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Energy Complicity in Trinidad 

Review by Sandra Moore 

 

Energy Without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity  

by David McDermott Hughes 

Duke University Press, 2017 

 

Throughout history, humankind’s energy sources have advanced from simple wood-fueled fires for 

warmth to complex extraction and development of deeply buried fossil fuels to fuel vehicles and heat 

homes. In Energy Without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity, David McDermott 

Hughes, a Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, aims to better understand “cultural 

dispositions and discourses on oil” (p.1). He also strives to understand why many are complicit about 

oil’s role in climate change. In this part-historical, part-ethnographic work, Hughes focuses on the non-

event everyday workings of the oil industry, rather than the abnormal events, such as oil spills and 

pipeline leaks, that often evoke moral outrage.  

 

Hughes questions why hydrocarbons (oil, coal, natural gas, bitumen) do not inspire moral outrage more 

often. He explores this question by looking at the non-event everyday workings of the oil industry in 

Trinidad, the larger island of Trinidad and Tobago, a South American country off the coast of 

Venezuela. It was on Trinidad in 1859 where Walter Darwent drilled the first continually productive oil 

well in the world; today Trinidad has “… the most prolific seep of petroleum in the world” (p.12). 

Hence, Trinidad’s abundant petroleum resources, lengthy oil drilling history, and lack of abnormal oil 

events make it an ideal location to explore how people view the everyday workings of the oil industry. 

It is also an ideal place to explore why hydrocarbons and their contribution to climate change have yet 

to become a moral issue for many people who are directly impacted by the hydrocarbon industry. 

 



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Trinidad’s early energy economy developed to solve a technical issue and evolved into a moral issue. 

Sugar plantations needed large amounts of labour and the global human slave trade supplied that 

labour. Eventually, people began to question the moral issue of using human beings as slaves to 

produce goods. This led to an increased demand for other forms of energy and a transition into a 

hydrocarbon energy economy. Energy demand continues to increase as global culture generates an 

ever-increasing desire for more hydrocarbon fueled vehicles, appliances, and large homes (Ghosh, 

2016), but there is a cost to the environment for producing and burning these hydrocarbon fuels. 

 

Hughes asserts the main theme of this book is complicity. He compares Trinidad’s slave-labour energy 

economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century with today’s oil economy. These two forms of 

energy relied on complicity from both producers and consumers who disregarded the immoral nature of 

these forms of energy. However, the slave-labour energy economy eventually encountered strong 

resistance, whereas oil has raised limited resistance among Trinidadians over the last century and a 

half.  

 

Divided into five chapters, and two sections, this brief book focuses mainly on Trinidad’s energy 

history. Hughes provides a comprehensive historical analysis in the two chapters of the first section. He 

details early suggestions for harnessing solar energy and discusses human slavery as the first forms of 

energy on the island. The first chapter delves into the island’s potential for growing crops. Cacao was 

one of the first crops grown by Spanish settlers on the island. Five years after a dismal cacao crop year 

in 1727, visiting Jesuit Joseph Gumilla envisioned landless settlers coming to the island and using the 

abundant energy of the equatorial sun to revive the cacao industry. No new settlers were sent, and a 

smallpox outbreak a decade later drastically decreased the number of settlers already on the island.  

 

By the late eighteenth-century, the Crown installed a new governor, Don Josef Maria Chacón. He was 

instructed to implement the royal edict of 1783 encouraging planters and their slaves to move to 

Trinidad.  Chacón knew the island’s sugar plantations needed massive amounts of human energy to be 

successful in the competitive Caribbean sugar markets. Shiploads of enslaved Africans were brought to 

Trinidad, but gradually shifting morality led to the abolishment of the sugar industry’s main source of 

relatively inexpensive energy – slaves.  

 

The second chapter explores the sugar industry’s transition away from slave energy toward oil energy. 



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Hughes draws interesting comparisons of both slaves and oil as consumable energy commodities. He 

also discusses the complicity associated with the immoral nature of both slavery and the oil industry 

from both producers and consumers. However, unlike oil, within a short period of time people began to 

develop a strong conscience against working slaves to death as a consumable source of energy.  

 

As the immorality of using free labour from the human bodies of slaves became an issue, sugar 

plantations required new forms of inexpensive energy. Trinidad’s most influential German immigrant 

Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer believed that harnessing the energy of the human body was immoral and 

he envisioned the work in plantations being accomplished by iron slaves, metal, solar-powered robots, 

rather than human slaves. In the mid-nineteenth century, Stollmeyer and his partners came up with an 

alternative to using human bodies for energy. They developed a method for distilling the heavy asphalt 

found on the island into light, combustible oil.  

 

In time, Stollmeyer’s views on humans and work shifted as he witnessed the idleness of many 

islanders. He believed that people needed work to be invigorated and he focused on selling his oil for 

lighting, rather than finding ways to decrease labour on the sugar plantations. In 1859, Walter Dewant 

drilled one of the world’s first oil wells on the island, but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that 

oil took an active role in Trinidad’s economy. As the use of hydrocarbons were introduced on the 

island, Trinidadians “…wavered between inspiration and indifference” (p.41). 

