Michael Tondre, "Oil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
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Welcome to the new books network.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Michael Tondry about his book titled Oil, the latest addition to the Object Lesson series from Bloomsbury. This one came out right at the end of 2024 and examines this substance that is everywhere in all sorts of forms, right? Obviously, in its most kind of dramatic or straight out of the ground form, we're talking about black and gold and

You know, there's all sorts of evocative names, but it's also embedded in all sorts of other things that we probably realize if we think about it. But part of the interesting thing here is how often do we think about it? How often do we think about where oil is, how it got there, the beliefs we have about it, the stories we've been told? There's actually a lot to get into from a title that is only three letters long. So Michael, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.

And thank you so much for having me. It's really wonderful to be part of this show. Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write an object lessons book and why you chose oil as your topic?

Absolutely. So I'm a cultural historian and English professor at Stony Brook University. I focus on the 19th century, in particular, literature and intellectual history. So I came to OIL a little bit belatedly. My first book was a monograph on the history of science and Victorian novels.

And that was called The Physics of Possibility from 2018. And that book's final chapter showed how George Eliot's novel Middlemarch was written in dialogue with her scientific friends and acquaintances at the origins of modern thermodynamics or the science of energy. So I think that that chapter really raised questions

beyond the scope of the book itself about the more material history of fossil fuels and how energies like coal and oil are not only material things or commodities, but also bound up with really deep set dreams and desires and assumptions about a future that looks like the past.

And so I was in the process of developing a monograph about the early history of oil culture in the British Atlantic when, like a number of friends of mine in the first phase of COVID, I got totally inundated with new writing and teaching challenges and came to the idea gradually of trying to write a more public history that would take the incredible insights of humanists and social scientists online.

working on oil over the last decade or so, and to try to broadcast those insights for

I think an audience of both academics and non-academics. And so I published a Penguin Classics edition of Oil up in Sinclair's great novel of Petroleum Power. And at that point, I had remembered talking to someone about the Object Lessons series. And I thought that I might get to work on proposing a book about petroleum for them and hunker down to write it at that time. Very good.

Very interesting how ideas develop sort of from one project to the next. There is so often a link, even if it doesn't look like it necessarily immediately. So thank you for that introduction. It's, of course, however, even deciding to do an object lessons book and deciding it's about oil, there's still a lot of things that have to be decided after that. There's so many ways that this topic could be approached. How did you do this? How did you think about this? How did you decide on your approach?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question, because I think as a number of scholars in the energy humanities have pointed out, and I think as you were noting at the very outset, oil cannot be understood as one isolated commodity among others, but rather as a much more sweeping social, cultural, economic, geopolitical substrate with very uneven impacts across the global north and south. And so in this very short book, I wanted to be able to try to trace this very vast set of

energetic entanglements across all sorts of different registers, modern labor, transport, housing, and entertainment, and art, and to try to retell the story of modern life in terms of the very contested histories of oil extraction and dispossession over the last 150 years or so.

But, you know, here again, I found myself stuck at the very start and didn't quite know where to begin. And I remember very clearly staring at a blank computer screen and started to try to think about the nature of writing itself in the traditionalist.

petroleum era. For instance, in terms of oils, invisible presence as a resource for my computer monitor, the laptop semiconductor chips for wiring installation for the petrofertilizers in my

cup of tea and the nylon sweatpants I was wearing through the height of the pandemic. And, you know, as a feedstock for the aspirin I was going to take as a result of all this thinking. And so, you know, from that point, I began to start with my own sense of situatedness and embeddedness as an author and to go from there to trace the more ramifying circuits of oil culture.

I think that the German playwright Bertolt Brecht once said that oil, quote unquote, oil resists the five act form, meaning that it's just way too global and geopolitically important of a resource to be reducible to a story with a clear cut beginning, middle and end. And so instead, I began to think of it as a kind of, you know, Trump Deloy or a trick painting where the object of attention seems to break the frame of the canvas and really reach into the world.

And that became for me a way to try to conceptualize how oil seeps everywhere, even into the ink used in the book's cover and its binding and boxing and distribution. So in a way, I might answer your question about how I approach the topic by saying that I really wanted to foreground three things. The first would be the historical voices and experiences of ordinary workers and frontline communities.

