The environment – Page 32 – a sibilant intake of breath

Fracking and peak oil

The sudden abundance of oil in the United States in fact reflects a global scarcity. The shale boom bas been used to dismiss evidence of peak oil; in fact, the boom is its latest symptom. The era of easily accessible, cheaply produced, and ever increasing supplies of conventional oil that shaped the politics of the twentieth century is passing away. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest corporation, publishes an annual scenario, The Outlook for Energy, which lays out a picture each year of expanding populations, growing consumption, and the continually increasing demand for energy on which its own share value depends. But even ExxonMobil now acknowledges, toward the end of the 2013 report, that the supply of conventional oil has reached a peak and will gradually decline. [p. 38] The peak reflects the fact that oil firms have already pumped from the ground roughly half the world’s recoverable stores of conventional oil, and will produce the remainder at slower rates and with increasing difficulty.

Humankind has now consumed about two trillion barrels of oil since the rise of the modern petroleum industry in the 1860s. It is worth repeating that burning the first trillion took about 130 years, but we went through the second trillion in only twenty-two years. Estimates differ on how soon the peak in the supply of unconventional oil or other fossil fuels will arrive. But under any scenario, the rate of their depletion is astonishing.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 259-60

Saudi Arabia and the political economy of oil

The fact that oil money helped develop the power of the muwahhidun in Arabia after 1930 and made possible the resurgence of Islamic political movements in the 1970s has often been noted. But it is equally important to understand that, by the same token, it was an Islamic movement that made possible the profits of the oil industry. The political economy of oil did not happen, in some incidental way, to relied on a government in Saudi Arabia that owed its own power to the force of an Islamic political movement. Given the features of the political economy of oil – the enormous rents available, the difficulty in securing those rents due to the overabundance of supply, the pivotal role of Saudi Arabia in maintaining scarcity, the collapse of older colonial methods of imposing anti-market corporate control of the Saudi oilfields – oil profits depended on working with those forces that could guarantee the political control of Arabia: the House of Saud in alliance with the muwahhidun. The latter were not incidental, but became an internal element in the political economy of oil. ‘Jihad’ was not simply a local force antithetical to the development of ‘McWorld’; McWorld, it turns out, was really McJihad, a necessary combination of social logics and forces.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 213 (italics in original)

Mitchell on “Carbon Democracy”

A surprising oversight in Timothy Mitchell’s generally-insightful Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil is how he gives relatively little consideration to static versus mobile forms of fossil fuel consumption. He strongly emphasizes the production and transportation logistics of coal versus oil, but gives little consideration to special needs for fuels with high energy density (and sometimes low freezing points) in transport applications from cars and trucks to aircraft and rockets. People sometimes assume that oil demand and electricity production are more related than they really are, especially in jurisdictions where oil is mostly used as transport fuel and for heating (both areas where little electricity is generally used).

At a minimum, I think it’s important to give some special consideration to the needs of the aerospace and aviation industries, especially when pondering biofuel alternatives. Also, we need to try to project things like the deployment rate of electric ground vehicles in various applications, when trying to project how the forms of energy production and use in the future affect politics and low-carbon policy choices.

China continuing with coal

A characteristic of climate change policies around the world is a disjuncture between targets states adopt and the policies they implement. States pledge to keep warming below 1.5-2.0 ˚C, but then make all sorts of choices which are fundamentally at odds with that trajectory: not pricing carbon, building new high-carbon infrastructure, and generally failing to act with seriousness and urgency.

A New York Times story demonstrates how bad the disjoint in Chinese policy is. They note: “Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal” and “The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord”. Most of the proposed construction is outside China:

Shanghai Electric Group, one of the country’s largest electrical equipment makers, has announced plans to build coal power plants in Egypt, Pakistan and Iran with a total capacity of 6,285 megawatts — almost 10 times the 660 megawatts of coal power it has planned in China.

At a time when the disastrous climate plans of Trump and the U.S. Republicans are making people hope that Chinese leadership can fill the gap, China’s unwillingness to abandon coal is a major reason why today’s policies are still leading toward global climate catastrophe.

