Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Andrew Watson
(University of Saskatchewan)
Robert Suits (University of Edinburgh)
Odinn Melsted (Maastricht University)
Katja Bruisch (Trinity College Dublin)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Energy and Infrastructure
- Location:
- Room 10
- Sessions:
- Friday 23 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
In an effort to move beyond largely stadial frameworks of energy regimes and transitions,this double panel invites submissions that are engaged with efforts to push the geographical, disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of energy history.
Long Abstract:
Energy history has developed into a dynamic subfield of environmental history over the last twenty years, particularly in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Recognition that profligate energy consumption has resulted in significant unintended consequences has raised questions about the role of energy in shaping economies, societies, and environments at local, regional, national, and global scales over time. The implications for energy history extend beyond simply better understanding the past and demand that historians respond to the emergent crises and historicize contemporary debates related to energy. For many years, historians of energy examined change over time in largely stadial frameworks of energy regimes and transitions. More recently, scholars have attended to the continuities, entanglements, and assemblages of human relationships with various overlapping sources of energy that more effectively reflect the multiple human and more-than-human experiences linked to the production and use of energy in the past. The scholarship shaping the newer, broader umbrella of energy history is not always written by historians, which has pulled energy history in profoundly transdisciplinary directions that reflect the trajectories of environmental history and environmental humanities more broadly. Most importantly, these approaches broaden the scope of energy history to situate studies in provincialized, peripheral, and global contexts that decenter the technologies, cultures, and political economies of the industrialized North, while at the same time employing feminist, BIPOC, queer, and subaltern frames of analysis. This double panel invites submissions that are engaged with efforts to push the geographical, disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of energy history.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 23 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper offers methodological reflections on how energy consumption as an analytical tool enables both the fruitful connections between energy history and ecological art history, and the museological engagement of environmental humanities with eco-critical issues through curatorial intervention.
Paper long abstract:
Making art demands energy. How to study the energy consumption of the production of art? How to curatorially demonstrate the ecological implications of the aesthetically pleasing, culturally valuable artifacts in public and private collections? Pushing the boundary between the histories of energy and art, this paper tackles the questions by means of methodological reflections and curatorial intervention. The methodological reflections in the paper are situated in a case study of the enormous energy consumption for porcelain production in Jingdezhen, China. In the early eighteenth century, some three thousand active porcelain kilns in Jingdezhen maintained a population of over one million people working in various sectors of the industry, providing more than 100 million pieces of luxurious and everyday porcelain for the European market, in addition to a larger amount for the Asian, North African, and Chinese domestic markets. Through the nineteenth century, however, the township had declined in multiple ways—irreversible deforestation for firewood and farmland, deteriorated soil and water systems, and exhausted reserves of clay and porcelain stone—an environmental crisis was looming large over the porcelain capital of China. Drawing from environmental and ceramic archaeology, historical anthropology, and histories of forest, farming, chemistry, and ceramic technology, the paper looks into the ways energy consumption embeds art history and energy history into an interdisciplinary network of environmental humanities, and into the integrated methodologies that translate the aesthetic and cultural meanings of museum exhibits into their ecological costs and relational meanings in a transcultural context.
Paper short abstract:
Energy infrastructure plays a central role in the rise of fossil-fueled civilization. This paper details a comprehensive interdisciplinary historical mapping project exploring its development in the U.S., and some of its implications for how we might understand the energy system and its history.
Paper long abstract:
The explosive growth of energy use, though calamitous for the planet, is astounding. Vast networks of infrastructure are required to harvest, transform, and carry energy from nonhuman sources into human economies. In this paper, I will outline a digital interdisciplinary project to map and catalogue the histories of these infrastructures in the United States. Collectively, we have mapped and dated hundreds of oil pipelines, thousands of natural gas pipelines, large-scale electricity transmission lines, power plants, oil refineries, and coal mines, with the intention of producing a series of interactive historical maps and a corresponding database for further and future inquiries into the nature of the U.S. energy system. I will discuss some of the methods and sources used for the mapping project, as well as the scholarly and policy implications. Among these are how built infrastructure profoundly constrains past and future energy transitions, playing a major role in why some were successful and some were not, with path dependencies on fossil fuels built into the very landscape.
Paper short abstract:
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, proponents of liberal rule used the immense power contained in coal to organize, extend, and negotiate resistance to, a particular form of society and government. Synergy between liberalism and fossil fuels became a foundation of the Canadian project.
