Thomas Turnbull | University of Oxford (original) (raw)
Papers by Thomas Turnbull
Environmental Humanities, 2024
This article explores the trials and tribulations of various attempts to store energy from a broa... more This article explores the trials and tribulations of various attempts to store energy from a broad historical and geographical perspective. It focuses on recent developments in and around Berlin but it extends into the deep past and distant stars. Taking in a wideranging sequence of historical events, it argues that certain dreams about unparalleled control over Earth's energy flows are unraveling. What if, rather than clinging to the vestiges of fossil-fueled existence or maintaining 24-7 lifestyles with banks of lithium-ion batteries, some decided to welcome the cycles and periodicities of the Sun back into their lives? It asks what we can learn from focusing on energy storage as a distinct point of exploitation, and what form resistance to new regimes of energy storage would take.
Amid a war in Southeast Asia, fomenting campus radicalism, and a looming energy crisis, a number ... more Amid a war in Southeast Asia, fomenting campus radicalism, and a looming energy crisis, a number of physicists shifted from the big science endeavors of postwar physics toward a new and little science of energy efficiency. These moves were actively supported by the American Physical Society, which took various ongoing crises as an opportunity to create employment opportunities and harness enthusiasm for more socially engaged physics. The Society's 1974 Summer School on efficient energy use was illustrative. Participants came from universities, national laboratories, industry organizations, and utility companies. Together, they estimated efficiency savings believed achievable at certain points in the US energy system. The summer school attendees argued energy efficiency should be redefined according to the second law of thermodynamics rather than the first. This approach allowed energyusing appliances to be reconceived of as sources of energy supply as well as demand. Rigorous estimates of potential savings were made. However, to the ire of more radical physicists, the school placed the onus to conserve on the consumer, ignored industrial energy use, and had been intended to avoid drastic measures. In revisiting these events, their lead-up and afterlife, this paper historicizes a now-central tenet of energy policy.
In the 1970s, employees at the RAND Corporation turned their expertise in rational decision makin... more In the 1970s, employees at the RAND Corporation turned their expertise in rational decision making toward the problem of energy demand. In surveying existing energy demand forecasts, primarily those carried out by electrical utility companies, RAND researchers found that contemporary approaches were self-serving, and that these simple extrapolative methods helped create growing demand for energy. In response, RAND developed an independent method which recast the determinants of energy demand in general systemic terms. They proposed that each consumer, appliance, and act of consumption could be reconceived of as parts of a vast and programmable energyconserving computer. The RAND approach made systems analysis and cybernetics central to energy policy, but also helped establish a misleading certainty that economic growth could be significantly decoupled from increasing rates of in energy use. The salmon pink office of the RAND Corporation on 1700 Main Street, Santa Monica, opened in 1952. Its airy reinforced concrete rooms, punctuated with an abundance of glass, were typically high modernist. The architect Harold Roy Kelley had previously designed buildings for Douglas Aircraft Company during World War II. 1 His most unique wartime project had been a five-million-square-foot structure of chicken
Given growing interest in environmental aspects of film, this chapter proposes an energo-critical... more Given growing interest in environmental aspects of film, this chapter proposes an energo-critical approach to industrial film, notable for depicting combustive processes, by suggesting four registers for reading such thermodynamic imagery: First the sensorial, which quantifies aspects of energy conversion. Second, energy is recognized in a physicist's sense, as a capacity to do work, pointing to the augmentation and denigration of human labour. Third, the imperative to save energy via increasing efficiency, a central characteristic of industrial film, manifest in portrayals of power transfers and transformations. Fourth the motif of friction is affirmed as various off-screen resistances impose themselves on the extractive processes of industry. Far from comprehensive, these registers offer starting points for reading energy's increasing pertinence back into film.
