Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the automobiles that constituted their primary market (Fortune Magazine, 2006).
'Fossil fuel interests'- corporate and state alliances committed to those industries -
are thus entrenched at the highest reaches of power around the world. As energy
demand has grown, new energy resources have supplemented, rather than replaced,
once dominant resources. Indeed, more coal is now consumed than ever before.
The great social and economic power vested in conventional energy systems
makes challenges to their hegemony fi ercely contested. For more than a century,
key developments in social welfare have been won through struggle against prevail-
ing energy interests, beginning with basic labour rights advanced through coal mine
actions. The rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1970s brought with
it national-level policies, such as the US Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, that sig-
nifi cantly reduced pollution and other local- and regional-scale impacts of fossil fuel
use, at least in the developed world. Thus, while air pollution remains a leading
cause of premature death in the developed world, London, for example, is no longer
in danger of having 4,000 people die in one week from an inversion of choking coal
smog as happened in 1952 (Davis 2002). Instead, the most dangerous health and
safety threats have migrated now to places like Mexico City, Beijing, and Delhi.
This success in mitigating or spatially displacing some problems of conventional
energy systems, combined with low energy prices beginning in the mid-1980s, viti-
ated much of the social movement pressing for sustainable energy transformation
in the US and elsewhere. In an ironic twist, the movement has been reinvigorated
in recent years through a growing international coalition concerned with the impacts
of carbon dioxide, a gas that among fossil fuel by-products would be completely
innocuous if it didn't constitute two-thirds of the greenhouse gases (GHG) threaten-
ing to destabilise the global climate system. Geographic energy research takes place
within this context of an ongoing global, yet highly differentiated, struggle for sus-
tainability against the hegemony of fossil fuels, and the following sections explore
how issues of resource adequacy and location articulate with political economic
dimensions of this struggle.
Uneven Geographies and the Geopolitics of
Fossil Fuel Hegemony
'America is addicted to oil' declared George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union
message, as a sharp rise in oil prices and war in Iraq increased the political saliency
of problems stemming from an economy reliant on petroleum for 40% of its total
energy needs and virtually all of its transportation. The administration's principal
policy prescription for addressing this dependence - satisfy it with more oil pro-
duced domestically - was, however, at odds with research by Cleveland and
Kaufmann (2003) demonstrating the steadily diminishing
energy return on invest-
ment
(EROI) of the US and global oil industries. When US oil production peaked
in 1970, the US oil EROI was 50, meaning that for each unit of energy used to
produce oil, an 'energy surplus' of 49 units subsidised other activities throughout
the economy. Over time, as the largest, highest quality and easiest to extract oil
reserves were drawn down, EROI fell to
15, and production levels never recovered,
despite improved drilling technology and enormous federal subsidies. Proposals for
achieving national 'energy independence' through expanded domestic oil production
on a dwindling resource base are thus likely to simply fl ush additional 'billions of
dollars . . . down a dry hole' (Cleveland and Kaufmann 2003, p. 488).
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