Paper long abstract:
In 2000, Ian McKay referred to Canada as a project of liberalism, and the study of Canada as fruitfully pursued through the study of those who worked to realize and resist that project. In this paper I would like to explore how to connect these ideas to the material realties of fossil fuel energy, particularly coal. As other scholars have pointed out, the synergy between fossil fuels on the one hand, and liberal democracy and capitalism on the other, is too strong to be accidental. Just as the liberal order expanded to include groups of people it had previously excluded, so too did the mineral energy regime simultaneously extend its material realities into the lives of more people. In both cases, inclusion encouraged, and eventually demanded, an end to resistance to the liberal order/mineral energy regime. I propose using a study of the control and consumption of fossil fuels as a starting point for analyzing why particular groups mobilized liberalism as a politico-economic structure of rule, why others joined the project and came to identify with it, and why marginalized groups sought to resist or opt out of the project altogether or in part. The logic of the liberal order in Canada crystallized around the ways that the materiality of fossil fuel energy facilitated inequalities and power relations within society by empowering those with access to carbon energy and further disempowering those without.
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with the contribution of oil to the narrative of economic growth by asking how political and economic decisions have led to the triumph of oil after World War two, resulting in the consequences we have to deal with in the present and - most likely - in the future.
Paper long abstract:
To this day, economic growth is seen as a panacea for almost all societal, economic and social challenges. The German economist Birger Priddat depicted growth as a "heaven on earth narrative" and a secular promise of salvation for capitalism. Yet, since the oil price crisis of the early 1970s, "limits to growth" have become a focus of public attention, indeed, the depletion of resources associated with growth has shaped the debate ever since. The fact that oil made this economic growth possible in the first place - along with other factors - is now generally accepted. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how oil was able to achieve this triumph after the Second World War. True, there is the thesis of the "1950 syndrome" by Swiss environmental historian Christian Pfister, which contends that the price collapse of the 1950s contributed to the rapid boom. While this is correct, it is not sufficient as the sole explanation. This paper will therefore examine the political, social, and economic factors that made the triumph of oil possible after 1945 by focusing on the case of Switzerland, including a comparison with other countries. The paper presents an in-depth coverage of the political substruction, i.e., the implementation of regulations, law enforcement – or the lack thereof – and subsidies. It hence takes into account the claim of the panel’s coordinators by placing questions of environmental history in a larger - in this case economic history - context.
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the socio-environmental impact of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is currently being built in Cadarache (France), through archival sources and the literature of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Nuclear Geography and Environmental History.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the territorial impact of the ITER, the world’s largest nuclear plant, promoted as a cleaner and safer source of electricity than fission. Through this case study, it asks: how do the territories of nuclear experiments change from a socio-environmental point of view? Do they themselves become experiments? I will focus on the local governance of ITER, closely intertwined at the national and global level; the masculinization and professionalization of work; the strategies for building the social acceptability of energy projects in the «Vallée des énergies nouvelles», from the practice of public debates, to the mechanisms of ecological compensation.
In the global energy landscape, fusion research has also embodied a clear idea of the future, as an integral part of an ever-widening project of energy diversification. Moving from the urgency of the present moment (global warming, environmental crisis and geopolitical instability), the ITER story becomes a key for a reinterpretation of some issues, such as the processes of «greening the atom» and the historical roots of the energy diversification paths on a local and global scale.
The interdisciplinary approach is particularly effective in weaving the complex links between the global history of energy and its territorial ramifications: from Science and Technology Studies, to Nuclear Geography and Environmental History, by tracking fuels, technologies and informal energy empires across multiple spatial and political scales (transnational, imperial, post-colonial, national, regional), and opening new spatial perspectives in the history of nuclearized territories, in which the boundaries of the installations become extremely permeable and integrate them into dilated "enviro-technical systems" that can go from the territories crossed by the nuclear water sources, to the places where raw materials are extracted.
Paper short abstract:
The historical relationship between energy law and "the low-income household" shows energy insecurity has been marginalized within U.S. energy law regimes by the theoretical and practical framing of low-income energy policy as an extension poverty law.
Paper long abstract:
Concern over energy burden may be new in some policy circles, but energy insecurity in low-income households, even where energy access is near universal, is not a new issue or policy quandary. Indeed, the longest-standing federal mechanism for preserving energy access in the U.S., the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), recently marked its 40-year anniversary, a celebrated milestone.
Yet home energy insecurity persists, with implications for health, wellbeing, education, economic stability, and safety. A few years ago, the Trump White House proposed budgets eliminating LIHEAP - a reminder of the precarity of any program dependent on annual appropriations in a polarized political environment. LIHEAP is a lifeline and must be protected. At the same time, the persistence of energy insecurity demands broader structural accountability for energy justice within energy law.