S. Gross, & A. Needham (Eds.), New Energies: A History of Energy Transitions in Europe and North America (pp. 131-148). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
Tellurische Revolutionen. In Schriften zur Verkehrswissenschaft, I. Gurschler, A. L. Hofbauer, & A. Klose (Eds.), Erden: Naturphilosophische Brocken (pp. 11-22). Wien: Sonderzahl., 2022
Für Umwelthistoriker*innen, die etwas über die Geschichte der Kohlenutzung im deutschsprachigen R... more Für Umwelthistoriker*innen, die etwas über die Geschichte der Kohlenutzung im deutschsprachigen Raum erfahren wollen, führt kaum ein Weg an Rolf Peter Sieferles Buch Der unterirdische Wald. Energiekrise und Industrielle Revolution vorbei. In eigenwilligem Ton und mit originärem Quellenmaterial beschreibt Sieferle, wie sich die mitteleuropäischen Gesellscha"en um 1800 von überwiegend mit Brennholz heizenden zu solchen wandelten, die in immer höherem Maße hunderte von Millionen Jahre alte fossile biotische Materie anzapften. Das moderne Deutschland, so der Kern von Sieferles Argumentation, wurde aus dem Überfluss an fossiler Energie geschmiedet.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 2022
This article considers the history of various attempts to derive work from the Mississippi River ... more This article considers the history of various attempts to derive work from the Mississippi River and its constituent basin. Geographer Élisée Reclus’s concept of a
‘working river’ is expanded upon in a series of reflections, meandering thoughts,
and direct observations, some of which were made from a canoe. The article considers the Mississippi as an energetic system in which nothing is lost but entropy
increases. A single drop of water is followed as it makes its way from the Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico, as it contributes to the sedimentary record of both
natural and human history. The article addresses how such flows were altered by
European hydrological beliefs, and how the misguided visions of these same kinds
of settlers created today’s cyborg watershed. Our journey ends beneath the Gulf,
where ancient geological processes of hydrocarbon formation have come to shape
the region’s fossil-fuelled present.
Contemporary European History, 2022
This article traces one aspect of Britain's approach to the political economy of energy conservat... more This article traces one aspect of Britain's approach to the political economy of energy conservation. It focuses on the forecasting work of Royal Dutch Shell and the deliberations of the Heath government. In the late 1960s, the oil major Shell predicted that oil-producing states would impose an embargo on oil-consuming states. Energy conservation policies would be necessary. In tracing the reception of Shell's 'crisis' scenario and its proposed resolution, this article details how these ideas were received by Edward Heath's Conservative government, particularly its 'think-tank', the Central Policy Review Staff. In the short term, interventionist policies were proposed so as to demonstrate Britain's ability to operate without ever-increasing oil consumption, while in the long term the idea was that the energy-saving capacities of a freely-operating market could address the problem. The article recounts the confusion these proposed conservation policies provoked, and how the second idea gradually coalesced and ultimately outlasted the Heath government, providing one justification for the eventual privatisation of Britain's formerly nationalised energy industries.
The Anthropocene Review
The Mississippi River Basin is a vast near-planar surface, an area upon which sunlight falls and ... more The Mississippi River Basin is a vast near-planar surface, an area upon which sunlight falls and wind flows. Its gently banked geomorphology channels precipitation, sediment, biota, and human activity into a dynamic locus of regional Earth system interactions. This paper describes the major features of this region’s energy exchanges from a thermodynamic Earth systems perspective. This analysis is combined with descriptions of the historical and socio-political contexts that have helped shape energy use. In doing so, the paper contrasts the region’s available energy exchanges and flows with their anthropogenic diversion, providing an account of human impact at a regional scale. It also offers theoretical estimates of the potential availabilities of renewable energy. This is contrasted with a description of the geological formation of stocks of fossil energy in the region. On these bases, a number of maps are presented and an assessment of the region’s energy flows is offered. These e...
History and Technology, 2021
The study of past 'energy transitions' are being reinterpreted as possible guides to a low-carbon... more The study of past 'energy transitions' are being reinterpreted as possible guides to a low-carbon future. But little is known about the historians who shaped how we understand our transition into a predominantly hydrocarbon-based energy system. Before energy history emerged as a subfield, historians John Nef, Edward Wrigley, and Rolf Sieferle already explained the Industrial Revolution as a result of coal use. In unleashing industrialism, they argued that coal took on an historically decisive role. These notions of energy determinism will be the central concern of this paper. In revisiting their lives and work, it will be argued that in pursuit of a low-carbon future, we should not ignore the grave concerns posed by fossil energy use nor slip into a crude form of energy determinism.
