Power Plants: Bioenergy, Vegetal Labour and the Politics of Productivity

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. Across the globe, efforts to identify sustainable substitutes for coal, oil and gas are increasingly converging on bioenergy—the large-scale production of plant-based fuels. In Power plants, James Palmer examines case studies from the UK, European Union and United States to contend that bioenergy’s expansion constitutes an explicitly political project—one enrolling plants to help naturalise human commitments to efficiency, productivity and perpetual economic growth. But the book also makes a more daring argument—plant life, however it is managed, will always inevitably exceed productivist logics. By listening more closely to plants, therefore, Palmer argues that we might yet bring into being quite different energy cultures—less concerned with work and growth for their own sakes, than with alternative values of human satisfaction, wellbeing and pleasure. Power plants is a timely intervention. Palmer asks what society can learn from listening to plants, rather than continually trying—and failing—to shape plants to serve societal needs.Jennifer Baka, Pennsylvania State UniversityThis brilliant critique of bioenergy takes us into fields and forests where plant life is being put to work, saving capitalist commitments to growth if not the planet. A must read for anyone who cares about resources, environments or energy transition.Gavin Bridge, Durham UniversityPalmer illuminates the many ways that plants are distinct as energy workers. This leads to an inspiring conclusion: that plants suggest different energy values, premised in vegetal rhythms of rest and activity that transcend the narrow goal of maximising productivity.Cara Daggett, University of Hamburg 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.