Energy and Society

A Critical Perspective

Gavin Bridge, Stewart Barr, Stefan Bouzarovski, Michael Bradshaw, Ed Brown, Harriet Bulkeley, Gordon Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351019002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Écologie

Energy and Society is the first major text to provide an extensive critical treatment of energy issues informed by recent research on energy in the social sciences. Written in an engaging and accessible style it draws new thinking on uneven development, consumption, vulnerability and transition together to illustrate the social significance of energy systems in the global North and South. The book features case studies, examples, discussion questions, activities, recommended reading and more, to facilitate its use in teaching. Energy and Society deploys contemporary geographical concepts and approaches but is not narrowly disciplinary. Its critical perspective highlights connections between energy and significant socio-economic and political processes, such as globalisation, urban isation, international development and social justice, and connects important issues that are often treated in isolation, such as resource availability, energy security, energy access and low-carbon transition.

Co-authored by leading researchers and based on current research and thinking in the social sciences, Energy and Society presents a distinctive geographical approach to contemporary energy issues. It is an essential resource for upperlevel undergraduates and Master's students in geography, environmental studies, urban studies, energy studies and related fields.

Part One
Energy, spaces and flows

Part 1 – Energy, spaces and flows – explores how energy systems shape social practices and structures, and vice versa. Energy and society constitute each other in important ways, and the four chapters in this opening section examine different aspects of this two-way relationship. Each unfolds a different socio-technical ‘layer’ of energy–society interaction, starting with natural resources (Chapter 1), progressing through economies (Chapter 2) and infrastructures (Chapter 3), and arriving at geopolitics (Chapter 4). Core concerns across chapters in Part 1 are the material, social and spatial characteristics of energy production, distribution and consumption, and the uneven distribution of resources, knowledge, and social power.

One of the main arguments in this book is that, to develop a critical perspective on energy–society relations, we need to contextualise and materialise the abstraction (Energy) we have inherited from the nineteenth century (see Introduction). Our focus on spaces and flows in Part 1 takes this perspective forward. By Space we mean the places, communities, regions and territories within and through which energy capture, transformation and consumption take place. Highlighting these territorial and place-based attributes is a way of ‘grounding’ energy production and consumption in particular geographical and material contexts. It draws attention to the interactions, dependencies and feedbacks between these processes and the locales and settings in which they occur. In addition, it acknowledges that spatial inequalities and uneven distribution are fundamental to energy–society relationships, and need to be taken seriously in any socio-technical analysis. Space, here, is a flexible term: it does not imply one particular size or scale (e.g. city, region, or nation) but can be stretched, shrunk or folded to suit. Accordingly, the chapters in Part 1 range telescopically across a full spectrum, zooming in on the intimate scale of the household and panning back out to encompass the whole planet (and everything in between). A key idea throughout the book is that energy systems’ spatial forms are dynamic: whether it is the scale of electricity networks, the shape of cities, or patterns of global trade, these spatial forms evolve with changes in energy–society relations.

Our attention to Flows in Part 1 is a similar contextual move, and emphasises the connections, interactions and movements forged through energy production and consumption. It draws attention to the multiple ways in places may be (dis)connected via energy, including resource movements, manufacturing trade, financial flows, infrastructural connections and the diffusion and circulation of policy ideas. Highlighting flows as a form of connection reveals how intensities of interaction vary across space (some places are more connected than others) and time (the same places can become more or less connected). Talk of spaces and flows may sound philosophical, but such issues are central to many energy-related policy concerns. In the area of transport policy, for example, advocates of aviation and high-speed rail celebrate the capacity of these infrastructures for decreasing travel time and increasing the frequency and intensity of interactions between places. Critics, however, point to the increased energy consumption (and carbon emissions) associated with higher speeds; and how, by linking centres of economic power and targeting users who are already relatively well off, high speed travel tends to intensify existing social inequalities rather than reduce them. Part 1 explores issues like these across a wide range of contexts.