The second, the role of big multinational oil syndicates and a very specific subset of individuals and institutions that I find most responsible for the carbon era's harms. And thirdly, and finally, the role of literature and art and film in trying to hold together these very different ends of

of the petroleum production and consumption chain. And to think about these cultural forms as providing resources, resources for both how oil has become naturalized in its industrial scale uses, but also in providing resources for thinking and imagining other ways of relating to energy.

And so I guess, you know, initially in trying to talk about all this, my senses, my sense of anger or outrage had led me to a quite polemical style of writing. And friends who had read my first drafts had said, you know, it kind of feels like you're shaking your finger at me. So I had to step back and

I would say I had to think not only about how to hate oil properly, so to speak, but also to think about how and why we've come to love oil and all of the incredible dreams and desires bound up with it in a certain part of the world. So in this later version of the book, I tried to pay attention to really both sides of the situation. On one side, the refined oil,

magic of living in a modern petriculture where we're surrounded by seemingly no end of metamorphic commodities and ways of moving and communicating and working and resting that seem to have spurred up from nowhere in that image of the gusher you were talking about at the very outset. And then on the other hand, those cruder conditions of sanctioned death and dying that have

always enabled those pleasures, particularly among working class communities of color. And so ultimately, I tried to hold together both of these two very different faces of global oil capitalism to see them in stereoscopic vision, I guess, and to try to think about how oil has enabled both a kind of petromagical politics of the good life

alongside a necropolitics of toxicity and slow death than to, again, see both of these two faces at the same time. Thank you for explaining that. I think the idea of as soon as I heard that this book was about oil, I was like, oh, that could go in a whole bunch of different ways. So I'm not surprised a lot of thought went into it. It's really interesting to hear about that process.

Getting into then what you decided to work on, what you decided to put into the book, I wonder if we can start by thinking about these ideas that we kind of think we have or do have until we start to poke at them. Because of course, as soon as we think about sort of black gold and all those sorts of evocative terms that I mentioned earlier, we bring into mind this sort of traditional story of the, you know, quote unquote, sudden discovery of oil. That's

One story, obviously, any of us who are historians of any kind kind of immediately our ears prick up and go, well, hang on a second. What histories do we miss if we just focus on that one? Yeah, that's a really interesting question as well. And I think that the canonical story of oil and the oil era's birth, at least in the U.S., traces to a big bonanza in 1859 Pennsylvania in a town called Titusville.

when a former railroad worker named Edwin Drake tapped the first commercially significant oil deposit and kicked off a massive extraction and investment scramble. And so this is a narrative that blew up in 1860s newspapers and cartoons, as well as latter-day films and carnival exhibitions to become a sort of founding myth of the industry, perpetuated by later historians, often funded by the oil industry itself.

The central image here, too, was the oil gusher or blowout, which seems then is now to offer the promise of wealth without work and an almost sorcerer-like power to conjure a new world of endless development from nowhere and without cost.

So I talk about how this myth persists even now through the 2016 and 2024 elections, when here in the US, Donald Trump promised not only to return America to a lost Camelot of fossil-fueled greatness, but also to jumpstart a new national oil era as if with the snap of a finger.

And so to answer your question, I think that what we miss in this traditional myth of a sudden energy regime change or transformation in 1859 are, of course, the very asymmetrical conditions of time.

dispossession that came beforehand and that continue through this day. And so namely, the myth of oil's sudden spectacular upsurge tends to obscure a very concerted history of indigenous displacement in the decades before and after when U.S. lawmakers and politicians were

essentially reparcelled communal tribal territories into individual land lots that could be more easily expropriated by white settlers. And so the myth of new beginnings is

overlooks this longer tale of violence and the consolidation of older colonial techniques of energy governance in new form. Another myth that emerged, you know, right in the 1860s as well, is that oil provided a revolutionary form of black power through the Civil War. And the idea that it suddenly shifted the nation's economy from cotton picked by enslaved people to hydrocarbon molecules.

And here again, the truth is more bitter, as the oil boom really did tend to allow southern slaveholders to effectively launder their wealth or refine it by shifting to northern bankers and investment interests calibrated towards petroleum.

And the book describes how we see in this racial and economic history an arc that extends through what one historian has called, quote unquote, slavery by another name in reference to white supremacy's resurgence amid a new grid of oil fields and fossil fuel factories and manufacturing sites marked by anti-black conditions of work and housing in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.

in the 1860s. And so the parts and pieces move differently in the British world system. But in the book, I talk about how the ties that bound oil to histories of racial subjugation stayed in place, again, with attention to marginalized offshored places like Trinidad, Barbados, and other Commonwealth countries.

