dr gavin bridge gavi [email protected]. uk economy value capitalism nature modernity conflict energy justice extractive resources accumulation 20 th century social relations natural gas time space claims appropriation substitution wind power governance tin oil resource curse finance A Political Ecology of Energy and A Political Ecology of Energy and Mining Mining Dr Gavin Bridge Dr Gavin Bridge University of Manchester University of Manchester metabolism
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the return of resourcesthe return of resources• spectre of scarcity: peak oil, gas, everything• new materials and sites of struggle (rare earths, lithium, biofuels,
wind, tidal, LNG)– resources for the ‘green economy’
• persistent themes– coal and oil disasters (China, US)– extra-territorial resource access (resources and imperialism)
• alternatives to extraction– Ecuador’s ‘oil in the soil’ proposal– El Salvador’s open pit proposals
• renegotiation of social contract around extraction and development– EITI, EIR (World Bank), Kimberley, ‘clean gold’
• energy transition
a good time for a political ecology of energy and mining!
• oil, gas, minerals are classic ‘gifts of nature’ – non-produced goods, fictitious commodities (Polanyi)– processes of production are geological, geophysical,
hydrological. • occur prior to the application of labour • over non-human time-scales
– processes of production cannot be (fully) capitalised– limited scope for ‘real subsumption’ of nature
nature as formnature as form• ‘treadmill of production’
– commodity sector (fungible), competition on price – drawing on non-renewable materials of declining quality– ‘auto-consumptive’, local depletion: production undermines
conditions of future profitability (ecological contradiction) – costs will rise
economies of scale and the diseconomies/costs of space
• ‘transport systems function as increasingly capital-intensive, debt-creating, state-forming instruments to articulate dispersed site-specific raw material sources with concentrated centres of industrial production, capital accumulation, and political power’
“In order to take account of space as materially differentiated and matter as spatially differentiated, we must incorporate topography, geology, hydrology, and climate, as well as absolute and geographic distances between places….into our analysis of how trade-dominant nations assure cheap and stable access to the volumes and types of materials they need”