Journal of Historical Geography, 2021
This paper documents the perennial role of energy in geographic thought. Thermodynamics initially... more This paper documents the perennial role of energy in geographic thought. Thermodynamics initially challenged the discipline's evolutionary and geological precepts. This incommensurability was overcome by organismic theories of statehood. Energy went on to provide a means to make determinate statements about the relation between climate and society. With the rejection of such determinism, energy regained eminence, particularly in postwar French geography. This work encouraged economic geographers to draw on new national records of energy use to describe and analyse growing industrial economies. Concurrently, physical geographers showed renewed interest in energy as means of explanation. However, in both branches, a nascent energy geography was subsumed by a more general systems approach. It took the energy crises of the nineteen-seventies to invigorate an applied form of energy geography. In our time, it is clear fossil energy use has transformed Earth's atmospheric and biogeochemical cycles, requiring studies which address new and complex relations between energy and society. While encouraging such work, it is argued that new geographies of energy have much to learn from the old.
Competition in World Politics, Bielefeld: transcript, 2021
The interwar years saw the rise of debates and comparisons around the growth and efficiency of na... more The interwar years saw the rise of debates and comparisons around the growth and efficiency of national power economies. The article interprets this 'energetic productivism' in terms of indirect geopolitical competition. While this form of competition clearly did not rule out national conflicts over resources and territories, it created a new medium––the national power economy––via which supremacy could be asserted. The article outlines the roots of energetic productivism in the 19th century and shows how it related to imperial competition around the turn of the century. It presents two forms of energetic productivism that emerged out of two distinct nation states, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. On the basis of these examples, the article argues that ‘power competition’ was wedded to two wider political conflicts. The first was between Great Britain and ‘rising’ rival powers whose ascendence was beginning to end its industrial and political hegemony. The second power competition occurred between the Soviet Union and the capitalist countries whom this experimental new polity sought to supersede. The article concludes by contrasting these two iterations of energetic productivism with a more well-known formulation of energetic statehood proposed in the US in the 1930s.
![Research paper thumbnail of Turnbull, Thomas (2020) 'Toward histories of saving energy: Erich Walter Zimmermann and the struggle against “one-sided materialistic determinism”', Journal of Energy History/Revue d'Histoire de l'Énergie [En ligne], Vol. 1. No. 4, 2020.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/65702168/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](While energy use has appeared historically consequent for most of human history, it now seems ene... more While energy use has appeared historically consequent for most of human history, it now seems energy non-use may determine our future. It is clear that the worst effects of climate change can only be averted if vast quantities of fossil fuels go unburnt. Accordingly, this paper argues historians of energy should pay attention to the rich histories of past attempts to conserve, save, constrain, and use energy with greater efficiency. To make this argument, the paper revisits the life and work of resource economist Erich Zimmermann, and extends his thinking beyond his lifetime to address more recent concerns. In historicising past energy saving initiatives the hope is we may find new means to achieve reductions in harmful energy use.
In Carbon Nation, the historian Bob Johnson provides a novel history of energy use in America tha... more In Carbon Nation, the historian Bob Johnson provides a novel history of energy use in America that takes media and the human body as its twin sites of analysis. In doing so, Johnson productively employs both social and media theory to uncover a rich cultural history of America’s energy use. Recent histories of energy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have tended to take a resource-centered approach: Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011) traces the political transformations made possible by shifting from a predominantly coal-based social system to one of oil; Peter Shulman’s more recent Coal and Empire (2015) offers an account of the role of coal as both a source of power and commodity to be fought over, in American foreign policy; and Shellen Xiao Wu’s Empires of Coal (2015) tells the history of the Qing dynasty’s appropriation of the Western art of coal-powered industrialization. Most recently, and perhaps most congruently with Johnson’s text, Andreas Malm, in Fossil Capital (2016), describes how the shift to fossil fuels created a new ecology of labor, more conducive to the growth of capitalism than that of organic and water-powered economies. Like Malm, Johnson focuses on the physiological and social significance of fossil fuel use, but with an emphasis more on how this reception inspired myriad forms of art, film, theater, and literature.