Yeah, those are definitely histories that are worth bringing back into the picture. And it makes it even kind of starker just how specific that traditional story is, how narrow that lens is. And it's not the only story about oil that is really quite pervasive, but maybe misses some stuff. Can you tell us about the idea of oil coming from dinosaurs? Is A, actually true? And B, why do we all think it is?

The short answer is no. Oil doesn't come from dinosaurs. It comes from lots of tiny microscopic algae and not from giant land lizards. But the larger question, I think, is why that assumption has hardened into cultural common sense.

and why many people tend to associate oil with big charismatic megafauna like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. And so I started to think about this when I visited the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles in order to talk with a curator there about the area's asphalt seeps and just got completely caught up instead with its interactive displays and

and different modes of catering to families and children in reference to everything from wobbly stabber cat robots and fiberglass woolly mammoths to PVC dinosaurs in the gift shops. And I began to think instead during that visit about new questions about oil capitalism and how it's shaped very basic assumptions about childhood,

family, reproduction in ways that have made it very hard to imagine a future after oil now. And so what's interesting is that the dinosaur explanation of where oil comes from was introduced only to be pretty much debunked by Victorian scientists, though it took on a new life in the first wave of oil marketing and publicity in the 1930s.

The company Mammoth Oil had a woolly mammoth mascot, and the Sinclair Oil cartel also invented a mascot, the dino mascot, that appealed to kids and families. And a number of these strategies were really quite fascinating. Sinclair Oil funded an entire Dinoland exhibit in the 1964 World's Fair. It put up billboards across America's highways and gas stations.

and did a lot more to effectively reintroduce the myth of dinosaur juice long after its scientific rejection in an effort to appeal to a mostly white middle class set of consumers at the height of America's suburban home buying phase.

Another way to talk about this might be to say that more anecdotally, I remember visiting the tar pits again with friends in the profession. And we all ended up at an on-site movie theater watching an animated film about woolly mammoths and dinosaurs, which I thought to be quite fascinating and frankly, a little bit bizarre. After some digging, I found that the theater was commissioned by a philanthropist who had donated millions of dollars to the tar pits.

in the 60s and specifically wanted to have a quote-unquote continuous theater of dinosaur cartoons because he had himself come to associate dinosaurs with petroleum and with the joys of youth.

And this, for me, became a way to make sense of oil centrality to how we imagine a future and an oil-based idea of life from one generation to the next. Schemes of social reproduction, as Marx puts it, through a kind of continuous cultural theater of images, stories, rituals, relationships.

they make it very hard again to imagine a posterity beyond our current energy mix. And so the final version of the chapter that I wrote moves from La Brea, California to its namesake in La Brea, Trinidad, where

where black and brown workers had organized against overseas oil firms through the 1930s on terms that tend to be forgotten or misremembered in North America now, and that we might want to reactivate, remember on new terms as we transition from oil today.

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So is it because of things like this, like...

places that have become tourist attractions associated with oil because of these sorts of films or cartoons. Is this the sort of how, when and where that these ideas of mass oil dependency that we don't even really think about get entrenched in our lives?

Yeah, and that's a great way to put it. It's through often low-key rituals that we don't really think about that are unconscious or latent. It's through places like bookstores, movie theaters, malls, and social media sites where we're said to be on our own and off the clock.

that the norms of an oil-based way of life become retrenched. And we rarely do ever see petroleum plainly, except when infrastructures fail or pipeline bursts. But we do see its refined manifestations all around us in the Apple earbuds I was using.

for our conversation a second ago in the acetate eyeglasses I'm wearing now in so much more that seem very basic and central to who we are as people.

In a different vein, I guess I would say that oil also gets retrenched through a historically specific matrix of work and housing and transportation that traces in the U.S. to the New Deal and to a systemic grid of airports and highways and suburban housing tracts rooted in the assumption of large-scale oil use back from the 1930s and onwards.

And this system of petro relations has now come to foster a certain middle class fantasy of having a kind of private home, a private family and private life quarantined from the basic acts and facts of oil extraction and refinement. In other words, of labor, where oil culture gets to be reproduced.

And so the chapter tells that history of reproduction by focusing on how Black and Brown writers ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Helena Viramontes have critiqued it in important works of petrofiction from the standpoint of marginalized Black communities, Latinx farm workers, and others who I try to make central to the story of oil. Thank you for taking us through that section of the book.

