Simon Pirani. Burning Up

Burning Up, by Simon Pirani, is foremost a good synthesis of the global history of fossil fuel consumption in a concise package. The construction of the book is quite straightforward, providing a general context for fossil fuels before the 1950s—plus a fairly elaborate statistical summary—in part 1; chronologies about production and use of fossil fuels in part 2; and reflections and speculations in part 3. Appendices offer some information on measuring environmental impacts, energy flows and inequalities, and some additional figures and tables. Using a historical approach, Pirani attempts to challenge the notion that population growth is “one of the main drivers” of fossil fuel consumption. Instead, Pirani argues, fossil fuels are consumed “by and through technological, social and economic systems, and that consumption growth is driven mainly by social and economic changes” (47). This is not a startling assessment for anyone who has read the works of Thomas Parke Hughes and others, but it does distinguish the corpus of the book from a simplified Malthusian approach. Politics is not stated as one of the systems alongside technological, social, and economic systems, rather embedded in the narrative in several places. Since politics is so important to decision-making about energy, it might have been highlighted a little more explicitly.

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