Bad news for Toronto island residents and affectionados

Toronto’s exceptionally high lake levels and accompanying flooding of beachfront and island areas may be both driven by climate change and the new normal for the city.

The National Post is quoting University of Saskatchewan professor of geography John Pomeroy saying that high temperatures and changes in the jet stream are causing the very unusually high rainfall: 142.6 mm of rain in May, compared to a normal 72 mm.

Pomeroy even goes on to suggest that the city should encourage people to permenantly relocate from the flood-prone areas, since they can only expect more such trouble in the future.

Lots of significant climate news

CPSA is keeping me busy, but there have been some interesting news stories in the last few days:

Overall, recent developments are worrisome. We know how short a window there is for action capable of hitting the Paris Agreement’s targets, and yet we continue to make contradictory policy choices.

UTAM’s first ESG report

As called for in President Gertler’s “Beyond Divestment” decision, the U of T Asset Managament Corporation (UTAM) recently released their first report on incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into the management of the school’s $9 billion portfolio (PDF).

I’m pretty tied up with the Canadian Political Science Association conference from tomorrow to Thursday, when I will be presenting a paper on pipeline resistance, but I will give it a close look afterward.

The original student group that primarily implemented the U of T divestment campaign has dissolved, but there are still efforts at subsidiary bodies like colleges and CUPE 3902 and there is at least some student interest in reviving a university-wide campaign.

CPSA prep

By next Tuesday I need to submit my paper on the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines for this year’s Canadian Political Science Association conference.

The proposed topic is media coverage and what it reveals about networks of fossil fuel opposition in Canada and the U.S. and the framings they are using.

Originally, it was meant to be an input to my old PhD project (about pipelines). The upcoming deadline, loss of that motivation, and the disappointing functionality of the Factiva and Canadian Newsstand news databases all have me rethinking the scope and focus of the paper.

The conference itself is May 30th to June 2nd. I am still waiting to hear back on TA position and internship applications, and still contemplating what to do about my present lack of a PhD supervisor.

Democracy and fossil fuels

The rise of mass democracy is often attributed to the emergence of new forms of political consciousness. The autonomy enjoyed by coal miners lends itself to this kind of explanation. There is no need, however, to detour into questions of shared culture or collective consciousness to understand the new forms of agency that miners helped assemble. The detour would be misleading, for it would imply that there was some shortage in earlier periods or other places of people demanding a less precarious life.

What was missing was not consciousness, not a repertoire of demands, but an effective way of forcing the powerful to listen to those demands. The flow and concentration of energy made it possible to connect the demands of miners to those of others, and to give their arguments a technical force that could not easily be ignored. Strikes became effective, not because of mining’s isolation, but on the contrary because of the flows of carbon that connected chambers between the ground to every factory, office, home or means of transportation that depended on steam or electrical power.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 21

Two responses:

First, it’s unfamiliar to think of fossil fuels as a positive force for social welfare.

Second, perhaps the familiar climate activist strategy of building a social movement is insufficient and we need to think about what means (if any) can align power with the objective of a stable climate.

Animal transport and the ethics of meat

In a perceptive tweet Ziya Tong argued: “In the 21st century you’ll find cameras *everywhere* except: where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes”.

I have long been of the view that if people were forced to look at where our meat, eggs, and dairy come from, few would still be willing to eat them.

That lines up with a recent episode of The Current, in which Anita Krajnc’s acquittal for giving water to pigs heading to a slaughterhouse was used to open a broader conversation about animal transport in the meat industry, including high mortality among “spent hens” used to make nuggets and chicken soup.

My vegetarianism has softened since the long period when I was pretty strict about it starting in 2005, though not for any morally-informed reason. Rather, I think it has just been a result of the way meat-eating (among so many other unsustainable and potentially unethical behaviours) is normalized in our society.

At a minimum, I will try to be more mindful again going forward. Talk of “spent hens” and the conditions of pig, cattle, and horse transport has kept me vegetarian since the broadcast.