The Coming Transition: Fossil Capital and Our Energy Future¹

1 Many of the arguments in this article were developed during a 4-day workshop at the University of Alberta, the After Oil School. The event gathered roughly 35 academics and artists from around the world to work through key questions surrounding energy and energy transition. I am grateful to participants in this event, especially Darin Barney, Jeff Diamanti, Richard Kover, Mark Simpson, and Sheena Wilson. The collectively-written document is available at www.afteroil.ca. I would also like to thank Imre Szeman for his continued support and mentorship. This research was supported from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Many of the arguments in this article were developed during a 4-day workshop at the University of Alberta, the After Oil School. The event gathered roughly 35 academics and artists from around the world to work through key questions surrounding energy and energy transition. I am grateful to participants in this event, especially Darin Barney, Jeff Diamanti, Richard Kover, Mark Simpson, and Sheena Wilson. The collectively-written document is available at www.afteroil.ca. I would also like to thank Imre Szeman for his continued support and mentorship. This research was supported from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

2 On conceptualizing energy as a social relation, see especially Boyer (2014), Huber (2013), Johnson (2015), LeMenager (2014), and Szeman (2013).

3 For an excellent account of the ways in which science fiction (SF) pushes the limits of our collective energy imaginary, see Graeme Macdonald’s “Improbability Drives: The Energy of Sf” in volume 26 of Paradoxa.

4 See Platform London, http://platformlondon.org/; After Oil, http://afteroil.ca/; Petrocultures Research Group, http://petrocultures.com/

5 Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman describe the energy humanities as “a rapidly emerging field of scholarship that overcomes traditional boundaries between the disciplines and between academic and applied research. Like its predecessors, energy humanities highlights the essential contribution that the insights and methods of the human sciences can make to areas of study and analysis that were once thought best left to the natural sciences” (2014: n.p.).

6 “Fossil capital” builds on Andreas Malm's (2013) use of the term, signifying the ways in which contemporary capitalism and fossil fuels are co-determinant and co-reliant.

7 Purely technological conceptions of energy and transition, often inspired by a variant of technological determinism, are plenty. They can be found, for instance, in the kinds of entrepreneurial energy ventures from Elon Musk and Telsa Motors that champion a transition to electric automobiles without addressing the larger systems and (infra)structures that maintain fossil capital, and perhaps most prominently from oil companies. In a 2015 speech, for example, Projects & Technology Director of Royal Dutch Shell, Harry Brekelmans, argues that it is primarily innovation that will stimulate transition (2015: n.p.); in doing so, he undermines the social history of energy. Even Vaclav Smil seems to revert to this technological impulse when musing on the unfeasibility of a transition beyond oil in any near future (2010: 105).

8 I focus largely on North American and otherwise “Western” movements because of my familiarity with them. That said, many of my observations can be extended globally.

9 While Urry is well-known for his work on automobility, a concept that describes the embeddedness of the private car in contemporary North American life, he has recently extended his focus to the relationship between energy and society. See, for example, Societies Beyond Oil: Oil Dregs and Social Futures (2013) and Offshoring (2014).

10 As Lars Kristoferson explains, “The question of energy supply is, and will always be, the center of all power politics and the base of all economic activity. Therefore, it is self-evident that energy policy is a political problem, and not primarily a technological one” (1973: 178).

11 Ethical Oil is a Canadian pseudo-grassroots group that takes its inspiration from Ezra Levant's book of the same name; their key argument is that, in contradistinction to “conflict oil,” Canadian oil is democratic since it is produced in a parliamentary democracy and should thus be valued more. Such campaigns are reactionary at their core, veiling their problematic arguments behind appeals to democracy.

12 Recent groups and campaigns like Liberate Tate, which occupied the Tate Museum demanding that it renounce its BP sponsorship, highlight a productive element to divestment.

13 Naomi Klein (2014) describes this in a chapter entitled “Blockadia.” For a critical account of this struggle, see Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas's Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta.