Metabolism of the petrostate

How might thinking differently about the petrostate help us imagine a more sustainable future?

This lecture explores the premise that we need to rethink our concept of the petrostate in order to better understand the forces marshalled to prevent or retard energy decarbonisation initiatives.

The incumbent concept of petrostate came into focus in the mid 1970s, centered on the Resource Curse Metanarrative (RCM) and often has been deployed to caricature Global South efforts to accomplish independent programs of national development (e.g., Chávez in Venezuela). What the RCM leaves unspoken is the capture of northern political institutions and dynamics by petropower. So instead of petrostates we should think about the petrostate as fundamentally a global, or better yet, planetary assemblage. Professor Dominic Boyer instead recommends a petrostate analytics focused on efforts at rule, subjection and domination that exceed our current models of the “oil and gas industry” and even “fossil capitalism.” What such a perspective offers, he argues, is a model of the petrostate at once more ubiquitous and tenacious than is normally assumed but also, conversely, more vulnerable. This petrostate, while still immensely capable and dangerous, also appears senescent, droning on about the glories of the past as it struggles to kill the multitude of futures that would bury it. The death of the petrostate is not guaranteed to come with the end of petroleum use. It is sustained by a complex infrastructural metabolism. But since its future ultimately depends on human beings there are constant opportunities for contestation. To locate those opportunities, he will argue that we need to pay attention to petrostate anabolics—the upscaling resource-consuming forces that synthesise petrocultural forms—and petrostate catabolics­—the disruptive forces that release stored energy so that the petrostate can adapt to new situations. In addition, there may be xenobiotics—metabolically useless and potentially damaging forms of life—that can stress the infrastructural metabolism of the petrostate enough to bring about its necessary downfall.

Meet our speaker and chair

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker and environmental researcher who directs the Social Design Lab at Rice University and co-Directs the Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience (CFAR). As one of the founders of the field of Energy Humanities, he has been researching the politics of energy transition and the social dimension of climate change for many years. With Cymene Howe, he made a documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier (Okjökull) lost to climate change, Not Ok: a little movie about a small glacier at the end of the world (2018). In August 2019, together with Icelandic collaborators, they installed a memorial plaque to Okjökull’s passing, an event that was covered by thousands of news organisations around the world, prompting The Economist to create its first-ever obituary for a non-human. The author of nine books and volumes and more than 100 research articles, Boyer’s latest book is No More Fossils (U Minnesota Press, 2023), an analysis of the fossil gerontocracy that seeks to hold us in its ecocidal grasp. His latest design project is the Global Glacier Casualty List, a dynamic storytelling platform to raise awareness about what the world loses as glaciers vanish.

Rebecca Elliott is Associate Professor of Sociology. Her research focuses on how climate change, as a material and symbolic phenomenon, is reshaping social and environmental landscapes.

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