I thought the abstract below might be satire, but alas that is not the case. Here is a link to the full paper.
The paper is short on facts and long on dogma and political rhetoric, but is not entirely without merit. The author acknowledges, albeit in a backhanded manner, the massive social benefits that fossil fuels have provided (quote below). Would our economy have been strong enough to support academic pursuits such as hers were it not for fossil fuels and “petro-masculine” ingenuity and labor?
“Fossil fuels built the modern world. There remains an appreciation for fossil fuels – or, at least, for the high energy consumption they provided – as a catalyst of mass liberal democracy. This is evident in ecomodernist calls for a good Anthropocene that would decouple the benefits of fossil fuels from the fuels themselves. After all, while industrialisation wreaks planetary destruction, its spread was coterminous with humanist victories like the abolition of slavery, increased literacy rates, gender equality and poverty reduction. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that this cannot be a coincidence, and that ‘the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive.“
In the interest of balance, the author might have also acknowledged the impressive technical advances that have made fossil fuel production cleaner and more efficient. See also: simpler, safer, greener and the beauty of deepwater production.
Bud's Offshore Energy (BOE) 