Leonardo, 2015
Here scale is taken to imply context, consideration of which is seen to have implications for the... more Here scale is taken to imply context, consideration of which is seen to have implications for the mobility of knowledge-as-visualisation. The suggestion is that technologies of visualisation are created within, create, and are negotiated within, contexts. Virtual spaces, such as that offered by the open-data paradigm, and the means for their exploration, here via visualisation, cannot be expected to furnish the means to ultimately settle controversies, a point made by an earlier generation of sociologists of science. This argument is demonstrated via an experiment in the replication of scientific visualisation. Accordingly, the science of visualisation, it is argued, is subject to contextual affect.
Green Alliance policy insight September 2012 Cutting Britain's energy bill: making the most of pr... more Green Alliance policy insight September 2012 Cutting Britain's energy bill: making the most of product efficiency standards Energy bills continue to rise, driven by a near doubling of the wholesale price of gas between 2009 and 2011. The government's plan to restrain price rises by diversifying energy supply is beginning to work, but won't bring bills down before 2020.
Scientometrics, Jan 1, 2010
Abstract New Scientist is a British weekly magazine that is half-way between a newspaper and a sc... more Abstract New Scientist is a British weekly magazine that is half-way between a newspaper and a scientific journal. It has many news items, and also longer feature articles, both of which cite biomedical research papers, and thus serve to make them better known to the ...
Environmental Humanities, 2024
This article explores the trials and tribulations of various attempts to store energy from a broa... more This article explores the trials and tribulations of various attempts to store energy from a broad historical and geographical perspective. It focuses on recent developments in and around Berlin but it extends into the deep past and distant stars. Taking in a wideranging sequence of historical events, it argues that certain dreams about unparalleled control over Earth's energy flows are unraveling. What if, rather than clinging to the vestiges of fossil-fueled existence or maintaining 24-7 lifestyles with banks of lithium-ion batteries, some decided to welcome the cycles and periodicities of the Sun back into their lives? It asks what we can learn from focusing on energy storage as a distinct point of exploitation, and what form resistance to new regimes of energy storage would take.
Amid a war in Southeast Asia, fomenting campus radicalism, and a looming energy crisis, a number ... more Amid a war in Southeast Asia, fomenting campus radicalism, and a looming energy crisis, a number of physicists shifted from the big science endeavors of postwar physics toward a new and little science of energy efficiency. These moves were actively supported by the American Physical Society, which took various ongoing crises as an opportunity to create employment opportunities and harness enthusiasm for more socially engaged physics. The Society's 1974 Summer School on efficient energy use was illustrative. Participants came from universities, national laboratories, industry organizations, and utility companies. Together, they estimated efficiency savings believed achievable at certain points in the US energy system. The summer school attendees argued energy efficiency should be redefined according to the second law of thermodynamics rather than the first. This approach allowed energyusing appliances to be reconceived of as sources of energy supply as well as demand. Rigorous estimates of potential savings were made. However, to the ire of more radical physicists, the school placed the onus to conserve on the consumer, ignored industrial energy use, and had been intended to avoid drastic measures. In revisiting these events, their lead-up and afterlife, this paper historicizes a now-central tenet of energy policy.