The chapters in Part 1 harness the concept of landscape as a way of bringing together energy, spaces and flows. Landscape has the advantage of being a familiar and well-understood concept: it is, perhaps, that rare example of a well-known ‘common-sense’ idea that may still be made to do important analytical work. As a critical concept, landscape reaches back to efforts early in the twentieth century to understand the dual influences of cultural and physical factors in ‘shaping the face of the earth’ (Simmons 1996). Landscape describes a configuration of natural and cultural features across a broad space, and gestures towards the history of their production and interaction. At a time when researchers sought either to prove the determining influence of the environment on human behaviour, or to assert human control over environmental processes, landscape was an attractive concept: it provided a way to acknowledge, simultaneously, the influence of social and natural phenomena, and to hold them together rather than separate them apart or reduce one to an effect of the other. In this way landscape sat – and continues to sit – somewhat awkwardly astride one of the most enduring divisions in the history of scientific thought: the divide between the physical and social sciences. Landscape may be a familiar and apparently unadventurous idea but, from the beginning, it has cut across and challenged some of the most significant boundaries that discipline conventional thought.

The chapters in Part 1 pick up this powerful idea and explore four different instances of energy landscape. We define an energy landscape as the constellation of activities and natural and socio-technical relations through which energy production and/or consumption are achieved within a given space. Energy landscapes, therefore, simultaneously combine nature and culture, action and relation, the visible and invisible, and past and future. Energy landscapes adopt many different forms, and the chapters in Part 1 examine four broad types: resource landscapes, economic landscapes, infrastructural landscapes, and geopolitical landscapes.¹ Chapters in Part 1 mobilise the concept of landscape to achieve several different things. First, as part of a contextual perspective on energy–society relations, landscape draws attention to the interactions among natural, social and technical phenomena in ways that align well with a socio-technical approach to energy systems. It acknowledges the heterogeneity of energy systems (that they are made up of materials and relations that have different properties and qualities), and the diversity of forms into which these materials and relations can be combined (Frantál et al. 2014). An energy resource landscape such as a hydroelectric dam, oil field or wind farm, for example, is a “heterogeneous category” in that it is made up of “multiple sites, scales and forms, and involves many potential forms of social relation and engagement between ‘publics’ and technologies” (Walker and Cass 2007: 458).

Second, the concept draws attention to the practices and processes that lie behind the production and maintenance of energy landscapes (Nadaï and van der Horst 2010). Energy landscapes are frequently durable, shaping livelihoods and social practices over long periods of time. At the same time, they are also subject to change: energy landscapes emerge, proliferate and mature; they also decline, fall out of use and are abandoned. Most often these changes are slow, although, occasionally, they can be rapid and sudden. A landscape perspective, with its emphasis on practices and processes, shows how the durability and apparent permanence of some energy landscapes is not inherent to particular fuels or forms of consumption, but arises from repeated patterns of social interaction with material infrastructures (Haarstad and Wanvik 2016). In this way energy landscapes are “a connective tissue, a highly contextualised membrane that helps society to mould and be moulded in relation to an energy system” (Castán Broto et al. 2014: 193). Third, landscape opens a door for thinking about who governs its form and use, who is able to access the energy flows it can yield, and whose interests drive energy-related decisions. From this perspective, energy resources and infrastructures are not only ‘inputs’ to an energy system, but also outcomes of the way such systems are socially organised. Energy landscapes, then, can be read as expressions of economic and political power. This kind of critical landscape reading can be an effective way of opening up debate on energy futures, particularly in situations where policy options appear limited and there seems to no alternative to certain courses of action.

Fourth, landscape conveys a sense of everyday surroundings that draws attention to the way energy saturates all aspects of social life. This means not only that energy landscapes are everywhere, but also that addressing contemporary energy challenges requires configuring natural and socio-technical relations differently, and in ways that will transform the value, function and significance of established and familiar landscapes. It is no surprise, then, that “landscape has become a key arena in the debate on energy policy” (Nadaï and van der Horst 2010: 143; Pasqualetti 2011). Transition towards a low-carbon economy, for example, means scrutinising landscapes dedicated to the extraction or combustion of fossil fuels for ways in which their carbon-intensive character might be foreclosed, mitigated or offset. At the same time, landscape forms that sequester and store carbon (e.g. forests and peatlands), or that provide opportunities for the generation of low-carbon energy, gain new sources of potential value and are targeted for commercial development (Bridge et al. 2013). The concept of landscape, then, can be a useful tool for thinking through some of the most challenging issues associated with transforming energy–society relations. Fifth, landscape conveys the commonplace notion of an extensive surface bearing the imprint of human activity. It points, therefore, to the environmental, economic and political consequences of energy production, transmission, storage and consumption, and the way energy systems can leave lasting traces in the social fabric and on the built and natural environment (Mitchell 2011; Huber 2013). These far-reaching consequences of the energy system are acknowledged by the chapters in Part 1 and are the primary focus of Part 2.