Considering the historical relationship between energy law and “the low-income household” shows energy insecurity has been sidelined within energy law regimes by the theoretical and practical framing of low-income energy policy as poverty law. However understandable administratively, this alignment has isolated energy insecurity as a consideration in energy law reform.
This history presents compelling reasons to reconceive of low-income energy policy as energy law, reinforcing the critical assistance provided by anti-poverty programs. This conceptual reorientation matters in the energy sector’s current transitional moment for two key reasons. First, it opens a path to ensure substantive reforms underway better incorporate concern for low-income households within energy law regimes. Second, it reinforces accountability for alleviating energy insecurity within energy law institutions.
Paper short abstract:
The paper studies the transition from animal muscle-run wells to inorganic enenrgy-run tube-wells in North Indian agriculture between the end of the 19th c and the beginning of the 20th c., to understand how the transition in energy forms was conceived in tandem with a new hydrological imagination.
Paper long abstract:
My paper aims to describe a genealogy of the ‘energy-irrigation nexus’ in Indian agriculture. This refers to the expanded use of tubewells energized mostly by electricity (and diesel) to draw groundwater for meeting two-thirds of the irrigation needs in the region. The paper will analyse the transition from wells to tube wells as modalities of irrigation between 1870s and 1930s in North Indian agriculture. I will trace this transition through how it was effectuated by a shift in energy regimes from animal labour/muscle to electricity/fossil fuels and via the concurrent changes in the meaning of groundwater usage and its ecology within colonial economic and legal understanding. I will analyse how proponents of mechanically-powered tubewells cast well-based irrigation as arrested by apparently natural limits - those of the cycle of land-based production feeding the primary drivers of wells, the cattle. When they instead suggested the new use of fossil fuel to power wells, this proposition was in turn combined with the imagination of apparently unlimited groundwater in the region. Together this fostered a new vision of North Indian agriculture as a kind of production beyond the parameters of natural cycles. I will also show the alternatives proposed against this vision that suggested that well irrigation should be re-embedded within natural sequentiality of water replenishment by recycling water from rainfall, canals and surface drainage and by improving water use in styles of cropping. This competition of ideas marked the complex genealogy of the 'energy-irrigation nexus' in Indian agriculture
Paper short abstract:
Using the case of peat extraction in 19th and 20th century Russia, this paper explores the benefits of integrating labour, environmental and energy history to write more-than-human histories of the fossil fuel age.
Paper long abstract:
Using the case of peat extraction in 19th and 20th century central Russia, this paper proposes to position our histories of the fossil fuel age more explicitly at the intersection of labour, environmental and energy history. Following peat workers on their way to and through their everyday at work, it demonstrates the benefits of taking labour and matter seriously as we try to understand the becoming and functioning of fossil economies and their situatedness in a world that is always more-than-human. The peat fuel which allowed power stations to operate and machines to run was a product of the complex and unpredictable relationships which humans formed with central Russian peatlands and the ways in which social inequality and power allowed for the appropriation of cheap rural labour which sustained peat extraction well into the post-WWII period. If we want to think about the fossil fuel age in more-than-human terms, we may gain a lot from directing our gaze “down to earth” to write the histories of places, people and fuels at its often overlooked margins.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses Catholic interpretations of (hidro)electricity in the context of recent loss of empire to elucidate how political subjectivities, perceptions of national decline and gendered notions on how to recover the nation’s virility influenced energy debates and choices.
Paper long abstract:
1898 marks the final collapse of the once-large overseas Spanish empire in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. As the defeat prompted a deep identity crisis, gender anxieties came to influence how energy technologies and resources were represented: virile nations were those who invented technology and were able to exploit their natural resources; however, backward and barely industrialized Spain was at risk of becoming part of the emasculated, underdeveloped nations. Among those who tried to put forward several schemes to ‘regenerate' a decaying nation, this paper will focus on Spanish Catholics. First, it will analyze how theological and religious concepts around energy and aether shaped certain extractive imaginations in Spain's end of the century and how these in turn were connected to wider concerns regarding national decadence. Secondly, it will explore how Catholic systems of belief also produced an aestheticization of certain energy resources – in particular (hydro)electricity over coal – as to promote an industrializing scheme that fitted Catholic values. Finally, it will show how inner controversies around the introduction of the electric light in Spanish churches were also connected to broader debates on the changes in the gender discourse and the re-masculinization of Catholicism throughout the nineteenth century. By placing Catholic interpretations of electricity in a space where political subjectivities, perceptions of national decline and gendered notions on how to recover the nation’s virility converged, I wish to shed light on the cultural elements shaping our energy epistemologies and on the complex drivers of past energy transitions.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the involvement of the local population in the construction of a regionally and imperially structured hydroelectric power plant in Carniola (a region of today’s Slovenia) at the beginning of the 20th century.