In the 1970s, employees at the RAND Corporation turned their expertise in rational decision makin... more In the 1970s, employees at the RAND Corporation turned their expertise in rational decision making toward the problem of energy demand. In surveying existing energy demand forecasts, primarily those carried out by electrical utility companies, RAND researchers found that contemporary approaches were self-serving, and that these simple extrapolative methods helped create growing demand for energy. In response, RAND developed an independent method which recast the determinants of energy demand in general systemic terms. They proposed that each consumer, appliance, and act of consumption could be reconceived of as parts of a vast and programmable energyconserving computer. The RAND approach made systems analysis and cybernetics central to energy policy, but also helped establish a misleading certainty that economic growth could be significantly decoupled from increasing rates of in energy use. The salmon pink office of the RAND Corporation on 1700 Main Street, Santa Monica, opened in 1952. Its airy reinforced concrete rooms, punctuated with an abundance of glass, were typically high modernist. The architect Harold Roy Kelley had previously designed buildings for Douglas Aircraft Company during World War II. 1 His most unique wartime project had been a five-million-square-foot structure of chicken
Given growing interest in environmental aspects of film, this chapter proposes an energo-critical... more Given growing interest in environmental aspects of film, this chapter proposes an energo-critical approach to industrial film, notable for depicting combustive processes, by suggesting four registers for reading such thermodynamic imagery: First the sensorial, which quantifies aspects of energy conversion. Second, energy is recognized in a physicist's sense, as a capacity to do work, pointing to the augmentation and denigration of human labour. Third, the imperative to save energy via increasing efficiency, a central characteristic of industrial film, manifest in portrayals of power transfers and transformations. Fourth the motif of friction is affirmed as various off-screen resistances impose themselves on the extractive processes of industry. Far from comprehensive, these registers offer starting points for reading energy's increasing pertinence back into film.
S. Gross, & A. Needham (Eds.), New Energies: A History of Energy Transitions in Europe and North America (pp. 131-148). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
Tellurische Revolutionen. In Schriften zur Verkehrswissenschaft, I. Gurschler, A. L. Hofbauer, & A. Klose (Eds.), Erden: Naturphilosophische Brocken (pp. 11-22). Wien: Sonderzahl., 2022
Für Umwelthistoriker*innen, die etwas über die Geschichte der Kohlenutzung im deutschsprachigen R... more Für Umwelthistoriker*innen, die etwas über die Geschichte der Kohlenutzung im deutschsprachigen Raum erfahren wollen, führt kaum ein Weg an Rolf Peter Sieferles Buch Der unterirdische Wald. Energiekrise und Industrielle Revolution vorbei. In eigenwilligem Ton und mit originärem Quellenmaterial beschreibt Sieferle, wie sich die mitteleuropäischen Gesellscha"en um 1800 von überwiegend mit Brennholz heizenden zu solchen wandelten, die in immer höherem Maße hunderte von Millionen Jahre alte fossile biotische Materie anzapften. Das moderne Deutschland, so der Kern von Sieferles Argumentation, wurde aus dem Überfluss an fossiler Energie geschmiedet.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 2022
This article considers the history of various attempts to derive work from the Mississippi River ... more This article considers the history of various attempts to derive work from the Mississippi River and its constituent basin. Geographer Élisée Reclus’s concept of a
‘working river’ is expanded upon in a series of reflections, meandering thoughts,
and direct observations, some of which were made from a canoe. The article considers the Mississippi as an energetic system in which nothing is lost but entropy
increases. A single drop of water is followed as it makes its way from the Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico, as it contributes to the sedimentary record of both
natural and human history. The article addresses how such flows were altered by
European hydrological beliefs, and how the misguided visions of these same kinds
of settlers created today’s cyborg watershed. Our journey ends beneath the Gulf,
where ancient geological processes of hydrocarbon formation have come to shape
the region’s fossil-fuelled present.
Contemporary European History, 2022
This article traces one aspect of Britain's approach to the political economy of energy conservat... more This article traces one aspect of Britain's approach to the political economy of energy conservation. It focuses on the forecasting work of Royal Dutch Shell and the deliberations of the Heath government. In the late 1960s, the oil major Shell predicted that oil-producing states would impose an embargo on oil-consuming states. Energy conservation policies would be necessary. In tracing the reception of Shell's 'crisis' scenario and its proposed resolution, this article details how these ideas were received by Edward Heath's Conservative government, particularly its 'think-tank', the Central Policy Review Staff. In the short term, interventionist policies were proposed so as to demonstrate Britain's ability to operate without ever-increasing oil consumption, while in the long term the idea was that the energy-saving capacities of a freely-operating market could address the problem. The article recounts the confusion these proposed conservation policies provoked, and how the second idea gradually coalesced and ultimately outlasted the Heath government, providing one justification for the eventual privatisation of Britain's formerly nationalised energy industries.