 

Hughes refers to the second section of the book as an ethnographic analysis. Comprised of three 

chapters, this section focuses on how the informed people of the island “… avoid reflecting ethically or 

emotionally upon oil” (p.2).  In these three chapters Hughes explores informant’s notions of plenty and 

how opportunism clouds their judgement on climate change. Many of the technocratic informants that 

Hughes engaged with included energy experts and oil company employees. However, he also engaged 

with informants who did not work in the industry, such as anti-industry activists, or climate change 

policy makers in Trinidad. With these diverse informants he explored the discourses surrounding and/or 

obstructing a moral view of oil and how it contributes to climate change. Some of Hughes’ informants 

promote the oil industry or reap the benefits of the industry, some do not, yet he feels almost all his 

informants are complicit about the impacts of the industry on climate change. 

 

This complicity frustrates Hughes as he, and many others in the world, advocate for an energy 



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transition away from hydrocarbons to increased clean forms of energy. Globally, the impacts of non-

renewable hydrocarbons on the environment are frequently seen as a moral concern. Yet, the common 

disdain, fear, and anger towards hydrocarbons are not as prevalent with Hughes’ informants in the 

petrostate of Trinidad.  Most understood that hydrocarbons impacted their environment and contributed 

to climate change, but many were apathetic, felt powerless to do anything, or viewed the impacts as 

minor irritants.  

 

Hughes illustrates that as consumers we rarely see oil; we inject oil into our vehicles without seeing it 

or thinking about the long-term impacts this fuel has on the environment. He asserts that the oil 

industry in Trinidad operates as it is supposed to every day with no abnormal events to encourage 

questioning the safety of the oil industry. Abnormal events like the BP oil spill in 2010 from the 

explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico cause people to look at the oil 

industry in a more critical manner. As Freudenburg and Gramling (2011) indicate, the oil industry has 

been cutting corners for years and an abnormal event like the Deepwater Horizon explosion was a 

disaster waiting to happen.  

 

However, when abnormal events occur, like the BP oil spill, we see the oil and the impact it has on the 

environment as vast efforts are dedicated to the cleanup process. Abnormal events decrease apathy 

toward oil and encourage people, states, and countries to express moral outrage and question their 

energy choices. Moral outrage towards the oil industry is minimal in Trinidad due to limited abnormal 

oil events and “… open governance and technical competence” (p.13) that keeps oil associated 

violence and corruption low.  Hence, the people of Trinidad see the problems the oil industry has 

solved (unemployment, economic development) more than they do the problems the industry has 

created (pollution, climate change).  

 

As Hughes identifies, the people of Trinidad have become complicit with the oil industry. He explores 

this complicity from the perspectives of his informants, but also from his own reactions to his 

informant’s complicity with oil and climate change. He explains that “I did not approach these men and 

women dispassionately, and I have not written about them with the usual ethnographic sympathy” (p. 

4). He frankly states that he opposes his informant’s efforts and sees oil as an immoral industry on the 

verge of extinction. Additionally, he affirms at the end of the book that the petro-geologists he 

interviewed “… are in the wrong and doing wrong” (p.151); they take credit for producing 



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hydrocarbons, but little credit for their role in contributing to climate change. 

 

Many of the informants that Hughes writes about are advocates of the oil industry, mainly because their 

livelihood depends on it. As his personal views promote the eradication of the oil industry, Hughes 

recognizes that he is advocating for the demise of his informant’s livelihoods. Hence, he claims to write 

about his informants with understanding and ethnographic nuance, while being “… prepared to reveal 

and criticize the wider harm that person may cause” (p.4). However, he is focused on the concept of 

morality, which is defined differently across cultures. As Ghosh (2016) points out, conversations about 

morality and climate change are often confounded by differing categorizations - spiritual, intellectual, 

political, philosophical - associated with the word moral and different understandings of what climate 

change is and how it is created. 

 

Many ethnographers and anthropologists advocate for researchers to take sides. Most often the side 

they take is that of the people they are researching, the proverbial oppressed. Hughes emphatically 

states throughout this book that he does not share the same views as many of his informants. His 

disdain for the hydrocarbon industry is evident and it shadows his presentation of a nuanced analysis of 

his informants and their cultural context. It is unfortunate that much of this brief book is focused on the 

history of energy in Trinidad, and less so on an in-depth ethnographic analysis of his informants with 

greater detail on who they are and how they think. However, Hughes has contributed greatly to an 

understanding of how climate change is viewed in locations outside of the modern Western world. 

Hughes affirms that complicity toward the oil industry in Trinidad has created a narrow, obsolete 

politics of pollution and “one can no longer plead ignorance” (p.15). As he points out numerous times, 

the oil industry will not evoke disdain for many in Trinidad until they are given a tangible, visible 

reason to fear and despise the industry. Changing the narrative around the oil industry in Trinidad will 

not occur overnight, nor will it take a lone abnormal event to spur Trinidadians to moral disdain of the 

industry. Rather, the commonly accepted narrative that hydrocarbons are necessary and vital to support 

energy demand, livelihoods, and economic development on the island needs to be challenged to move 

from complicity to conscience.  

 

References Cited 

Freudenburg, W.R. & Gramling, R. Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of 

Energy in America. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011.  



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Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: 

University of Chicago Press, 2016. 

 

Sandra Moore is a current Vanier Scholar and Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Environment and 

Sustainability (SENS) at the University of Saskatchewan. She researches the social, economic, and 

ecological costs and benefits of oil and gas development in rural Saskatchewan.  With an academic 

background in anthropology and international community development, Sandra has lived and worked 

in Canada, Ethiopia, and Vanuatu. 

 

 

© 2017 Sandra Moore 


