speed-stunned imaginations: a reflection on Energy and Equity (CR #3)
In his recent book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared that we have entered the “energy climate” era. According to Friedman’s narrative, the solution to the twin crisis of peak oil and climate change relies overwhelmingly on technical advances and market innovations. Along with his win-win scenarios for business and the environment, Friedman states, “Only if we got abundant, cheap, clean reliable electrons could we deal with climate change, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, energy poverty, and energy resource supply and demand. That is the cure” (Shea, 2008). While Friedman’s holds out for such an invention to come and solve the world’s socio-environmental problems, I think it is apt to revisit Ivan Illich’s 1973 essay Energy and Equity, where he posits there are social limits to the ever-expanding consumption of energy, renewable or otherwise.
Illich states “The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated” (2). Using the example of the transportation industry, Illich attests that energy and equity can grow concurrently only to a point. Above a certain quantifiable threshold, energy and equity are negatively correlated (Illich, 3). Writing in a period in which the automobile had become the utmost priority in transportation planning and urban design, Illich saw the endorsement of speedier and more energy-intensive modes of transport as involving the homogenization of landscapes and the annihilation of “commons into unlimited thoroughfares … for the production of passenger miles” (18). This new round of space-time compression was manifested physically in an accelerated rate of land-take for transport infrastructure. For example, in Los Angeles during the 1960s, over one third of the downtown became exclusively parking lots (excluding the spaces of traffic corridors), producing an environment where every citizen found the autonomy and use-value of their feet reduced (Coolidge, 2007).
Crucially for Illich, this unevenness is the outcome of transportation, as an industry, dictating the configuration of social space and incorporating class inequality in its material structure. Across North American cities, personal automobile ownership came to be a prerequisite for participation in social life and work, for the spatial dispersion of the post-WWII urban form made “the consumption of the products of the auto, oil, rubber, and construction industries a necessity rather than a luxury” (Harvey, 39). In this light, the prized personal mobility bought by having an automobile was in fact involuntary traffic made necessary by the settlement patterns that cars create. While transportation is an insignificant cost for upper-class speed capitalists, the necessary infrastructure for unlimited high-speed travel dictates that the majority spends larger amounts of personal time on unwanted trips (and larger amounts of labour time to earn the money needed to commute to work). Across cities, the result is “more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry” (Illich, 8).
Illich’s insights are applicable not only at the urban scale, but also at the scale of core/periphery in world systems theory. As John Whitelegg notes in his study on transportation policy, the majority of World Bank loans for transport spending from 1962 to 1994 were geared towards new highways, rail closure and privatization (1997;54). Whitelegg recommends that if the World Bank “has the ultimate objective of reducing poverty … then they could ensure that 95 percent of investment funds are not steered in the direction of 5 percent of the population who are in a position to drive themselves around and carry freight by truck (1997;58). The massive subsidies and policy preference for increasing energy-intensive, private forms of transport comes with highly uneven benefits, not to mention increased dependency on industrially-packaged forms of energy.
A second parallel can be drawn between Illich’s work and that of Arghiri Emmanuel, who helped develop dependency theory and its arguments of unequal exchange and declining terms of trade for “developing” countries. Emmanuel showed that “low-wage countries have to export greater volumes of products in exchange for a given volume of imports from high-wage countries than they would if the wage level were uniform” (Hornberg, 7). The low-income transit user who must spend the largest proportion of income on mobility is akin to the developing country that must spend higher shares of their export incomes on the importation of energy. Renewable energy advocate and late German politician Hermann Scheer researched this “energy trap” by comparing the ratio of export incomes of African countries to the costs of importing oil. Scheer found that the costs as a percentage of import spending incurred by importing energy have risen from 5-10% in the 1960s to upwards of 80% (2009, B III). Furthermore, “In 2005, the developing countries’ oil import costs rose by 100 billion dollars; this is significantly more than the sum of development assistance provided by all the industrial nations put together” (2009, B III). Participation in the Global North’s model of global trade (and its necessary infrastructure for industrialized transport) comes with high costs to equity and compromises other development goals.
