Infinite Power to Change the World: Hydroelectricity and Engineered Climate Change in the Atlantropa Project (original) (raw)
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Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a Discourse
From climate change to acid rain, contaminated landscapes, mercury pollution, and biodiversity loss, 2 the origins of many of our least tractable environmental problems can be traced to the operations of the modern energy system. A scan of nightfall across the planet reveals a social dilemma that also accompanies this system's operations: invented over a century ago, electric light remains an experience only for the socially privileged. Two billion human beings-almost one-third of the planet's population-experience evening light by candle, oil lamp, or open fire, reminding us that energy modernization has left intact-and sometimes exacerbated-social inequalities that its architects promised would be banished (Smil, 2003: 370 -373). And there is the disturbing link between modern energy and war. 3 Whether as a mineral whose control is fought over by the powerful (for a recent history of conflict over oil, see , or as the enablement of an atomic war of extinction, modern energy makes modern life possible and threatens its future.
Review of Robert L. Bradley, Jr. and Richard W. Fulmer's Energy, The Master Resource
D espite its obvious economic and social importance, energy (broadly understood) is an understudied field. True, among academics, one can find several engineers and geologists, along with some economists, geographers, legal scholars, and political scientists, who devote much of their research efforts to devising and/or analyzing various energy-related technologies, supply sources, markets, and institutions. By and large, however, very few individuals have tried to understand how all the various parts of the energy puzzle fit-or not-together, and much-if not most-of the public discussion of the issue is agenda-driven and ignorant of basic physical and economic principles.
Energy and Society at the Beginning of the 21st Century
Angeboten für: Studierende im Master-Studiengang "Internationale Beziehungen" (anrechenbar für das Modul GPOE-IF und SIP) und ggfs. im Bachelor-Studiengang "Internationale Beziehungen" ab 3. Fachsemester sowie Studierende der Politik-, Geschichts-bzw. Kommunikationswissenschaften und ggfs. anderer Fakultäten Das Seminar findet in englischer Sprache statt.
Energy and economy: Recognizing high-energy modernity as a historical period
Economic Anthropology, 2016
This introduction to Economic Anthropology's special issue on "Energy and Economy" argues that we might find inspiration for a much more engaged and public anthropology in an unlikely place-19th century evolutionist thought. In addition to studying the particularities of energy transitions, which anthropology does so well, a more engaged anthropology might also broaden its temporal horizons to consider the nature of the future "stage" into which humanity is hurtling in an era of resource depletion and climate change. Net energy (EROEI), or the energy "surplus" on which we build and maintain our complex societal arrangements, is a key tool for anthropologists' as we bring our trademark cross-cultural, ethnographically grounded knowledge and perspectives to bear in examining the complex interplay of material infrastructures, energy flows, social organization, and culture. We are now mindful of the always already cultural nature of such circuitry and interactions-in ways obviously unavailable to our nineteenth-century forebears. And yet even as our energy futures are neither predetermined nor inevitable, neither are they as unfettered by material constraints as many have come to think. A robust anthropology of energy informed by awareness of the energetic basis of the historically specific moment in which we find ourselves seems poised to help us get beyond the developmentalist ideas of Morgan and Tylor and to overcome a seeming inability to think comprehensively about the human predicament in simultaneously general and particular terms. We have a chance in the space now opening to get beyond the antinomiesmaterialist-mentalist, infrastructure-superstructure, agency-structure, objective-subjective, and so on-that dominated much of twentieth-century anthropology.
Thermodynamics Revisited: The Political Ecology of Energy Systems in Historical Perspective
The International Handbook of Political Ecology
This chapter addresses new territory for political ecologists: the politics of energy systems. It brings concepts from thermodynamics and systems ecology into dialogue with the history of electrification to make a case for a historically grounded political ecology. The chapter centres on the assumption that fossil fuels must be substituted for an equal amount of renewable energy sources to withstand climate change and peak oil. But this conjecture is misleading. By examining the turbulent histories of electrification in the USA, the Soviet Union and the former Third World – notably in India and Cuba – it is argued that electricity systems are fundamentally historical products that represent political and economic rationales. Energy, in turn, behaves in specific ways depending on the energy system’s geographical outlay – an outlay contingent on the interests manifest in the system. The centralized long-distance transmission grids that are prevalent in the world today demand high energy input; yet this energy demand is not linked to the technology ‘itself’ but to the interests it represents. To ask how we are to replace fossilized energy potential with renewable neglects this political ecology of the energy system. Instead the interests embodied in energy systems can be challenged to achieve a low-carbon transformation. The chapter ends with suggestions for future research into the remarkably underexplored political ecology of energy systems.
Energy Civilization through Industrial Modernity and Beyond
Euro-Asian Journal of Sustainable Energy Development Policy, 2016
Three of the authors (Jensen Shearing, Skauge) are in the core group of the SANCOOP project: Transition to Sustainable Energy Systems in Emerging Economies. It is a South African Focused Comparative Project, financed by the Norwegian and South African Research councils 2014-2016. The included countries are Brazil, China, India and South Africa. This paper is based on theoretical discussions early in the project and some preliminary impressions from our interviews. Energy systems have gained new relevance. Dominated by their electricity component, energy systems were the main ingredient in forming advanced industrial-based civilizations. These energy systems are now a main actor that threatens to destroy them. The IPCC (2014) declared electrical energy production (especially coal) as the main driver of climate change. Through energy production patterns, humans are now able to destroy nature’s foundations of their civilizations; we are in the age of the Anthropocene. The paper will discuss the relation between humans and nature, as seen through energy. At the start, energy was mainly a local, even family matter, requiring skill and care. Since energy in itself is not a scarce resource, the problem of energy sources, organization and institutions comes into focus. We will discuss the perspectives and practices towards nature that came with industrialism, the new forces of governance and the resulting institutions of huge electricity grids and big power plants that resulted. The climate change challenge is one driver of change. Other drivers are cultural in nature: The century-old institutions of power production are developing problems of change and learning, but they remain powerful. Consumers start to be actors in new ways, in ordinary markets, but also as energy citizens and co-producers of energy. Technology development and structural changes point to smaller scale, flexibility and decentralization of energy production. These factors work together and create rapid development of new niches of energy production and many of them are approaching their tipping points to become major production regimes. The paper concludes with a discussion of actors forming the new system, including consumers as energy citizens and the crucial new regulatory challenges that emerge.
In 1982, in Smolenice, Czechoslavakia, and in the wake of the 1970 energy crises, ICOHTEC decided to focus on ‘energy in history’ at its 1984 symposium. The meeting in Lerbach, Germany, inaugurated energy as a subject of interest in successive symposia, with sessions regularly addressing energy resources, production, transportation and use. Tangentially, a closely related interest in the environment emerged at ICOHTEC symposia, and technology and the environment appeared as a subject in its own right. In 2000, these related topics all came together in Prague, where the symposium theme was ‘technological landscapes: energy, transport and environment.’ That same year, ICOHTEC members joined with historians of technology in the American Society for the History of Technology and with environmental historians to form Envirotech, a new organisation ‘bridging the histories of environment and technology’, and books and articles on the subject emerged from the work of ICOHTEC scholars. Subsequently, energy, technology and the environment continues to be an important and on-going subject of discussion at ICOHTEC symposia.