All Our Yesterdays

An interview with Dr James Palmer, about his career and his new book.

1. A little bit about who you are – how did you come to be working at Bristol and writing books about “power plants” (nice pun, btw!)

I first moved to Bristol in 2018, having worked for a few years as a lecturer at the University of Oxford. Bristol generously brought me in on a research fellowship, which was a major change of gear for me following what had been a fairly teaching-intensive career up to that point. For the first time since finishing my PhD in 2013, I had some genuine breathing space to take a step back and ask myself what I really wanted to work on – to take a few risks and try out some new ideas. I’ve always been based in Geography departments wherever I’ve studied or worked, so that’s my home turf, but the discipline is mindbogglingly broad and diverse.

Prior to coming to Bristol, I’d always studied biofuels – the growing use of crops and trees as renewable fuel sources – from the perspective of the science–policy interface. Bristol gave me space to think about the agency of plants themselves in a lot more depth, slowly connecting up my own interests with wider developments in and around geography which I had much less knowledge of at the time, like critical plants studies, vegetal geography and ecological Marxism.

2, Specifically on “Power Plants: Bioenergy, Vegetal Labour and the Politics of Productivity” – explain a little on the genesis of the book. Did it emerge organically (sorry about that) from existing concerns, or was there an “aha” moment? How long did it take to write, and what surprised you in the research/writing of it.

I can still remember the exact moment I came up with the title, sitting on the train one morning somewhere between Swindon and Bristol in the first few months of 2018. I knew what each of the chapters would roughly have to cover to give the book a degree of coherence, but for some of those chapters I hadn’t yet done the primary research. The precise arguments were a very long way from being fully formed in my mind at that point as well. But I knew the broad purpose of the book would be to trace connections between diverse forms of modern bioenergy – whether that be liquid transport biofuels, wood pellets in the electricity sector, or sustainable aviation fuels made from genetically engineered crops – and to show how those developments were all driven by a deeper desire to use the metabolic exertions of the plant kingdom to help replace fossil fuels, without calling commitments to growth or productivism into question. The actual writing took a good while – I made a start in earnest in 2020 but didn’t get to the stage of knowing I would actually finish it until early 2025. I’ve been telling myself this slow gestation period is appropriate, though, given the book’s arguments are effectively a broadside against productivism!

3. The blurb includes this – ” this book blows apart bioenergy’s reputation as a simple, benign substitute for fossil fuels. Scrutinising modern bioenergy systems in the UK, Europe and United States, Power Plants shows how vegetal lifeforms are being enrolled to reinforce energy cultures centred around logics of efficiency, productivity and economic growth at all costs.”  Using the example of so-called “Sustainable Aviation Fuels”, how does the book do that?

All imaginaries of a future in which the global aviation sector is actually pretty benign for the climate – and maybe even becomes fully ‘net zero’ by mid-century – rely on a very large expansion of jet fuel production from agricultural crops (or if not, then on a gargantuan one!). In my book, I dig into how these imaginaries are playing out in the US, where the federal government has endorsed a ‘grand challenge’ to ramp up sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production, and scientific researchers are working to optimise agricultural crops so that they yield up larger volumes of oil molecules which can then be easily converted to jet fuel. One thing I find fascinating about the science is that it often focuses on crops which have historically been grown for their sugar or starch – including sugarcane and sorghum – and effectively tries to rewire their metabolism so that they end up becoming valued not for their sugar at all, but rather for the oil they contain! The challenge is huge though – a typical transatlantic flight carrying a few hundred passengers will burn, on average, three litres of fuel per second, so the volumes of oil needed to replace even 10% of total global jetfuel consumption by 2030 are eyewatering; one estimate suggests even this modest goal would require 50 billion litres of SAF. The fact that these incredibly ambitious visions are not being laughed out of town owes a huge amount to the promise of crop science and biotechnology to engineer crop plants which can convert more incoming solar energy to biomass production, waste fewer resources, and direct their metabolic efforts more remorselessly towards maximising the output of oil—in short, to making plants which embody the principles of efficiency and productivity on a molecular level.

4. If you had the ear of the Energy Secretary for 5 minutes, besides saying “for Gaia’s sake, don’t approve Jackdaw and Rosebank”, what would you say to her?

I think I’d try to get across two key ideas. Firstly, it’s critical to wise up around industry claims that we are in the midst of a wholesale transition to cleaner forms of energy. Blending modest volumes of biofuels into petrol and diesel in the road transport sector, for example, may have offset some volume of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK and other affluent nations, but it has done nothing to address a deeper-rooted addiction to the internal combustion engine. In reality, biofuels have actually reinforced that addiction. 

Secondly, I’d push government to think really seriously about whether the reliance of its net zero plans on large volumes of carbon dioxide removal is realistic. I’m not entirely against bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – the idea of using crops and trees as alternatives to fossil fuels and then capturing the emissions and burying them permanently – but I do think the degree of faith being placed in it is extreme. In the UK, suggestions that BECCS could be removing 25 million tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere annually by 2050 obviously have huge consequences, and not just in the sense that they necessarily earmark vast amounts of land for energy crop cultivation in the future. These visions also make it a lot easier for governments to avoid taking more difficult decisions today, to force the pace of actual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions along a steeper downwards curve.

5. What next for your research?

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past few months about the future of photosynthesis. Globally, we know this process is vital to planetary health, food security and to keeping the atmosphere in a relatively stable state, but there are also growing concerns about what climate change might be doing to the ability of the earth’s land carbon sinks – all driven by photosynthesis – to keep pace with anthropogenic GHG emissions. I’d like to dig in to the science and politics of how we currently come to know something about the changing status and ‘health’ of photosynthesis at a global scale, the disagreements and conflicting viewpoints that are in play around this question, and how the wider futures of photosynthesis are being imagined by actors with quite different ideas about the best ways to repair and harness this process to help address the global environmental crisis.

6. Anything else you’d like to say (shout outs to upcoming events, other researchers whose work you admire, etc etc.

In the early stages of writing my book, I was particularly inspired by Scott Prudham’s amazing early-2000s monograph – Knock on Wood – which explores in forensic detail the history of commercial forestry in the Pacific northwest, understood as a long-term project of commodifying and remaking the nature of trees themselves. Later on, I was really indebted to Cara Daggett’s book The Birth of Energy for helping me to see how the virtuousness of work and productivity have come to be naturalised through a particular and actually quite parochial theory of what energy is, linked especially to the emergence of thermodynamics and the industrial revolution. So I have to round off by giving a shout out to both of those brilliant books – my own wouldn’t exist without them!