Value as ethics: Climate change, crisis, and the struggle for the future

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I contribute novel ethnographic insights into how oil and gas experts understand notions of value. I show that prevailing notions of value are normatively defined in economic terms and closely tied to understandings of an American “way of life.” Questions of value, I suggest, reveal our idiosyncratic and shared ethical orientations toward what we think is important and the futures we are fighting to create. The climate crisis, as such, is not a crisis of emissions or hydrocarbons but a crisis of how value is assigned to worldly things. I conclude by arguing that until we address questions of value, we are unlikely to address the existential crisis of anthropogenic climate change.