Ending the fossil fuel era

387 Pages·2016·7.279 MB·English

by  Manno, Jack;Martin, Pamela;Princen, Thomas

Ending the Fossil Fuel Era

Ending the Fossil Fuel Era
edited by Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno, and Pamela L.
Martin
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ending the fossil fuel era / edited by Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno and Pamela L. Martin.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-02880-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-262-52733-0 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Fossil fuels. 2. Energy security. 3. Energy – Governmental policy. 4. Environmental
degradation. I. Princen, Thomas, 1951- II. Manno, Jack. III. Martin, Pamela, 1971-
T P318.E54 2015
553.2– dc23
2014034211
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Part 1 The Fossil Fuel Problem 1
1 The Problem 3
Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno, and Pamela L. Martin
2 The Biophysical: The Decline in Energy Returned on Energy
Invested, Net Energy, and Marginal Benefi ts 37
Jack P. Manno and Stephen B. Balogh
3 The Cultural: The Magic, the Vision, the Power 53
Thomas Princen
4 The Ethical: A Fossil Fuel Ethic 97
Thomas Princen
Part 2 Keeping Them in the Ground 107
Introduction to Part 2 109
5 Leaving Oil under the Amazon: The Yasun í -ITT Initiative as a
Postpetroleum Model? 119
Pamela L. Martin
6 Appalachia Coal: The Campaign to End Mountaintop Removal
Mining 145
Laura A. Bozzi
7 El Salvador Gold: Toward a Mining Ban 167
Robin Broad and John Cavanagh
vi Contents
8 Slowing Uranium in Australia: Lessons for Urgent Transition beyond
Coal, Gas, and Oil 193
James Goodman and Stuart Rosewarne
9 The Future Would Have to Give Way to the Past: Germany and the
Coal Dilemma 223
Tom Morton
10 Heating Up and Cooling Down the Petrostate: The Norwegian
Experience 249
Helge Ryggvik and Berit Kristoffersen
Part 3 The Politics of Delegitimization 277
11 The Good Life ( Sumak Kawsay ) and the Good Mind
( Ganigonhi:oh ): Indigenous Values and Keeping Fossil Fuels in the
Ground 279
Jack P. Manno and Pamela L. Martin
12 Exit Strategies 311
Thomas Princen and Adele Santana
13 On the Way Down: Fossil Fuel Politics in the Twenty-First
Century 333
Thomas Princen, Jack P. Manno, and Pamela L. Martin
Contributors 365
Index 367
Preface
Throughout our academic careers, we coeditors have tackled issues of
global environmental politics from the perspective of those who seek
social and ethical transformation. At times we have put these efforts
under the rubric of sustainability or sufficiency or decommoditization
or buen vivir (the good life). All aim at building good lives while living
lightly on the earth. In Rio in 1992 at the Earth Summit, the UN Con-
ference on Environment and Development, Jack and Tom participated
in the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and documented
their role in global environmental politics. In the early 1990s, Pam
worked in Latin America, investigating how transnational networks for
social change also changed world politics, all centering on oil and the
Amazon. By 2010, the beginning of this project on the fossil fuel era,
all three of us had turned to questions of diminishing energy resources
and a post– fossil fuel future. Tom saw a localizing trend in the Global
North — a shift in attention and action from the global, the abstract, the
placeless to the local, the concrete, the place based. Jack and Pam both
worked with Indigenous peoples (I ndigenous as a capitalized term refers
to groups of peoples, like E uropean peoples or N orth American nations,
with a common identity that involves historic claims to sovereignty and
nationhood). Jack worked with Onondaga Nation in New York State
as they strategized to prevent hydrofracking on their ancestral territory.
Pam encountered conflict in the Amazonian rain forest as she came to
know the people and their place, and the politics of the Yasun í National
Park and the oil beneath it.
When the three of us came together for the long talks that eventually
became shared writing, we realized that from our respective vantage
points, each of us saw that a fundamental shift, at once biophysical and
social, moral and spiritual, is underway. With every extreme weather
event, every economic bubble bursting, every excuse for inaction on a
viii Preface
host of critical environmental and social issues, the call for a concomi-
tant cultural shift is gaining momentum. This book is our contribution
to accelerating that momentum.
With some trepidation, we admit, we began to advance an argument
that not so long ago would have been considered extreme: imagining and
building a case for keeping fossil fuels in the ground. We no longer see
anything at all extreme in this argument, this possibility, this hope. What
is extreme is extreme extraction, beyond anything remotely sustainable
