Review of No More Fossils by Dominic Boyer

In No More Fossils (2023), Dominic Boyer confronts the lingering spirits of fossil modernity with the insight and theoretical fluency that readers familiar with his work have come to expect.The book is an engagement with a historical overview of energy systems, the present obstacles to energy transition, and a philosophical reckoning with the attachments-economic, ideological, and infrastructural-that bind us to the world fossil fuels built.Boyer is particularly attentive to the temporal contradictions of a world where past extractions continue to shape present suffering, revealing how the violence of fossil capitalism persists even as we imagine post-carbon futures.In this slender volume, Boyer does not simply chronicle the collapse of fossil-fueled civilization; he urges readers to decarbonize their economies and demystify the fossil imaginary that continues to animate so much of our world.At the heart of No More Fossils lies a central provocation: what if the obstacle to energy transition isn't solely technological, but rather lies deep (literally and figuratively) in the historical continuities that bind sugar, coal, and oil into a single extractive logic?Across three chapters, Boyer traces how "sucropolitics"-the temporal and extractive logics first established by sugar plantations -evolved into the "petropolitical" systems that structure contemporary life (p.12).He argues that ending our reliance on fossil fuels requires dismantling what he calls the "fossil gerontocracy," a system that not only resists transformation but makes imagining alternatives increasingly difficult (p. 45).Fossil fuels, the book ultimately contends, mediate how modernity experiences and organizes temporality, meaning that moving beyond requires both structural change and imaginative work, an orientation that can grieve what fossil fuels have provided even as we reject the world they have made.Chapter One, "Sucro, Carbo, Petro, or What Made This World That Needs to Be Remade," lays the groundwork for the book's core argument by tracing the long, interconnected histories of extraction that underpin global economics.In this opening chapter, Boyer contends that the development of modern capitalism was made possible by sugar, which established a system of "sucropolitics" defined by logics of persistence, ossification, and endurance, which would later animate the fossil economy.He proposes that this sucropolitical framework set the stage for what he calls the logic of fossilization.Sugar, in this schema, is eventually displaced by coal (carbo), and then oil (petro), but the extractive and temporal logics remain more or less continuous, inhering during the plantation era.Boyer further suggests that these materials: sugar, coal, and oil, can be understood as technics for time travel, mediating how modernity experiences and organizes time.As he puts it, "very little of modern life exists outside of entanglement with petroleum's many life forms" (p.45).Through this framing, the chapter establishes the groundwork for a critique of the systems that continue to organize our worldecologically speaking -while attending to the historical conditions that made them possible.