When considering whether renewable energy will offer new possibilities for emancipation from a crisis-prone system, it is crucial to keep in mind the possibility that abundant, renewable energy may only perpetuate, perhaps even strengthen, forms of hierarchy and domination in the sunbelts and wind-corridors of the world. Thinking beyond the renewable/nonrenewable binary, “All industrial energy systems deploy space, capital, and technology to construct their geographies of power and inscribe their technological order as a mode of organization of social, economic, and political relations” (Ghosn,7). In his anticipation of a future beyond oil, Friedman dismisses the continuities between conventional and alternative energy and overlooks the deep structural issues having to do with power, control, and unequal access to resources. The attractiveness of ‘renewable energy’ as a panacea for social and environmental ills, independent of a wider social transformation of capitalism, risks foreclosing serious political questions about alternative socio-environmental trajectories.
Works Cited
- Coolidge, Matthew. “Pavement Paradise: American Parking Space” Center for Land Use Interpretation 2007.
- Ghosn, Rania. “Energy as a Spatial Project” New Geographies vol (3) 2009 pg 7-10, Cambridge; Harvard University Press.
- Harvey, David. The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Blackwell, 1989.
- Hornberg, Alf. “The Unequal Exchange of Time and Space: Toward a Non-Normative Ecological Theory of Exploitation” in Journal of Ecological Anthropology vol (7) 2003 pg 4-10
- Illich, Ivan. “Energy and Equity” in Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978
- Friedman, Thomas. Hot, flat, and crowded; why we need a green revolution—and how it can renew America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
- Scheer, Hermann. “Renewable energies and the environment”, Committee on the Environment, Agriculture and Local and Regional Affairs. Council of Europe 18 May 2009
- Shea, Danny. “Tom Friedman Calls For Green Revolution”. Huffington Post. 4 July 2008,
- Whitelegg, John. Critical Mass: Transportation, Environment and Society in the Twenty-first Century, Pluto Press: London 1997.
1 comment
1 John Verity { 11.29.10 at 10:10 am }
May I bring to your attention to a later essay by Illich that reveals how his thinking on energy evolved. Early this year, a Harvard journal called New Geographies published, for the first time, a 1983 paper called “The Social Construction of Energy.” (Alas, this paper is, I believe, not available on-line. The title and theme of this issue, #02, is – believe it or not – “Landscapes of Energy.”)
As the title suggests, Illich aimed here to describe how the word “energy” operates in today’s language and discussions, what meanings it conveys, what myths surround it. He offers a wonderful history of the word’s changing definition, showing how, in the mid-19th century, scientists (e.g. Mach) and social philosophers (namely Marx) alike relied on each other to invent a new entity called energy – a mysterious stuff that nobody can see or directly experience. And he identifies several obstacles that prevent most of us from seeing this fact, that energy, operating hand-in-hand with “work,” is a construct. As a measure of nature’s ability to do work, energy simply did not exist until the mid-1800s.
Today, “the word energy functions as a collage of meanings,” Illich concludes. “[It is] charged with hidden implications: it refers to a subtle something that has the ability to make nature do work. … It is a symbol that fits our age, the symbol of that which is both abundant and scarce.” Abundant because, we’re told by certain mystical scientists and scientific mystics, it is the stuff from which the whole world is made of, and scarce because it is a resource, which by definition is something for which demand exceeds supply.
Energy, Illich concludes, is the subject of much “supersitition religiosity.” And the energy whose consumption we all want to reduce and whose production we want to expand using low-impact, “soft” alternatives is a quite different stuff from the “e” that Maxwell, Einstein, and other physicists discuss in their highly technical equations.
Illich also expresses embarrassment at his misunderstanding of the “energy” discourse when writing “Energy & Equity” ten years earlier. That first essay, a major inspiration for the alternative energy and transportation crowd, argued that over-consumption of scarce energy doomed any prospect of social equity, particularly as relates to transportation. Even if they were powered by water or some other non-polluting fuel that cost nothing to obtain, Illich seemed to say, cars’ high rates of acceleration and their unavoidable monopolization of the roads would still wreck communities and rip the social fabric.
In short, democracy and social equity cease to be possible when a society’s consumption of energy passes beyond a certain threshold – a relatively low threshold, in fact, that was exceeded long ago by the U.S. and other industrialized nations but one which, back in 1974, still seemed to be a goal that “developing” nations could, if they chose to do so, respect.
A decade later, Illich had come to see that his discussion of energy efficiency in transportation – how many calories, or watts, are required to move people by bicycle vs. car, for instance – had missed entirely a vital point: Human-powered transport – on foot or by bicycle – does not “conjure up the illusion … of a regime of scarcity,” such illusion being a fundamental assumption that underpins all discussions of traffic.