Introduction to the Chapters in Part 1

Resource landscapes (Chapter 1) examines the massive expansion of energy availability since the Industrial Revolution; the wide range of raw materials and locations that have social value because of the energy services they can provide; and the dominance of fossil fuel extraction and thermal power generation in the global energy mix. It explores how certain socio-technical characteristics of energy resources and conversion technologies – energy density, susceptibility to control, power density, carbon intensity – influence how, where and when energy is harnessed; and the economic, political and environmental consequences to which resource landscapes give rise. All energy resource landscapes have environmental impacts, and the chapter considers how recognition of a global carbon constraint now shapes resource landscapes in significant ways. The chapter highlights the contested character of energy resource landscapes, and how they express – and, in turn, shape – the exercise of economic and political power.

Economic landscapes (Chapter 2) explores the linkages between economic activity and the availability, reliability and cost of energy at a range of scales. It outlines energy’s role as a vital economic input and ‘factor of production,’ and shows how energy availability has re-worked several economically significant spatial forms. These include the horizontal footprint and vertical skyline of cities, the globalisation of manufacturing, and the everyday experience of space and time. Chapter 2 also explores how energy systems are currently an economic ‘frontline’ in a century-old struggle over whether economies should be organised around private or public forms of ownership. It highlights a renewed interest in public ownership following several decades of economic liberalisation and privatisation, and the impact of renewable energy on the emergence of alternative models to the state firm and corporate utility.

Infrastructural landscapes (Chapter 3) focuses on the networks that circulate, store and transform energy at a range of scales, from localised off-grid solutions to expansive transnational systems. It explores how energy infrastructure has become embedded in material and social life in different ways; and how moments of infrastructural breakdown (pipeline ruptures, electricity blackouts) reveal their underlying spatialities and vulnerabilities. The chapter considers the qualities of permanence, obduracy, modular growth, and invisibility that characterise these networks, and shows how they co-evolve with economic, political and technological change. The chapter highlights how, in the context of climate change, energy’s infrastructure landscapes both sustain and lock in high energy ways of living, as well as offering possibilities of change towards a low carbon future.

Geopolitical landscapes (Chapter 4) focuses on how energy production, distribution and consumption shape international relations, and are embedded in the geopolitics of inter- and intra-state competition, co-operation and conflict. It considers the ways in which energy has been integral to the making of political projects in the broadest sense, including the creation of the nation state and the making of the modern citizen. It examines how the geopolitics of the contemporary carbon-intensive energy system are increasingly connected to the responses of states and cities to climate change, and the process of economic globalisation. The chapter reflects on emerging geopolitical relations around low-carbon energy, and how these are shaped by the different geographies, temporalities and scalability of low-carbon energy capture and generation technologies.

Note

1 Energy consumption features extensively within Part 2 (particularly Chapters 5 and 6), and elements of it appear in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.

References

Bridge, G., S. Bouzarovski, M. Bradshaw and N. Eyre. 2013. Geographies of energy transition: space, place and the low-carbon economy. Energy Policy 53: 331–340.

Castán Broto, V., D. Salazar and K. Adams. 2014. Communities and urban energy landscapes in Maputo, Mozambique. People, Place & Policy 8(3): 192–207.

Frantál, B., M.J. Pasqualetti and D. van Der Horst. 2014. New trends and challenges for energy geographies: introduction to the Special Issue. Moravian Geographical Reports 22(2): 2–6.

Haarstad, H. and T. Wanvik. 2016. Carbonscapes and beyond: conceptualizing the instability of oil landscapes. Progress in Human Geography 41(4): 432–450.

Huber, M.T., 2013. Lifeblood: oil, freedom, and the forces of capital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Mitchell, T., 2011. Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil. London and New York: Verso Books.

Nadaï, A. and D. van der Horst. 2010. Introduction: landscapes of energies. Landsca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of definitions
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a critical perspective on energy–society relations
• PART 1 ENERGY, SPACES AND FLOWS
• PART 2 SECURITIES, VULNERABILITIES AND JUSTICE
• PART 3 TRANSITIONS, GOVERNANCE AND FUTURES
• Index