Obviously worth flagging to listeners that the book has way more detail than we're able to cover here. So definitely go check it out if you're interested. But that's a very helpful explanation of kind of where we should be looking for sort of how oil gets so embedded. One area as well that I want us to discuss is literature and other forms of art as well, you know, visual art, paintings, all sorts of things.

Can you tell us about your idea in the book where these forms of art are using oil, quote, on non-functionalist terms?

What does this mean? Can you give us some examples? Yeah, absolutely. I think by non-functionalist terms, what I mean is that documents like novels and plays, films, poetry, hold together very different contradictory dreams and desires at the heart of oil capitalism without necessarily rising to the level of a programmatic point, an argument.

In particular, petro-critics have used the idea of the energy unconscious to theorize how oil can't help but seep into all aspects of culture in modernity for the very simple reason that it remains our most hegemonic global resource. Although in ways that are indirect in fiction and in literature that don't always rise to the level, again, of a manifest theme, something that gets to be named or articulated as a plot point.

So one example might be Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which famously kicks off with the sweet smell of Madeline cookies. And those cookies serve as a caloric fuel that jumpstarts the narrator's 4,000-page personal meditations.

Many people know about the Madeline Cookie, but in the first draft of that opening, Proust actually wrote that it was the sweet smell of gasoline, of petrol, that wafted through the window and kicked off his memories. And it was only in the novel's final published version that the Madeline Cookie was introduced. I was interested in that in part because in the final version, Proust does still use the

the French term essence to describe the cookie, which is the same word for gasoline. So even as the magic of oil remains buried or encrypted, refined away in the final version, there are traces of oil below the hood, so to speak.

I also found that Proust soured on oil by the 1920s in the later version or the later volumes of the novel as his asthma got worse. And he went on to write about how noxious he found petroleum in that context. And so that's one example of how, you know, the literature and art holds together contradictory ideas about oil. Another example might be Michelangelo Antonioni's new wave film classic La Ventura.

From 1960, The Adventure, which usually gets glossed as a satire about the disaffection of Italian youth culture, following a set of well-to-do people who cavort around in yachts and fast cars that they conspicuously fail to think about.

And instead, I think that we should understand the film as a kind of backhanded critique of Italy's new condition of petroabundance after a 1950s oil discovery just a few years before the film liberated Italy from reliance on American imports, mostly from standard oil, and undergirded the new post-war possibilities for cheap and abundant oil use there.

And here again, as with Proust, oil is never really represented directly. It only gets invoked in the film when one minor character says that she, quote unquote, detests comparisons made with oil.

But I try to read this moment as an example of what's sometimes called the technique of parallepsis, the Roman rhetorical technique, where a speaker introduces a topic through its dramatic repudiation, you know, a kind of loud declaration that I'm not going to talk about the elephant in the room.

So here, as with Proust, we have an amazing sense of the pleasures of oil, hand in hand with an ironic critique about its excesses and failures in a society that's come to take oil for granted.

And then finally, very briefly, I would say that another example might be from Walter Benjamin, who many folks know as the father of modern media studies, who wrote a very short and seemingly unfinished story in 1923 called The Siren, in which a character confesses a tragedy that had happened to him on board a German oil tanker.

And so scholars think that this story was left incomplete by Benjamin because it trails off right when the traumatized speaker is about to confess what happened on board the tanker.

He never gets there. But I try to read this story as an allegory about the larger historical catastrophe of petromodernity and its own ongoing unfinished condition, even though oil remains, you know, unrepresented in the text itself. And so as Benjamin wrote later in life, I think at one point, the fact that he said the fact that things are the status quo is the catastrophe.

And I think that this story was groping towards an account of that, even though Benjamin himself didn't have necessarily a modern understanding of anthropocentric climate change. And so while never making oil into a functional or programmatic concern, literature and art imagine it on very resonant terms once we bring it to the center of our attention.

This is a very interesting perspective to bring to, I mean, obviously you've given us some examples there, but I'm sure listeners could immediately think of a whole other host. I mean, there's so many things that this way of thinking could be applied to. So it's really an interesting thing to add to the discussion.

