often advertised as methods for increasing productivity. Lethargy and sloppiness were not sins, as idleness had been, nor resistance to hard toil, but understandable physical reactions to a poor balance of energy, whether as a result of malnutrition, inadequate sleep, or a lack of recreation and spiritual education." Pg 93
Evidence of the emergence of a Work-Waste framework:
"The obsession with the work of steam engines led to a preoccupation with one theme: waste. Importantly, this was not the waste produced by the operation of engines, but rather the waste of the engines in converting coal into motion. It was waste from the perspective of work, as that which detracted from it." Pg 35
"Reformers believed that, left idle too long, the public was prone to the vices of drink, prostitution, and crime. Thompson notes the sharp increase in histrionics in the Victorian era about the immoral leisure activities of the poor. The wage was important, then, not only to regularize workers’ time, but to instill in them the notion that time equals money, that time was to be “put to use” and not frittered away unproductively." Pg 89
"Unlike time measurements, energy efficiency offered a much more fine-grained picture of the quality of a worker’s efforts. Ensuring good work, then, whether by bodies or machines, called for comprehensive energy surveillance and accounting in order to track energy intake and consumption." Pg 163
"They always had in mind the cosmological, the metaphorical, the theological. Energy laws could be deployed to endorse an ethos—the ethos of the engine, the maximization of work, and the minimization of waste—that reconciled the spatiotemporal registers of Earth time and human time, God’s beneficence and cosmic indifference." Pg 50
Evidence of socio-political influence of the Work-Waste Paradigm:
"As Andreas Malm argues, steam engines were not necessarily adopted because they were cheaper or provided superior power, especially given the advantages of water power in the early nineteenth century. Instead, as chapter 1 detailed, steam power was attractive because it better accorded with the needs of industrial capitalists in making a profit while simultaneously dodging the rising demands of laborers." Pg 35
"Like energy, efficiency started out as a “technical invention, created by engineers and physicists” in an industrial context, but quickly “became promiscuous, describing activities of all sorts, including marriage, fuel consumption, use of leisure time, and political and moral behavior.” Pg 78
"By historicizing energy, we also appreciate how the embrace of a dominant, northern British logic of energy, with its stress on engineering principles and work, reflected only one possible interpretation of energy and its optimal flow through metaphorical machines and organisms (a metaphor further elaborated on in the next chapter). Managers like Taylor could only assert, but never satisfactorily prove, that the maximization of work was in the interest of the well-being of the state or laborers. The assertion was buttressed by its reliance on the seemingly universal, and apolitical, physics of energy. This allows us to appreciate not only how energy infused the governance of work (as in how Taylor deploys thermodynamics), but also how work infuses the governance of energy/fuel. In other words, in disturbing the work/energy nexus, we are carried forward to the concluding claim of this book: that our relationship to fossil fuels has been governed by a singular ruling logic of energy, and delimited by its idealization of work, its unquestioned drive to put the world’s materials to use for human profit." Pg 101-102
"First, engineering schools almost universally embraced the project of industrial capitalism and its goals of profit seeking and productivity. The primary aim of many schools was not to produce citizen-scholars or scientists, but rather to produce industrial workers and managers, to increase the “industrial intelligence” of workers, as a 1905 Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education report explains. Practicality, or the ability to apply scientific theories to the “real world” of technical apparatus, was the overriding goal." Pg 167
"Engineering schools, often affiliated with universities, were the most elite, and were intended “to prepare people for a life of managing labor” by producing industry-friendly engineers. … White managers were therefore reliant upon a second kind of industrial education, which ranked below their own engineering schools: those industrial or technical schools that aimed “to prepare people for a life of labor” by producing ideal workers. … Such education schemes were the preferred tools of a progressive racism that aimed to improve colonized others. Energy provided one metric by which to gauge status: lower-status workers had not yet proven a mastery of efficient energy flows, and in a feat of circular reasoning, this was supposedly evident in their resistance to menial, waged work." Pg 169-170
"These schools understood labor as energy conversion and labor governance as a striving for disciplined efficiency." Pg 185
"Over and again, the labor resistance of colonized peoples was read through the prism of idleness and waste. These came to be understood as no longer just moral vices, but as signs of insufficient evolution that could be accelerated through technical education." Pg 186
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.