Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to fossil fuel narratives to consider whether there are continuities between coal fiction and oil fiction in different periods of modernity and whether there are identifiable formal features that unify fossil fuel fiction. The chapter pursues these questions by examining correspondences between Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, which depicts the socio-environmental consequences of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, and several exemplary fictions of extraction written 100 or 150 years earlier, including Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). The commonalities that persist across the historical gap from coal fiction to oil fiction express distinguishing aspects of life under fossil fuels and constitutive elements of the writing of fossil fuels.

At the heart of classical mechanics sits the venerable equation F=ma. To solve this equation, we first need to specify the force at play. In this chapter, we start along this journey. We will look at various forces, including gravity, electromagnetism and friction, and start to understand some of their features. For each, we will solve F=ma in some simple settings.

Chapter 10 evaluates the challenges of SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, which aims to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. The scarcity of non-renewable minerals and energy resources presents a critical global challenge that could constrain economic growth and well-being. Various ways to measure natural resource scarcity are evaluated, and an economic analysis of the optimal extraction of exhaustible resources over time is established. Policies to address future demands for mineral and energy resources while balancing the environmental impacts of extraction and use are discussed. For example, substituting non-renewable energy with renewable energy sources poses economic and environmental challenges. Concerns over supply constraints and reliance on critical minerals have prompted calls for self-sufficiency, reducing reliance on imports of essential raw materials, and creating incentives to enhance recycling, recovery, and reuse, especially of rare earth elements. In addition, developing new technologies to improve end-use efficiency can support the decoupling of dependency on non-renewable resources from economic growth.

By exploring issues of energy, efficiency, growth and systemic resets, the reader is able to see the trajectory humanity is currently on and how it needs to change in order to survive and thrive moving forwards.

This chapter looks at the most recent climate science and starkly sets out the severity of the problems ahead. It gives the reader all the knowledge needed to broadly understand the critical issues of our day from a technical perspective, including systems of production and consumption for energy and food, biodiversity loss, pollution (including plastics), disease threats and population levels. It then looks at ways in which we can technically transfer to a sustainable way of living.

This case study explores the State Grid Corporation of China’s (SGCC’s) localization strategies within the Belo Monte hydroelectric project in Brazil, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as they expand into Latin America. Over recent decades, Chinese SOEs have emerged as potential collaborators for Latin American countries seeking investment and technology for critical infrastructure projects. SGCC’s involvement in constructing the Xingu-Estreito transmission line for the Belo Monte project stands as a prime example. This line, among the world’s largest and first to implement ±800kV ultra-high-voltage technology outside China, marks not only an engineering triumph for SGCC but also a significant business and legal accomplishment. The company adeptly navigated Brazil’s complex legal environment, tackling multifaceted regulatory, financial, and environmental challenges. This case study, based on government and corporate documents as well as confidential interviews, examines SGCC’s strategies for procurement, financial structuring, environmental licensing, and operational management in the context of this grandiose transmission line.

This chapter begins with the sombre matter of world destruction. Almost by definition, the fully artificial worlds described in this book are ontologically fragile. They can be pulled apart or undone, as easily or more easily than they were put together. Whether they are replaced by a natural world of power politics involving different ethnic groups or whether no more than chaos and disorder can be expected in such a scenario is no doubt an important question, but it does not affect the real possibility of world destruction. This chapter argues for an alternative to hegemonic wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation, an alternative to be sought in the dynamics of world building. Today competition between the superpowers is organised around the capacity to build new technological worlds; those unable to compete must eventually become elements in a world built by others. The emergence of these artificial worlds opens up possibilities for state actors to change the global power distribution without the risks arising from direct action against their rivals. In Ukraine, while Russia seems determined to bring the current world order tumbling down, it also has to face the full brunt of that world order’s power in a succession of system wars ranging from a new form of technological warfare to the uses and abuses of the global energy, financial and trade systems.

This chapter outlines Hopkins’s knowledge of contemporary energy physics as it decisively shapes his distinctive poetry and the metaphysic that undergirds it. The discussion begins with Hopkins’s appreciation of meteorology in his ‘Heraclitean Fire’ sonnet, of the earth’s atmosphere as a vast thermodynamic system. The figure that this poem presents of man as a lonely ‘spark,’ and the pyrotechnics of ‘As kingfishers catch fire,’ ‘The Windhover’ and ‘God’s Grandeur,’ are then glossed through the optical application of the energy concept in spectroscopy. Finally the chapter considers field theory and Clerk Maxwell’s reassessment of the Newtonian principle of force through the energy concept as the distributive principle of stress, tracing Hopkins’s use of this physical concept in his writings on mechanics, nature and most momentously in the definitive formulation of his metaphysic of stress, instress ,and inscape in 1868 and the concurrent advent of his metrical principle of Sprung Rhythm.

This chapter adopts an Anthropocene framework to contextualize Gerard Manley Hopkins. Placing his work within the epoch of human geophysical agency, I argue, affords new perspective on his radical contribution as an ecological witness. It allows us to see that Hopkins’s depictions of natural entities involved an intuition about their embeddedness in larger systems, many inchoately explained by contemporary science; that his representations of non-human nature seldom avoided the ‘anthropos’ (the ‘human’ in Anthropocene), whether as destructive interloper or divinely privileged steward; and that his life and work included moments of prescience about human activity interfering with Earth-system processes. To recontextualize Hopkins thus is to furnish different ways to interpret his work (in wider conceptual networks and deeper time horizons) and to animate that work’s reception (in light of present concerns). It is also to affiliate Hopkins with ecopoets whose formal innovations might be fruitfully juxtaposed with his poetics.

The introductory chapter is a brief recap on the history and origins of wind power, from windmills in ancient times to today’s multi-megawatt turbines. Energy security has arguably been the historic driver for wind power, and it was a primary source of mechanical power until the advent of the Industrial revolution when it was superceded by coal and oil. The first electricity generating wind turbines were built in the late nineteenth centry, and the technology was pursued most vigorously in Denmark, a country with limited energy reserves: the role of this country in creating the modern wind turbine is described. The worldwide energy crisis of the 1970s brought wind power into the frame internationally, and the pivotal role of legislation under President Carter in expanding the market for wind energy in the US and elsewhere is outlined. Since then the rationale for wind power has expanded to include climate change and the technology has grown exponentially in terms of global installation of wind power and the physical size of wind turbines. The chapter concludes by introducing some of the technological steps that have enabled this process, and which are detailed in subsequent chapters.