Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in Houston, Texas, to explore how the perceived risks of, and responsibilities for, climate change are entangled with a kind of temporally-oriented ‘energy ethics’ that dovetail with the industry’s prevailing financial and accounting practices.

Paper long abstract:

Tom asked me:

“Are you really willing to change your entire life and your economy and impoverish the planet over a concern that's generated from a computer model that says temperatures, 50 years from now, are going to be two degrees different? Are you willing to do that?... Why would you change your entire life on what the weatherman says the temperature is going to be when he's not even right next week?

Tom is a respected reservoir engineer turned influential hydrocarbon financier, and a prominent member of Houston’s oil and gas community. His responsibility for the impact of climate change is to his current investors and the broader welfare of people today, he suggests, and his perspective is representative of an ethos that runs through this community.

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in Houston, Texas, to explore how the perceived risks of, and responsibilities for, climate change are entangled with a kind of temporally-oriented ‘energy ethics’. Attributing climate change to ‘natural’ causes and casting doubt on climate change risk predictions vacates human responsibility for its anthropogenic causes, its current manifestations, and what should be done about it. This vacation, I show, provides an opportunity to posit a capitalist-oriented ethics of what is ‘right’ and ‘good’ with a presentist sense of humanist responsibility when it comes to the exploration and production of oil and gas, which dovetail with the prevailing temporal horizons of the industry’s financial and accounting practices.

Paper short abstract:

2008 represents an important date for contemporary economics. That year not only saw a significant financial crisis but even the issue of the first green bond and bitcoin’s first white paper. After more than a decade, it’s time to analyze how those technologies are transforming capitalism

Paper long abstract:

Technology is usually seen as a neutral or positive term: it indicates devices or tools improving humans’ work. It comes from the Greek τέχνη, “art of doing something”, “expertise”; current mainstream use then indicates only the material, tangible part of this improving mechanism. However, critical authors (eg. Foucault, Hornborg) often used this term to refer to its immaterial meaning, highlighting how intangible devices embed/depend on/enforce power relationships actually managing humans’ economic activities (on the broader definition given by Godelier). Another widely used and ambiguous term nowadays is the word “crisis”; even if it usually carries a negative meaning, it comes from the ancient Greek κρίσις, “to make a choice”. In fact, we are facing changes, but, given current inequalities, few people are benefitting from this. What technologies and devices play a pivotal role in this changing/crisis period?

Drawing on critical anthropology, in this paper we aim to demonstrate how the very notion of responsibility can be seen as one of the technologies employed after 2008 by the financial sector to solve the crisis in its favour, that is transforming capitalism in what has been called (Varoufakis, Durand) “technofeudalism”; we will do this by unpacking and defetishizing mainstream discourses on technology, finance and environment, focusing in particular on the use of blockchain to tackle the climate change

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores ideas of responsibility and blame in the energy transition: should fossil fuel companies blamed for climate change assume responsibility by changing their business model, or should responsibility for developing green energy be primarily given to new actors?

Paper long abstract:

Conservationists and environmentalists have long protested against drilling platforms in the Adriatic for the exploitation of gas reserves beneath the seabed. This extractive activity has been blamed for subsidence beneath the coastline, exacerbating erosion of the historic and iconic pine forests and dunes of the Po Delta, rich in biodiversity. Protests returned with renewed vigour when ENI, the Italian oil major, began lobbying the government to use part of Italy’s allocation from the EU pandemic recovery fund, raised through centrally issued green bonds, for a highly ambitious programme of blue hydrogen production, using methane from existing reserves, with emissions to be abated by carbon capture and storage. Meanwhile Agnes, a consortium developing offshore wind and solar power to produce ‘green’ hydrogen, is competing for funding from the same source. ENI’s proposal raises questions about the nature of sustainability: if EU institutions and national governments are to use private capital to achieve a ‘green recovery’, should methane be seen as part of the solution or part of the problem? Is ‘blue’ hydrogen sustainable? Is it morally acceptable to bet on the efficacy of unproven CO2 storage technologies at large scale? How should threats to coastal ecology be taken into account? What weight should be given to local protests? These questions are overshadowed by the competing claims of responsibility and blame: is the oil industry’s rhetoric about a sustainable transition to green energy to be trusted, and are its claims to responsibility likely to be matched by responsible action?

Paper short abstract:

This paper talks about how the residents and the municipal authorities of the city of Barcelona refer the city's structure of governance as the "municipality machine", and the effect of this metaphor on attributing urban responsibility and blame.

Paper long abstract:

Escola Benjami is an unused former school building in Trinitat Nova, one of the most disadvantaged and marginalized neighborhoods of Barcelona situated on its north-eastern periphery. Taking the battles and negotiations over the future of this public space in municipal channels of local deliberation, participation, and decision-making (neighborhood councils, district audiences, participatory urban improvement plans etc.) as ethnographic points of departure, this paper outlines how a complex web of formal and collusive relationships among multiple actors, administrations and jurisdictions involved in the City of Barcelona's politics and practices of urbanism creates a structure of governance that both the city authorities and the residents alike refer as the "Municipality Machine." It then discusses the concrete effects of this metaphor, namely a machine claimed to be fully understood and controlled by no one that is fueled by a moral framework of citizen participation. I show that it functions as a naturalized myth (Barthes 1972) to smooth the contradictions between the ethical urbanism narratives and the neoliberal urbanism practices of the Barcelona city government, immunizing multiple authorities against ethical urban responsibility, justifying social marginalization and inequalities, and leading to a situation in which no one is ever responsible but residents are always to be blamed.

Paper short abstract:

The tram in Cuenca, Ecuador, is analysed according to its three lives: a radical innovation proposed by authorities to produce a sustainable, modern city; an unruly, damaging construction which raises questions of responsibility; and a technology that needs to be adopted by responsible city actors.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I propose to explore three lives of the tram in Cuenca, Ecuador, which today coexist, but which also contradict each other by changing what the tram is and does and how responsibility is attributed. First, the tram comes into being as a spectacular project, capable of making the city more sustainable, modern, orderly and beautiful. From this perspective, the tram is given the agency to transform, to ignite a transition toward sustainability. Responsibility for solving urban problems is made to bear on a technological fix. Local and national authorities, for their part, are eager to claim responsibility for the tram, hoping that it will also work as a political tool for winning people over. However, in 2013, the tram emerges as something different as construction works begin. It increasingly appears as an unpredictable set of forces which haunt the city. The spatial and temporal unfolding of the construction gets out of control, causing long years of delay and economic crisis in the surrounding areas. Affected business owners are seeking justice and compensation until today, but the responsibility over the project has dissipated into an opaque blame game. In 2020, the tram goes into operation, but still does not fulfil its initial promises, lacking passengers and connection with the privately operated bus system. Instead of a technology capable of fixing the city's problems, city dwellers and organisations are now called upon to fix the technology by adopting it, taking care of it and making it sustainable.