John S. Duffield will be familiar to many readers thanks to his extensive publications on U.S. and European energy policies, as well as on the role of political culture in foreign policy. His new book, under the intriguing title Fuels Paradise, brings together these various interests as it sets out to compare the energy policies of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. While not discussed elsewhere in the text, the word “paradise” is likely a reference to the elusive quest for energy security, to a paradise never to be attained. While the book refers to trends spanning more than 80 years (from the pre–World War II period to roughly 2014), the focus is on the post-1973 era. Rather than seeking to cover the entire 1973–2014 period, the author focuses on two periods: that following the 1973 and 1979 oil crises, and that surrounding the challenges to energy security in the 2000s.

The first part of the book (three relatively short chapters plus an introduction) presents the analytical framework, which is followed by five detailed case studies and a conclusion. While the general introduction presents the main theoretical puzzle driving the work (concerning what explains diverse state responses to energy insecurity), Chapter 2 focuses on the main energy security threats faced by the countries it discusses. In Chapter 3, the author—while still working at a mainly theoretical level—compares possible responses to such insecurity. Chapter 4 completes the analytical framework by focusing on the factors that may explain the choices states make in terms of responding to energy insecurity. A key focus of the chapter is on state strength and its various facets. Particularly interesting is the distinction, following James Hollifield (“Immigration and the French State,” Comparative Political Studies 23(1) (1990)), between state capacity and state autonomy as affecting public policy, both of which have at times been incorrectly conflated as “state strength.” The discussion of the difference and tension between state capacity and state autonomy, and how they are reflected in domestically focused and externally focused responses to energy security challenges, is one of the book’s key theoretical contributions.

The second part, Chapters 5 to 9, is devoted to detailed studies of each of the cases—Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. Each includes a section analyzing responses to the oil shocks of the 1970s (including subsections on background, impact of the oil shocks, and an overview of that particular country’s policy responses, followed by a discussion of domestic policy responses, including emergency preparations, energy conservation and efficiency, and promotion of substitutes for oil) and a section on externally oriented responses. The case studies move to a discussion of energy insecurity challenges, covering the period until mid-2014. Whereas the challenges faced in the 1970s (and in particular the 1973 oil shock) were largely similar, this was not the case for the energy challenges of the 2000s, which are more difficult to conceptualize as a discrete, one-time challenge, and were different for various countries. It was only in the United States that the main (perceived) challenge still revolved around the price and availability of oil, while for the others it had to do mainly with the reliability of domestic nuclear energy production (France), natural gas (the UK and Germany), and import dependency in general (Japan). In this sense, it is not surprising that the discussion on the first issue—responses to the 1970s crisis—works better than the second one.

Each case study chapter concludes with a section seeking to explain that particular country’s responses to energy insecurity by focusing on such factors as material (energy) resource endowments, economic conditions and policy constraints, state strength, policy legacies, and path dependencies, in addition to ideology, societal factors and political culture. The interest in political culture (which builds upon the author’s previous work on political culture as an important source of external state behavior) adds a twist to discussions of energy policy often based overwhelmingly on material and interest factors. A final chapter places the cases in context, compares them, and analyzes the impact of various explanatory factors. While the author does not argue specifically for the role of one factor above all others, from the context it appears that differences in energy endowments may be the key.

There is much to praise in this book. The British case, for example, provides an interesting discussion of the important role of the technical aspects of oil processing in Britain’s conceptualization of energy security. Despite Britain’s increased North Sea oil production and growing energy independence in the 1980s, it still needed to import light oil as it was “able to use only a fraction of the very light North Sea oil in its own refineries,” thus needing to continue importing heavier types of crude oil from the Middle East “in order to produce the correct mix of refined petroleum products.” (p. 81).

I found the case study on the United States one of the most interesting in the book. Especially noteworthy was the insight that of all the countries examined, it was U.S. energy policy that had changed the least between 1973 and 2014. Rather than moving away from oil, the United States responded to the oil shocks of the 1970s by creating a crude oil reserve (the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, SPR), which meant that it continued to be vulnerable to oil market swings. The United States concentrated more on external than internal policy actions, where consistent policymaking was hindered by the division of policy responsibilities, and the difficulty of getting the needed legislation passed by Congress. This is the main reason why increased taxes on gasoline and crude oil, a globally, widely used policy instrument, could not be used effectively. It was also interesting to learn that in the decades following World War II, America’s main problem, to a certain extent, was not oil that was too expensive but rather the influx of overly inexpensive oil, which took market share from the more expensive U.S.-produced oil (p. 243). The discussion of policies concerning SPRs and who should be responsible for them, as an illustration of the paradoxes created by mismatches of policymaking autonomy and domestic capacity, is also highly interesting. In the case of the United States, it was, paradoxically, the state’s weakness vis-à-vis oil companies that led to the need for the state to play a central role in the SPRs, whereas in other cases, the state was able to place that responsibility on the companies themselves (see pp. 301–2).

For all its positive contributions, there are a few key things a reader may find missing in the book. It would have been nice if Duffield had engaged more critically with the concept of energy security itself. For example, does dependence on energy imports equal energy insecurity? Similarly, a more nuanced discussion of how the cases were chosen would have been useful. Is the fact that they are “advanced democracies” the only criterion? Why specifically these cases? An explicit discussion of how the political characteristics of these states (either their shared status as advanced democracies or differences concerning specific characteristics, such as party system and number of veto players, among others) affected their ability to deal with extensive energy challenges is missing.

The discussion of Britain, France, and Germany would have been much stronger if there had been more discussion of how European Union processes and regulations affected the picture. Especially considering how important EU legislation and policy initiatives have been for the UK, France, and Germany in dealing with these challenges, it is surprising to see these issues receive little attention. While the concluding chapter includes a section discussing EU energy policy specifically, an analysis of how EU initiatives in other areas, such as competition policy, have affected the energy markets, as well as states’ abilities to deal with such challenges, is absent.

Although the case studies include very detailed discussion of policies followed, there is much less about the actors influencing these policies; little attention is paid to the role of interest groups and companies. While this is not surprising given the author’s preference for taking the state as the key actor and unit of analysis, it also limits the analytical power of the enterprise, and makes it harder to understand the actual sources of policy. Finally, it would have been nice to see the five case studies placed in the context of other energy-dependent states (such as a number of post-Soviet states) and the literature discussing their own policy choices concerning their own energy insecurity.

These critical remarks, however, should be put in the context of the magnitude of the task taken up by the author. Fuels Paradise can be recommended to those interested in the energy policies of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States as a companion to, and contextualization of, more technical review materials on specific countries, such as those by the International Energy Agency (IEA), on which the book draws extensively. The case study on the United States, as well as the discussion of fracking as applied to oil and natural gas and an overview of fracking’s impact on different parts of the world (Chapter 10, pp. 318–25), can also be highly recommended as reading for undergraduate survey courses on energy and energy policy.