The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
This week, we will consider energy as an important mediator of human-environment relations. In seeking energy sources, in recovering and using energy, humans necessarily make modifications (big and small) to their environment as well as to themselves. Energy production, distribution, and consumption re-orient human-environment relations as well as human societies. This week, the course looks at the sub-field of energy geography – what it is and what it studies. This week’s readings, on oil and biofuels, problematize two ideas that have become common sense when thinking about energy: first is the idea that scarcity of resources is a result of natural, geological limits; and second, the idea that renewables are beneficial for everyone.
Consider these questions as you go through the material for this week as well as when completing your assignment:
To Read | Read the Week 8 course content. |
Use the links below to continue moving through the lesson material. |
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To Read | Huber, M.T. (2011) Enforcing scarcity: oil, violence, and the making of the market. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 101(4):816–826. | A link to the reading is located in the Week 8 module in Canvas. |
To Read | Baka, J. (2016). Making space for energy: Wasteland development, enclosures, and energy dispossessions. Antipode doi: 10.1111/anti.12219. | A link to the reading is located in the Week 8 module in Canvas. |
To Submit | See Canvas, course announcements. |
Note: Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates.
While energy geography has existed as a sub-field within geography for at least the past three decades, the interest in energy issues has been cyclical, spiking around the time of energy crisis (Solomon & Calvert, 2017). However, with energy taking center stage in regional, national, and international policy and public debates, scholarship in energy geography has seen a resurgence since the mid-2000s (Huber, 2015). Geographers argue that the inter-disciplinary nature of geographical research makes the discipline well-placed to engage with critical question of energy as well as affecting policy.
Calvert (2016) suggests that the approach of geography to energy studies is best thought of as “an academic borderland”, as it lies somewhere in the overlap between the (four) sub-disciplines of geography.
Energy is simultaneously:
Energy geographers have studied the entire value chain of energy, from fuels and the extraction of energy to its distribution and consumption. A large part of the geographical work on energy has been to highlight the unequal distribution of benefits and costs that emerge from energy systems. Pasqualetti (2011), in his review of books in energy geography, notes the shifts that have occurred in the subjects studied by energy geographers since the 1950s. While in its formative years, energy geography concentrated on the location of resources, regional energy systems and nuclear power; since the 2000s, the focus has moved to climate change, energy justice, energy security, and renewable energy. While oil has been the most studied resource, recent scholarship in energy geography has turned its attention towards renewable sources of energy (solar, wind) as well as non-conventional sources (shale gas, oil sands).
In his review of energy geography, Calvert (2016) concludes that energy geography scholarship includes the description and explanation of:
“Dedicated to the 25 orangutans we lose every day” “Let’s stop palm oil destroying the forest”.
These are the lines with which the Greenpeace video on palm oil deforestation ends. This video, released by the organization on the internet in August 2018, recently made headlines when it was banned from being telecast to UK television screens when it was submitted as a Christmas ad.
Palm oil is extracted from the fruit of the Oil Palm trees. It is an efficient crop and a highly versatile oil, which has resulted in it being used in the manufacture of all sorts of products – from pizza to shampoos; from detergents to diesel. However, palm oil production is a major driver of deforestation and is destroying the habitat of endangered animals like the orangutan. A large part of the palm oil produced is exported to other countries (European Union, China, India, etc.) where it is used for a variety of purposes, including conversion to Biofuel.
In thinking about the geographies of palm oil, consider the following:
Indonesia and Malaysia currently account for 86% of the global palm oil production, and palm oil production is increasingly contributing to the 1.5% annual deforestation rate in these countries (Fargione, Hill, Tilman, Polasky, & Hawthorne, 2008).
The population of orangutans in Borneo has fallen by 80% over the past 75 years as a result of habitat destruction. The Sumatran Orangutan was declared critically endangered in 2016 (Emont, 2017).
The impact of biofuels on climate change is not clear: “Our analyses suggests that biofuels [such as palm oil], if produced on converted land, could, for long periods of time, be much greater net emitters of greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels that they typically replace” (Fargione et al., 2008, p. 1237)
However, the palm oil story is much more complicated. Consider the following:
Read more on Palm Oil here:
References:
Calvert, K. (2016). From “energy geography” to “energy geographies”: Perspectives on a fertile academic borderland. Progress in Human Geography, 40(1), 105–125.
Emont, J. (2017, April 25). A Refuge for Orangutans, and a Quandary for Environmentalists. The New York Times.
Fargione, J., Hill, J., Tilman, D., Polasky, S., & Hawthorne, P. (2008). Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt. Science, New Series, 319(5867), 1235–1238.
Huber, M. (2015). Theorizing Energy Geographies. Geography Compass, 1–12.
