Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Jeff Diamanti, 2021)

Ph.D. Student, Department of History, University of Texas, Austin
yzacarias[at]utexas.edu

cover Diamanti 2021
Bibliographic reference

Jeff Diamanti, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

Abstract

Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes presents the historical relationship between climate, capital, and oil energy from the second half of the 20th C to the present. For this process, Diamanti introduces different historical cases to trace oil exploitation’s political, economic, and environmental consequences through the concept of “terminal landscapes.” From the Shell oil company to the Fiat factory in Lingotto (Turin, Italy), from current digital forms of information to the case of Greenland, Diamanti shows how landscape, energy, and capital are related, engaging the readers with a cultural and theoretical line of analysis of our climate crisis, connecting with a broader secondary study about petroculture and energy history. With this study, Diamanti shows historical cases as representations of human actions after 1970, when the Western economy combined economic stability with energy through oil production, changing our conception of the future associated with unlimited energy from natural resources.