Similarly, I'm wondering if we could turn to another topic that sounds really unrelated, perhaps, but is following this thread that we have throughout of kind of looking at things that are maybe usually out the corner of our eyes or are sort of assumed and passed over. In this case, I wonder if we can talk about the idea of a country having an oil curse. Absolutely. Yeah. The idea of an oil curse, in a way, traces to social scientists and economists who

in the 70s and 80s who tried to answer the puzzle of why oil-rich countries, most of which are in the global south, tend to be burdened by disproportionate democratic inequalities and unequal conditions of work, housing, medicine, infrastructure, things like that. The idea of the oil curse suggests that oil itself is to blame for global petrovilence.

But as many scholars, and I'm thinking here about Jennifer Wenzel and Michael Watts and others, as many scholars have pointed out, this is a classic colonial move to innocence. It disavows the long imperial entanglements that have historically perpetuated the harms we associate with, quote unquote, foreign oil.

And so what this means is that I think we need to really rethink the imaginative apartheid that has allowed Americans in particular to think of, quote unquote, foreign oil as a problem that somehow over there and has to be stopped at the borders of the national gates.

And so the Niger Delta, for instance, has been called one of the most polluted places on Earth by Amnesty International due to the effects of regional petro-extraction.

where oil contamination has devastated local populations and ecologies for over 70 years now. And many journalists have documented the state-sanctioned violence towards indigenous activists by the Nigerian government.

But the violence of oil really traces to a longer history of colonial extractivism perpetuated by corporations like Shell, British Petroleum, other multinationals headquartered in Europe and North America. And those interests have made the Nigerian government dependent on overseas oil rents rather than traditional forms of revenue raising, things like taxes, which lead to

to turn a blind eye when an oil well bursts and infrastructure fails. So for Euro-Americans to think of oil as elementally evil, as an accursed substance, I think leaves out these longer global entanglements

And at the same time, tends to nurture the very ideas of autonomous agency and personhood that have been fueled by oil from other shorts. So I think something that we're hearing in a lot of these different areas is the difficulty of bringing oil and its embeddedness into kind of the front of mind.

It's everywhere, but in some ways, a lot of what you're saying is about how tricky it is to notice that it's there. I wonder if you can talk a bit about the way in which the news and the structure of the news and reporting might be exacerbating that. Yeah, that's really a great question. And as you say, oil is everywhere, but

It tends to hide in plain sight and at scales that are hard to comprehend moment by moment. And I think that the temporality of the daily or weekly news cycle has limitations akin to the temporality of the election cycle, perhaps, and that it doesn't quite capture the total scale of the problem.

It's easy to point to disasters like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill or the Iraq oil fires from the first Gulf War and how those have been covered in the news.

in quite spectacular form. But it's harder to think about the global and historical nature of oil's ongoing violence as we know in terms of global warming. This is a limitation famously critiqued in the 2021 Adam McKay film, Don't Look Up,

Leonardo DiCaprio. But even that film presents climate change through the allegory of a singular instantaneous event horizon, an asteroid, rather than through the forms of slow, accretional violence that thicken over many, many years and over different shores.

as in the toxicity and ecological wreckage that continues to mark the area around the southern Kuwaiti oil fires from the 90s that persist through this day. So I think that what's needed are forms more suited to global oil capitalism's very different, multiply scaled entanglements of life and matter,

And I think that literature and film are valuable resources for this reason. They give us ways of capturing the different scales of petrovolence, both the fast and spectacular alongside the slow and accretional. And they give us resources for thinking bigger about how to contest them.

This is definitely an interesting lens. Again, you know, the way that we talked about bringing the perspective to literature and other forms of art, I think can also very much be translated to the stories that are told or not told or how they're told in various forms of media as well.

I wonder if we can now turn to talking a bit about sort of newer ideas, perhaps around oil or the impact of oil, tracking one's carbon footprint. Obviously, it's not the newest idea, but it is very much in the conversation at the moment and recently.

But it doesn't come out of nowhere. Now, we do often talk about it in the context of the glowing awareness of the impacts that we're making on the planet. We don't usually talk about it in terms of other things happening in society around tracking stuff, around tracking individual stuff. Can you tell us a bit about that story?

