Gasoline Dreams: Waking Up from Petroculture

Gasoline Dreams is a graphic novel that explores and challenges the ways fossil fuels have shaped our identities, relationships, and ability to imagine sustainable, equitable futures. It reveals the many ways petroculture fails to deliver on its promises of "the good life" and calls us to the difficult work of waking up from the fantasies that inhibit us from working toward a global transition to renewable energy. The book offers a space of hope and engagement from which concerned people can work to build a more sustainable future.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 28 September 2021
Publisher: Fordham University Press

What if the biggest barriers to responding to climate change are not technological or governmental, but cultural? In other words, what if we ourselves could help to enact change through a deeper understanding of our petroleum dependency? In a provocative graphic format that draws widely from history, critical theory, and popular culture, Gasoline Dreams explores and challenges the ways fossil fuels have shaped our identities, relationships, and our ability to imagine sustainable, equitable futures. As our rapidly warming planet is pushed toward ecological collapse, we might often feel helpless or paralyzed by the enormity of the challenges confronting us. However, reflecting upon the cultural dimensions of our predicament helps reveal the great potential for social transformation inherent in the multiplying crises. Author and artist Simon Orpana engages with contemporary scholarship in the emergent field of Energy Humanities to confront the habits, narratives, and fantasies that support our attachment to fossil fuels. By revealing the many ways petroculture repeatedly fails to deliver on its promises of "the good life," Gasoline Dreams calls us to the difficult work of waking up from the fantasies that inhibit us from working toward a global transition to renewable energy. Written in an engaging graphic format that makes relevant historical, cultural, and political analyses of global warming and petrol dependency important to a wide audience, Gasoline Dreams refutes the progress narratives that depict contemporary, energy-intensive societies as the inevitable product of human history. By revealing the contingencies, coercions, and compulsions that shape our relationship with fossil fuels, Gasoline Dreams offers a powerful critique of the dominant ideologies that perpetuate our dependence on these resources. Through its exploration of the cultural dimensions of climate change, Gasoline Dreams provides a roadmap for building a more just and sustainable world. By challenging the myths and assumptions that underlie our current energy system, it encourages us to think critically about the ways in which we can transition to a renewable energy future. By highlighting the ways in which fossil fuels have shaped our identities, relationships, and ability to imagine sustainable futures, Gasoline Dreams offers a powerful tool for promoting social change. By revealing the many ways in which petroculture fails to deliver on its promises of "the good life," it calls us to the difficult work of waking up from the fantasies that inhibit us from working toward a global transition to renewable energy. In conclusion, Gasoline Dreams is a must-read for anyone who is interested in understanding the cultural dimensions of climate change and the challenges we face in transitioning to a more sustainable future. By engaging with contemporary scholarship in the field of Energy Humanities, it offers a powerful critique of the dominant ideologies that perpetuate our dependence on fossil fuels. Through its exploration of the cultural dimensions of climate change, it provides a roadmap for building a more just and sustainable world. By challenging the myths and assumptions that underlie our current energy system, it encourages us to think critically about the ways in which we can transition to a renewable energy future. By highlighting the ways in which fossil fuels have shaped our identities, relationships, and ability to imagine sustainable futures, it offers a powerful tool for promoting social change.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780823297719