The Anthropocene Review
The Mississippi River Basin is a vast near-planar surface, an area upon which sunlight falls and ... more The Mississippi River Basin is a vast near-planar surface, an area upon which sunlight falls and wind flows. Its gently banked geomorphology channels precipitation, sediment, biota, and human activity into a dynamic locus of regional Earth system interactions. This paper describes the major features of this region’s energy exchanges from a thermodynamic Earth systems perspective. This analysis is combined with descriptions of the historical and socio-political contexts that have helped shape energy use. In doing so, the paper contrasts the region’s available energy exchanges and flows with their anthropogenic diversion, providing an account of human impact at a regional scale. It also offers theoretical estimates of the potential availabilities of renewable energy. This is contrasted with a description of the geological formation of stocks of fossil energy in the region. On these bases, a number of maps are presented and an assessment of the region’s energy flows is offered. These e...
History and Technology, 2021
The study of past 'energy transitions' are being reinterpreted as possible guides to a low-carbon... more The study of past 'energy transitions' are being reinterpreted as possible guides to a low-carbon future. But little is known about the historians who shaped how we understand our transition into a predominantly hydrocarbon-based energy system. Before energy history emerged as a subfield, historians John Nef, Edward Wrigley, and Rolf Sieferle already explained the Industrial Revolution as a result of coal use. In unleashing industrialism, they argued that coal took on an historically decisive role. These notions of energy determinism will be the central concern of this paper. In revisiting their lives and work, it will be argued that in pursuit of a low-carbon future, we should not ignore the grave concerns posed by fossil energy use nor slip into a crude form of energy determinism.
Journal of Historical Geography, 2021
This paper documents the perennial role of energy in geographic thought. Thermodynamics initially... more This paper documents the perennial role of energy in geographic thought. Thermodynamics initially challenged the discipline's evolutionary and geological precepts. This incommensurability was overcome by organismic theories of statehood. Energy went on to provide a means to make determinate statements about the relation between climate and society. With the rejection of such determinism, energy regained eminence, particularly in postwar French geography. This work encouraged economic geographers to draw on new national records of energy use to describe and analyse growing industrial economies. Concurrently, physical geographers showed renewed interest in energy as means of explanation. However, in both branches, a nascent energy geography was subsumed by a more general systems approach. It took the energy crises of the nineteen-seventies to invigorate an applied form of energy geography. In our time, it is clear fossil energy use has transformed Earth's atmospheric and biogeochemical cycles, requiring studies which address new and complex relations between energy and society. While encouraging such work, it is argued that new geographies of energy have much to learn from the old.
Competition in World Politics, Bielefeld: transcript, 2021
The interwar years saw the rise of debates and comparisons around the growth and efficiency of na... more The interwar years saw the rise of debates and comparisons around the growth and efficiency of national power economies. The article interprets this 'energetic productivism' in terms of indirect geopolitical competition. While this form of competition clearly did not rule out national conflicts over resources and territories, it created a new medium––the national power economy––via which supremacy could be asserted. The article outlines the roots of energetic productivism in the 19th century and shows how it related to imperial competition around the turn of the century. It presents two forms of energetic productivism that emerged out of two distinct nation states, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. On the basis of these examples, the article argues that ‘power competition’ was wedded to two wider political conflicts. The first was between Great Britain and ‘rising’ rival powers whose ascendence was beginning to end its industrial and political hegemony. The second power competition occurred between the Soviet Union and the capitalist countries whom this experimental new polity sought to supersede. The article concludes by contrasting these two iterations of energetic productivism with a more well-known formulation of energetic statehood proposed in the US in the 1930s.
While energy use has appeared historically consequent for most of human history, it now seems ene... more While energy use has appeared historically consequent for most of human history, it now seems energy non-use may determine our future. It is clear that the worst effects of climate change can only be averted if vast quantities of fossil fuels go unburnt. Accordingly, this paper argues historians of energy should pay attention to the rich histories of past attempts to conserve, save, constrain, and use energy with greater efficiency. To make this argument, the paper revisits the life and work of resource economist Erich Zimmermann, and extends his thinking beyond his lifetime to address more recent concerns. In historicising past energy saving initiatives the hope is we may find new means to achieve reductions in harmful energy use.