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I would just say at the outset here of this topic that I think both individual and institutional kinds of changes are useful. There's no bad way to act, although there are. But, you know, I think that both individual and institutional.

modes of action are beneficial. So I talk about the carbon footprint in the second to last, the penultimate chapter of the book. And that chapter discusses big oil's different disinformation schemes and

Uh, and I traced the carbon footprint as many other journalists and scholars have, uh, back to British Petroleum's 2003 invention of the carbon footprint. Uh, and so I, I think about that moment and, uh,

more uniquely about an earlier moment that I tried to pinpoint in the 1970s with the rise of the personal credit score. In a way, oil was a principal part of the credit score's creation since the oil shocks of 1972 and three and 1978 created very basic challenges to maintaining a middle-class lifestyle and

and a turn to financialized forms of lending, of personal credit. And so it's at this time we see the amassing of huge amounts of personal information by new credit industries in the 70s in order to distill a seemingly real, neutral, and vaguely moral truth of who you are, namely the credit score.

And so for the first time, middle class folks began to internalize the idea, I argue at this time, that you should constantly work on finessing your personal number. And a related thing that was happening in the realm of personal health around this moment was the rise of calorie counting and fitness practices, which some scholars view as a kind of compensation for the failure of

more radical movements in the 1960s in the sense that if you couldn't change the world structurally, you could at least change your personal energy expenditure through burning calories more efficiently.

And I argue that these two developments, respectively in the realm of credit counting, personal data tracking, and in the realm of calorie counting, have become wrapped up with ideas about who we are as well-meaning, diligent sorts of liberal-minded people in the carbon footprint at a time when more large-scale modes of structural transformation away from oil still seem very hard to imagine.

The problem is that I think this way of understanding things, if we reduce our actions to the carbon footprint and trying to narrow our footprints, is that it tends to potentially turn attention away from the disproportionate and structural sources of fossil capitalism's harms, namely a handful of energy multinationals, again, mostly headquartered in the U.S. and Northern Europe, alongside with their managerial elites and enablers.

A 2016 report I'm thinking of now from a group of international scientists established that over half of all carbon emissions since 1989 have come from just about 100 global corporations. But the idea of the carbon footprint

reinforces the idea of individual responsibility, a kind of relativism, and the idea that we're all equally guilty for climate change, which is precisely what BP had in mind when it coined the carbon footprint in 2003 amid a shift from climate change denialism to what's sometimes called delayism or the tactical slowdown of a coordinated energy transition.

Yet another thing to look at more critically, thanks to this book and discussion. Given that we're now very much talking about kind of ideas of what the future could look like related to oil, can you tell us about the Museum of Carbon Ruins? Yeah.

Absolutely. This is where I end the book on a more hopeful note that looks towards the future. It's a kind of experimental exhibit that was put on first in 2019 by a really wonderful set of interdisciplinary scholars at the University of Lund. Most museums look backwards and try to tell a certain story about how we got here, who we are as a people based on our pasts.

This museum, the Museum of Carbon Ruins, aims to transport visitors to a world after oil 30 years from now, around 2050. And it invites you to think through the different prospects for how we might more actively build popular power, contest hyper emitters, put green candidates in place and collaborate in a large scale transition from fossil energy.

And it features individual artifacts of the oil era behind glass under the sort of impending light of those artifacts decommissioning and renunciation. Everything from Legos and single malt scotches to pleather pants and zippo lighters.

that are set to become obsolete, ideally, in the years ahead, or at least one version of those things. And so another way to understand this museum might be to see it as enacting a kind of heterotopia where different relations to the future might be imagined.

And there have been really wonderful carbon ruins exhibits in Glasgow, Manchester, and North America, including in New York, where students in my own literature in the Age of Oil class developed a carbon ruins museum of New York. And so I think this is a kind of living idea and an attempt, among many other creative, innovative projects, to think about, to imagine a future after oil.

Something that I think we all probably are doing a lot of the time. Anyway, so very interesting example. Thank you for telling us about that one that, as you mentioned, does end the book. Can I ask you as a final question about your future? What might you be working on now that this book is done?

Yes, absolutely. Thank you. So I'm getting back finally to an academic monograph on oil in the British Atlantic world called Refinement Oil Aesthetism and the British Atlantic world. And that traces the long 19th century history of oil culture and its birth from the Afro-Caribbean plantation system on into international modernism.

I'm also hoping to keep writing in a more public mode on energy and environmental justice and to develop a new set of projects on that front. Well, that sounds very intriguing. So best of luck with the big monograph and, of course, all the other related things that, of course, we all are doing. Yeah.

And while you are working on them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Oil, part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series released towards the end of 2024. Michael, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you for having me. This has been a real pleasure.