ecologically, let alone just; extreme wealth and power for the few, which
is hard to imagine is socially sustainable; and extreme weather, which
will absorb increasing amounts of resources, capital, and attention in the
coming years and decades. As we conceptualized and sought empirical
grounding for the possibility of deliberately keeping fossil fuels in the
ground, we gradually came to believe that a transition out of fossil fuels
will occur one way or another. So we asked, What might that shift look
like? What possibilities are there for positive transition? What would be
the cultural shift that parallels the energy shift? These are among the
questions that prompted this study.
The more we delved into this topic, the more we wondered why so few
scholars in the environmental sciences deal explicitly and directly with
fossil fuels. Certainly there is plenty of work being done on the impacts,
from health and ecosystem effects to cleanup and efficiencies. Looking at
our own practices and work environments, we suspect the reason is that
most of us enter this field because we like green plants and blue water,
free-roaming animals and wide-open spaces. We steer away from gooey
and sooty substances and the noxious smells they give off. And we steer
away from that messiest of all human activities— politics.
We coeditors came to realize that there is a price to be paid for
such neglect: the very substances most implicated in environmental deg-
radation and the very actors who so effectively convert concentrated
physical power to concentrated economic and political power get a
free pass. Put differently, the fossil fuel complex — that network of inde-
pendent and national oil companies and their enablers in finance and
government— can hide in the shadows, pull the levers, write the rules
of the game, displace many true costs, all while others fret about the
consequences and seek fixes. What we coeditors came to realize in this
project is that an environmental science of transformation, of transition
out of that which is demonstrably unsustainable and unjust, requires
going to the source— physically, culturally, ethically, even spiritually. It
Preface ix
requires conceiving of a politics of extractive resistance, of exiting the
industry before compelled by circumstances, of imagining the good life
after fossil fuels.
So this book is about transitional politics. Insofar as modern industrial
society is only beginning the transition away from fossil fuels, barely
showing an awareness of it, little that we offer here is definitive. Rather,
our hope with this book is to provoke a conversation and offer some
language and some examples of arguments made with the language.
Few wish to speak of the end of the fossil fuel era, let alone the end of
material growth. Here we speak of it, and speak differently from the
prevailing discourse of bounteous growth (conflating economic, material,
and so many other forms of growth), efficiency, consumer prerogative,
technological proliferation, pollution cleanup, commercial diffusion, and
financial mastery.
Philosopher Richard Rorty once said, to paraphrase, that fundamen-
tal cultural change occurs not when people argue well but when they
speak differently. 1 In this book, we attempt to speak differently, to
create a language of positive transition out of fossil fuels. We presume
that fundamental cultural change occurs when relevant cultures and
their languages change— the organizational culture of ExxonMobil, for
instance; the industry culture of oil and gas; the sectoral culture of energy
(dominated as it is by fossil fuels); the high-finance culture of economic
policy (which dominates the fossil fuel industry); the economic culture
of growth (which derives in part from the history of fossil fuel growth
and in part is a necessary condition for growth); the consumer culture
of goods seen as good so more goods must be better (until recently sup-
ported by cheap energy and costless waste deposition).
What do we mean by language here, and how does it engage a politics?
First, language is more than words, grammar, and syntax. It is concepts
and ideas, principles and norms, metaphors and stories, all that help
steer societal change in a particular direction, here away from fossil fuels
and toward a sustainable world. That steering, then, is the politics, the
influencing, the changing of images of the possible and definitions of
the good life. It is framing that escapes the dominant frames of empire,
machine, laboratory, commerce, consumption, freedom, comfort, speed,
and power and makes normal living within our means, with attention
to all peoples, not just the powerful and the privileged. For ending the
fossil fuel era— that period when fossil fuels dominate all other energy
sources worldwide — there is a distinctive politics that we try to capture