Paper long abstract:
In addition to mill wheels, which used the energy potential of water for centuries, machines for harnessing waterpower were already gaining ground in the last decades of the 19th century. For Slovenia, or more specifically the land of Carniola, this was still the period under Austro-Hungarian rule. With the turn of the century, the question of general electrification was a burning issue throughout the monarchy. The prevailing opinion was to use the empire's own natural energy resources, especially the abundant hydropower of its Alpine rivers. The desire of a faster and more comprehensive electrification of the peripheral parts of Carniola led to the initiative of the Regional Committee for Carniola to gain electricity from the region’s rivers and streams. The main actors for the construction of a hydroelectric power plant on the Završnica stream were, besides the Regional Committee, the Ganz & Comp. machine factory in Leobersdorf and the Ministry of Railways in Vienna. When these three parties negotiated the necessary concessions for the construction of such an energy-infrastructure, complications and conflicts arose, especially with the inhabitants of the riverine villages. In my paper I want to examine these conflicts and thus also address the communal participation possibilities within a regionally and imperially structured infrastructure system. What freedom of action existed for peripheral communities in the early period of hydropower development in the south-eastern Alps and to what extent were the inhabitants of the surrounding villages involved in the construction of the Završnica hydropower plant? This research question allows me to show how imperially aligned energy systems were negotiated and constructed on a communal level in peripheral Europe during the age of high modernity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes Alaskan electrification between 1893-2023 to push the methodological boundaries of energy history. Alaska electrification was mediated by the dynamics of internal colonialism, resource extraction, circumpolar militarism, public power and bootstrap innovation.
Paper long abstract:
Too often environmental histories of energy utilize methodologies that marginalize peripheral areas or attempt to impose concepts that poorly explain areas far from the metropole. This paper uses the example of Alaskan electrification, 1893-2023, to push the methodological and conceptual boundaries of energy history via two primary interventions. First, electrification must be understood not simply as historical change over time but also change across space. Alaska’s electric history demonstrates that concepts like the “global north/ south” neglect the tremendous inequality and internal colonialization within northern polities. This study utilizes insights from geography and area studies to understand electrification as a process of uneven and unequal development. This paper argues that Alaska electrification was mediated by the dynamics of internal colonialism (including resource extraction and circumpolar militarism), public power, and bootstrap innovation. Second, if the concept of energy regimes has illuminated key system dynamics, it has simultaneously occluded much. Alaska exhibited tremendous variance between rural and urban areas, complicating any conception of a totalizing energy regime. Furthermore, small scale but important innovations produced meaningful efficiency gains, despite not creating a fundamental energy transition. Ironically, rural and under-resourced areas most often made the most important electrical breakthroughs. Rather than the standard story of rural development and state building, these interventions recast Alaskan electrification as an instructive example of what I call “depetrolization”— an attempt to reduce petroleum utilization via efficiency and hybrid (wind and hydro) generation—that can inspire contemporary responses to the climate crisis in a hard to decarbonize region.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the role of oil companies and technologies in the development of geothermal energy. As will be argued, the "spillover" of oil technologies was crucial for worldwide geothermal development from the 1960s, revealing an understudied link and the messiness of historical transitions.
Paper long abstract:
Between the 1960s and 1980s, the geothermal energy resources of several of the world’s most volcanically active regions were developed at scale. This development surge was enabled by improved exploration and drilling methods, along with decisions to invest in geothermal energy as an environmentally friendly and renewable alternative to fossil fuels. An often overlooked but crucial factor in the history of geothermal development were “spillovers” from the oil industry. While fundamentally different in end use, geothermal and hydrocarbon industries employ similar methods for exploring and extracting fluids and gases. Adapted to the requirements of geothermal energy, petroleum technologies – ranging from geoscientific exploration techniques, oilwell rotary drilling rigs, to well-logging and reservoir engineering – greatly improved the knowledge of geothermal reservoirs, the success rate of well drilling and the efficiency of geothermal energy production. In this paper, I analyze spillovers between oil and geothermal industries in the cases of Italy, California, New Zealand, Indonesia and Iceland, which all developed large geothermal fields with the help of petroleum technologies. Those oil spillovers ranged from the direct involvement of oil companies in geothermal projects – above all Union Oil, ENI and Chevron – to rather indirect influences with the exchange of geoscientists, independent drilling companies and research institutes between the industries. As I will argue, energy history needs to pay more attention to the co-evolution of multiple energy systems and the messiness of transition processes, as oil actors and companies played a key role in the transition processes to geothermal energy.