linguistic difficulties with 'energy'

The seminar is off to a great start, with 14 students enrolled from a diversity of backgrounds.

Our first topic of discussion dived into the history of the emergence of the collective idea of the word “energy”. Just what exactly do we mean when we say this word, so strong in connotation yet weak in denotation?

Ivan Illich’s lecture, titled “the social construction of energy”, looks back to the physicist’s role in trying to encompass into a word the concept of that which is inexhaustible and always conserved. Illich classifies this denotation of energy as the scientist’s “e”, differentiated by the popular term “energy”, which having left the defined space of the laboratory, has taken on vast connotations. Illich takes issue with the way founders of mainstream classical economics have claimed a monopoly on the term ‘energy’, defining it as “nature’s ability to do work” in a world presupposed to be governed by scarcity. In such a world, appropriating energy, like work itself, is a moral duty. But Illich, imparting these warnings in the 1980s, asserts that society is headed towards a future of “an energy-obsessed low-energy society in a world that worships work but has nothing to do for people” (17). (see structural unemployment).

In discussing energy from a social and spatial perspective, I hope to engage with the  subtle, yet crucial, characteristics of our energy extraction, production and consumption that are often left out in mainstream discussions of energy issues. In regards to oil, when industry experts and spokespeople use the impoverished language of “efficiency” and prices per barrel as their primary indicators for discussing the future direction of the resource’s use, what other aspects are omitted? How do we go about taking account of the space(s) resource networks traverse in order to make it to the pump? How can we elevate the importance of the livelihoods of those living in Iraq (among other places) within our perspective?  When discussing energy issues, these omissions play a major role in how we define the scope of the problem.

For instance:

The diversity of tactics in combating climate change on the ground, whether its market-driven Carbon-Capture-Storage (CCS- pumping metric tons of carbon dioxide into the ground) or international social movements demanding climate justice and a moratorium on further fossil-fuel exploitation, speaks to the huge gulfs in how different groups go about defining the “crisis”. Is the “energy crisis” about running out of the massive subsidy of easy-to-extract oil and facing the true environmental/social costs of an industrially-packaged lifestyle, or is it about the dangerous abundance of fossil-fuels, whose rapid exploitation and combustion has pushed the climate into “crisis”, or something entirely different?

How we define the crisis creates the scope of solutions.  CCS appears to be a coping strategy designed to purge fossil-fuel intensive industries of their most undesirable characteristics (carbon emissions) while preserving its fundamental nature (the insistence on the growth of a fossil-fuel based economy) and is symptomatic of a limited view of the issues at hand.