The actual space through which people drive cars, Illich came to see in his ongoing work on the “history of scarcity,” is of a radically different kind than that traversed by people on foot or bicycle. Measurable in terms of Cartesian coordinates, modern space is homogenous and technologized (not his word). It is not commensurable with traditional space, which is discrete and vernacular and – a key word for Illich – a commons. A commons, as Illich sees it, is something that I can use without making it any more difficult for you to use.
In short, walkers do not consume passenger-miles.
The idea that space itself has a history – and that it differs by culture and place and time – is pursued by Illich elsewhere: in an intriguing book published shortly thereafter, called H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, and in an essay, also published in the mid-1980s, about “dwelling.”
Most people know of Illich as the author of a book called Deschooling Society. In another paper from 1983 – ‘Eco-pedagogics and the commons,’ which is available at the website of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation – one can see how, via the shared notion of scarcity, his thinking about education and transportation relate to each other:
“ … Education I associate with some kind of swimming lesson in which pupils are trained to keep afloat in an ever rising tide of bits, a flood that has long ago lifted them off the ground of personal meanings. As the pupil is taught how to handle, ever more skillfully, the onrush of information, even his desire for grounding in a meaningful system is eroded. In a similar way with development and economic growth, I associate counter-productivity: the frustrating ability of institutions to remove their clients, particularly the majority of the less privileged, precisely from the purpose the institution was set up to deliver.”
Counter-productivity is, of course, a key concept for Illich, explicityly investigated in his book Medical Nemesis. The phenomenon is easily identified in car culture: High-speed, high-energy vehicles not only push pedestrians and cyclists off the road, they also stretch the landscape apart so that human-powered transport is no longer effective. Like heated gas molecules, cars exert a pressure on communities from the inside out, a pressure that pushes the nodes of daily life – home, shops, offices, school, etc. – far apart from each other, so that only those who can drive a car – indeed, at some point, only those drivers wealthy enough to avoid rush-hour – are able to traverse the new distances in a reasonable amount of time. The “less privileged” wait for second-class buses.
Illich: “… Education, as manpower qualification, is an enterprise by which people are disciplined for competent performance of work which remains meaningless to them. More recently, education, as training for clientage in the service industry, for computer use and for consumption, is an enterprise that teaches people to content themselves with meaningless lives off the job. In both ways education is a means to make people adjuncts to economic growth. But this economic growth will not come and if it comes it will be of an entirely symbolic nature. If the word ‘development’ is to survive, it must now acquire a new meaning. So far it has meant more energy intensive goods and more professional service. Both types of growth have reached their asymptote, not so much because their externalities have become intolerable, but because they have become counterproductive. At this point, development can only mean a change-over from growth to a steady state. However, what steady state shall mean depends entirely on the way in which we interpret the present.
“… Most people now alive have acquired [the assumption of scarcity] during this generation. Take as an example, transportation. A large part of all those still alive were born auto-mobile. They had only their feet for moving about. Culture defined their range, but within this range they had almost unlimited access to each other. Getting from here to there did not depend, most of the time, on a resource which was scarce, which you could not get if I got it. This is totally different for us. We have created a world in which we have to be moved, in which we have to consume “passenger miles”. And these are always scarce – if I get there, I compete with you for a seat. We belong to the human subspecies of homo transportandus. In the same way we belong to the sub-species of homo educandus. Once everywhere almost everything that people needed for everyday life they learned because it was meaningful to them and had proven useful. Now, we are constantly taught what is meaningful, from a perspective which is not yet ours, and we are taught things that, we are told, one day will be useful to us. And we are taught only as much as we are able to pay for, or society is rich enough to give us. Education as a result of teaching, is always a commodity, a service and as such is scarce.”
No summary does Illich justice. His aphoristic prose is deceptively simple and a challenge to interpret or paraphrase concisely. Read the paper in full.
Anyone piqued by this essay might want to look at another by Illich called Shadow Work, published in a book by that name. There, Illich explains how the modern service economy can work as it does only because consumers do a hell of a lot of extra work for free, work that’s vital to adding value back into various commodities and services. This so-called shadow work has to be done for no pay, for otherwise, the economy would grind to a halt. Some of Illich’s examples are housework, generally done by women; the various degrees, credentials, certifications, on-the-job training classes, and other types of education that workers are required to consume; and yes, daily commuting to and from the job.
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