Keller, E. (2018). 10 things you should know about palm oil. Retrieved December 14, 2018, from https://blogs.wwf.org.uk/blog/habitats/forests/10-things-you-should-know... [2]
Meidiwaty, D. J. (2017, May 8). Opinion | Indonesia and Palm Oil. The New York Times.
Pasqualetti, M. J. (2011). The Geography of Energy and the Wealth of the World. In Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Vol. 101, pp. 971–980).
Solomon, B. D., & Calvert, K. E. (2017). Introduction: Energy and the geographical traditions. In B. D. Solomon & K. E. Calvert (Eds.), Handbook on the Geographies of Energy. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Solomon, B. D., & Pasqualetti, M. J. (2004). History of energy in geographic thought. In C. J. Cleveland (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Energy (Volume 2, pp. 831–842). San Diego, CA: Elsevier.
Zimmerer, K. S. (2011). New Geographies of Energy: Introduction to the Special Issue. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(4), 705–711.
Huber MT (2011) Enforcing scarcity: oil, violence, and the making of the market. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 101(4): 816–826.
Is the scarcity of oil a geological fact? Does resource scarcity result in ‘resource wars’? These are the two main questions Huber examines in his 2011 article. Predictions of the scarcity of key resources, especially oil, make headlines every now and then. The idea of “peak oil”, wherein the global oil production will reach a peak and then decline, are especially popular. This scarcity of natural resources is seen by many as the reason for wars and violence. Indeed, as Huber suggests, many assume that securing oil reserves was one of the motivations for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
However, geographers have shown that scarcity is socially produced. This is not to deny that resources are finite, but to say that what is understood as scarcity (i.e., not enough resources available for current consumption) is socially produced. Historically, for the global petroleum industry, the problem has never been scarcity, but overproduction; this can be seen in the multiple efforts by the OPEC to coordinate production as well as in the volatility of global oil prices. Thus, oil producers use institutional arrangements to try and create a level of scarcity that will result in prices that would allow for profits but not deter consumption. Thus, oil scarcity is “actively managed” (p. 819).
Huber then goes on to examine the role of violence in this process. Through his study, the enforcement of martial laws in response to overproduction in the oilfields of Texas and Oklahoma in the 1930s, he argues that violence is necessary to enforce scarcity. Thus, rather than resulting from scarcity, violence is used to produce and enforce scarcity. To Huber, “in capitalism, commodity relations presuppose the social production of scarcity” (p. 823). Violence, thus, is necessary for the functioning of capitalism as it enforces scarcity, which in turn is necessary for stabilizing commodity production and prices and making profit.
While reading this article, reflect on which resources or commodities you think are scarce and why, particularly on how these commodities are produced, made available to you, and how they are consumed.
Baka, J. (2016). Making space for energy: Wasteland development, enclosures, and energy dispossessions. Antipode doi: 10.1111/anti.12219.
In this article, Baka draws attention to the geographies of ‘renewable’ energy sources, in this particular case, the cultivation of Jatropha for the production of biodiesel in India. She shows that the cultivation of Jatropha is the latest iteration of the Government of India’s efforts to develop “wastelands”. Underpinning these efforts is the narrative of “wasteland” which are seen as “underperforming common lands with the potential to be improved and provide a societal benefit if enclosed” (p. 980).
The narrative of wasteland has a long history in India, with new programs implemented depending on the changing ideas of “improvement” of the government. In this case, the fuelwood species of Prosopis, was planted under an earlier Social Forestry program to provide fuelwood for local consumption as well as take pressure off production forests. This cultivation was later termed “backward” when the new policy decided to replace it with Jatropha for the production of biofuel. The introduction of Prosopis, however, had yielded some benefits, since it had given landless households access to free fuelwood and its invasive quality required constant tending which had generated considerable employment. The replacement of Prosopis with Jatropha would erase these benefits through, what Baka terms, “energy dispossessions” wherein the introduction of new kind of energy erases certain existing energy economies as well as associated livelihoods.
“Yet, wasteland development has failed to achieve its goals necessitating further rounds of wasteland development” (p. 983). This narrative of wasteland persists, Baka argues, to obscure the underlying tension between the government’s vision of development (and its attempts to partner with private industry for wasteland development) and the practices of the local people. Thus, Baka concludes, the category of “wasteland” will not go away since it is needed by the government to carry out “improvements”.
While reading this article, reflect on how biofuels and renewables change the land-use patterns of the sites where they are promoted. Consider how categories such as “wastelands” come to be constructed and then persist despite evidence against their underlying logic.
NOTE: Links to the readings are located in the Week 8 module in Canvas.
This week, we have learnt about Energy Geographies, with a focus on the ways energy scarcity is created and manipulated and an examination of some of the complications with renewable energies.
To wrap up, please take the time to find out which company supplies your energy and how they source it.
You have reached the end of Week 8. Double-check the Week 8 Checklist list on the Week 8 Overview page [4] to make sure you have completed all of the tasks listed there before you begin Week 9.
Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates.