Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Energy and Geographic Thought
As we have seen, the paradox of conventional energy systems is that they are, at
present, essential to economic productivity and social well-being and yet enor-
mously destructive, crisis-prone and unsustainable. While the thermodynamic
potential of renewable energy resources far exceeds demand for energy services
worldwide, it remains that in most places and in global aggregate, far more social
investment goes to maintaining dependence on fossil fuels and other conventional
resources than to developing clean and effi cient alternative energy systems. The
question is why?
One answer is that the conceptual underpinnings of the dominant economic
theory informing conventional energy policy are fundamentally fl awed. Geogra-
phers active in the fi eld of ecological economics argue that energy insights are
essential to conceiving alternatives to neo-classical economics that recognise human
economies as embedded in environmental systems which provide essential services
that must be adequately accounted for in economic decision making (Hall et al.,
1992). Critical among these services are the supply of low entropy, high-quality
energy resources needed for productive activity and the reprocessing of high-entropy
waste from human activity back into sustainable cycles of ecological renewal. This
line of research challenges the bases of mainstream economic estimation of climate
change mitigation costs, and certainly those studies used by the Bush administration
and others to claim that carbon reduction policies pose grave threats to economic
well-being. It also challenges the wider assertion that 'economic growth is the best
environmental policy' espoused by some opposing GHG limits, and echoed in aca-
demic research suggesting that industrialisation brings with it processes of ecological
modernisation that reliably engender the capital, knowledge and politically empow-
ered citizenry necessary to move countries along an 'environmental Kuznets curve'
of decreasing pollution and decarbonisation (Selden and Song, 1994). The empirical
basis for such claims is weak (Cleveland and Ruth, 1999), and offers little hope that
'autonomous' economic processes will resolve the problems posed by conventional
energy systems (Richmond and Kaufmann, 2006). Similarly, the idea that neoliberal
privatisation and deregulatory restructuring of energy systems will improve eco-
nomic and environmental performance rests far more comfortably in the realm of
theory than experience (Solomon and Heiman, 2001; Heiman and Solomon, 2004;
Perkins, 2005). Clearly, better conceptual understanding of systems of energy,
ecology and economics is needed to guide decision making.
Such work often lacks a critical, political economic perspective that can help
explain the entrenched, though hardly static, power of fossil fuel and nuclear indus-
tries, and illuminate emergent strategies that might reshape these confi gurations of
power (though see Kaufmann, 1987). Presently, geographic research, like most
energy research, all too often seems to assume that the route to sustainability lies
largely in sound technical analysis and sober planning. It tends to overlook the often
brutal way in which 'policy' gets executed on the ground around the world. Beyond
the perils of imperial oil lie largely unexamined, geographically contextual struggles
over the future of energy industries playing out globally in highly varied ways.
Similarly, the complex top-down and bottom-up scalar strategies of sustainable
energy advocacy operating through cities, states and nations are crucial to under-
standing and enhancing transformational potentialities. One avenue to realising