In Carbon Nation, the historian Bob Johnson provides a novel history of energy use in America tha... more In Carbon Nation, the historian Bob Johnson provides a novel history of energy use in America that takes media and the human body as its twin sites of analysis. In doing so, Johnson productively employs both social and media theory to uncover a rich cultural history of America’s energy use. Recent histories of energy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have tended to take a resource-centered approach: Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011) traces the political transformations made possible by shifting from a predominantly coal-based social system to one of oil; Peter Shulman’s more recent Coal and Empire (2015) offers an account of the role of coal as both a source of power and commodity to be fought over, in American foreign policy; and Shellen Xiao Wu’s Empires of Coal (2015) tells the history of the Qing dynasty’s appropriation of the Western art of coal-powered industrialization. Most recently, and perhaps most congruently with Johnson’s text, Andreas Malm, in Fossil Capital (2016), describes how the shift to fossil fuels created a new ecology of labor, more conducive to the growth of capitalism than that of organic and water-powered economies. Like Malm, Johnson focuses on the physiological and social significance of fossil fuel use, but with an emphasis more on how this reception inspired myriad forms of art, film, theater, and literature.
Leonardo, 2015
Here scale is taken to imply context, consideration of which is seen to have implications for the... more Here scale is taken to imply context, consideration of which is seen to have implications for the mobility of knowledge-as-visualisation. The suggestion is that technologies of visualisation are created within, create, and are negotiated within, contexts. Virtual spaces, such as that offered by the open-data paradigm, and the means for their exploration, here via visualisation, cannot be expected to furnish the means to ultimately settle controversies, a point made by an earlier generation of sociologists of science. This argument is demonstrated via an experiment in the replication of scientific visualisation. Accordingly, the science of visualisation, it is argued, is subject to contextual affect.
Green Alliance policy insight September 2012 Cutting Britain's energy bill: making the most of pr... more Green Alliance policy insight September 2012 Cutting Britain's energy bill: making the most of product efficiency standards Energy bills continue to rise, driven by a near doubling of the wholesale price of gas between 2009 and 2011. The government's plan to restrain price rises by diversifying energy supply is beginning to work, but won't bring bills down before 2020.
Scientometrics, Jan 1, 2010
Abstract New Scientist is a British weekly magazine that is half-way between a newspaper and a sc... more Abstract New Scientist is a British weekly magazine that is half-way between a newspaper and a scientific journal. It has many news items, and also longer feature articles, both of which cite biomedical research papers, and thus serve to make them better known to the ...
www.anthropocene-curriculum.org, 2020
In this reflection upon the Clashing Temporalities seminar that took place as part of the Anthrop... more In this reflection upon the Clashing Temporalities seminar that took place as part of the Anthropocene River Campus, Thomas Turnbull considers the non-fixedness of the concepts of time and place that represented its core concerns. From a fishing township in the Atchafalaya basin that has seen the ecosystems it has relied upon for generations change at an alarming pace, to the mis-memorialization of history and omission of the stories of those who were enslaved at a former plantation, to a scientific model of the river that both chronicled a past and focused upon a future narrative centered around human control, the seminar evidenced the troubling myriad of temporal clashes at play in the region. But acknowledgment of and engagement with these complex clashes, the author writes, offers opportunities for generating coherent responses to the seemingly totalizing notion of the Anthropocene.
www.anthropocene-curriculum.org, 2020
Taking as a starting point the notion of the Mississippi as a “working river,” Thomas Turnbull tr... more Taking as a starting point the notion of the Mississippi as a “working river,”
Thomas Turnbull traces the various—often futile—attempts to harness the
river’s power by establishing human sovereignty over it. Having explored these histories as a traveler on the Anthropocene River Journey, he observes how experiences on the river essentially dissolved the distinction between field and archive, with the water itself evidencing not just efforts to alter the Mississippi’s flow, but the similarly shifting cultural and political dynamics that have accompanied such endeavors.