What makes resources political? We often imagine that politics is something done to resources (i.e. larger contestations over access to and control over resources). In this second “progress report”, ...I question whether resource politics is simply about fighting over stuff. How does the materiality of resources themselves shape broader conceptions of “the political” in general? I highlight the role of resources in shaping three central meanings of the political or politics. First, the commonsense ideology of politics as electoral contests over political power. Second, the state – as the sphere of “the political” – is constructed as a geographical entity based on a specific form of territoriality. Third, the nation-state reflects a complex political duality: both an institutional state apparatus and a cultural imaginary of shared nationhood. I conclude with some thoughts on the need to expand the terrain of the political in resource geography.
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2.
Resource geographies I Huber, Matt
Progress in human geography,
02/2018, Volume:
42, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The relationship between value and nature has become central to critical resource geography (and other nature-society geography). While research demonstrates the problems with efforts to extend ...capitalist monetary value to ecosystem services or externalities, few scholars have anchored their critiques in their own theory of value. This report reviews this bourgeoning research through a theory of value anchored in Marxian political economy. Drawing from a few basic postulates, I attempt to fill some gaps and clear up some ambiguities in this research. First, I examine research on environmental valuations schemes (e.g. pricing externalities, or payments for ecosystem services). Marx’s value theory (rooted in abstract labor) can help us to explain why these projects seem so destined for failure. Second, I examine research into how resources and value flow through commodity chains or global production networks. Marx’s focus on labor and abstraction can help us to better understand the violence within these chains toward humans and nonhumans alike. Third, I examine research into the financialization of environmental goods in services. I suggest Marx’s value-theoretical approach to the ‘totality’ of capitalist social relations can better help us to theorize financial capital’s contradictory relationship to value production in the realm of production. I conclude by suggesting a unified theory of value can yield a more radical critique of the diverse failures of capitalism in dealing with our current ecological crisis.
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Climate change is often referred to as an "abstract" problem. Its consequences (melting glaciers, violent storms, rising seas) are often not felt in "concrete" lived experience and are imagined to ...occur in faraway locales. More importantly, understanding its causes requires one to think abstractly about emissions in one place having delayed and uncertain impacts. It requires working knowledge on the global atmospheric circulation of gases, and the ways in which that complex circulation will cause warmer temperatures and extreme weather. Here, Huber examines exchanged nitrous oxide reductions at one plant location for the "carbon equivalents".
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4.
Resource geographies I Huber, Matt
Progress in human geography,
02/2018, Volume:
42, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The relationship between value and nature has become central to critical resource geography (and other nature-society geography). While research demonstrates the problems with efforts to extend ...capitalist monetary value to ecosystem services or externalities, few scholars have anchored their critiques in their own theory of value. This report reviews this bourgeoning research through a theory of value anchored in Marxian political economy. Drawing from a few basic postulates, I attempt to fill some gaps and clear up some ambiguities in this research. First, I examine research on environmental valuations schemes (e.g. pricing externalities, or payments for ecosystem services). Marx’s value theory (rooted in abstract labor) can help us to explain why these projects seem so destined for failure. Second, I examine research into how resources and value flow through commodity chains or global production networks. Marx’s focus on labor and abstraction can help us to better understand the violence within these chains toward humans and nonhumans alike. Third, I examine research into the financialization of environmental goods in services. I suggest Marx’s value-theoretical approach to the ‘totality’ of capitalist social relations can better help us to theorize financial capital’s contradictory relationship to value production in the realm of production. I conclude by suggesting a unified theory of value can yield a more radical critique of the diverse failures of capitalism in dealing with our current ecological crisis.
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Here, we compare the ocean overturning circulation of the early Eocene (47–56 Ma) in eight coupled climate model simulations from the Deep‐Time Model Intercomparison Project (DeepMIP) and investigate ...the causes of the observed inter‐model spread. The most common global meridional overturning circulation (MOC) feature of these simulations is the anticlockwise bottom cell, fed by sinking in the Southern Ocean. In the North Pacific, one model (GFDL) displays strong deepwater formation and one model (CESM) shows weak deepwater formation, while in the Atlantic two models show signs of weak intermediate water formation (MIROC and NorESM). The location of the Southern Ocean deepwater formation sites varies among models and relates to small differences in model geometry of the Southern Ocean gateways. Globally, convection occurs in the basins with smallest local freshwater gain from the atmosphere. The global MOC is insensitive to atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 1× (i.e., 280 ppm) to 3× (840 ppm) pre‐industrial levels. Only two models have simulations with higher CO2 (i.e., CESM and GFDL) and these show divergent responses, with a collapsed and active MOC, respectively, possibly due to differences in spin‐up conditions. Combining the multiple model results with available proxy data on abyssal ocean circulation highlights that strong Southern Hemisphere‐driven overturning is the most likely feature of the early Eocene. In the North Atlantic, unlike the present day, neither model results nor proxy data suggest deepwater formation in the open ocean during the early Eocene, while the evidence for deepwater formation in the North Pacific remains inconclusive.
Plain Language Summary
The ocean's overturning circulation refers to the replenishment of the ocean's deep water by cold dense polar surface waters and its eventual return to the surface. It affects the climate through redistribution of heat across the globe and uptake of atmosphere carbon dioxide (CO2). Here, we explore the overturning circulation of the Early Eocene, a hot period 47–56 million years ago when atmosphere CO2 levels were similar to the “worst case” projections for the end of this century, in eight climate models setup up for that time. Our results, together with available ocean circulation sediment data for the time, indicate that during the early Eocene deep water originated predominantly from cold surface waters around Antarctica. The North Atlantic source of deep water that today contributes to European's relatively mild climate for its latitude, was completely absent at the time. Interestingly, even when the carbon dioxide in the Eocene model simulations was lowered to levels similar to today and before the industrial revolution, the North Atlantic source of deep water remains absent, indicating that it is the distribution of continents and ice‐sheets, rather than CO2 that is responsible for the difference between the modern and Eocene circulation.
Key Points
This study evaluates the ocean's meridional overturning circulation during the early Eocene in eight models of the DeepMIP project
The primary region of deep‐water formation depends both on the atmospheric freshwater flux and the strait geometry in the Southern Ocean
Compatible with proxy records, six of eight models show that deep waters predominantly originated from the south
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Despite a deepening set of socioecological contradictions, it is remarkable that oil's centrality to capitalism persists. In economic geography, the regulation approach has been useful in explaining ...the persistence of capitalism despite its contradictory tendencies, and scholars have recently applied the regulation approach to the geography of natural resources and environmental governance. In this article, I argue that environmental regulation theory is ill equipped to explain the persistence of petro-capitalism in the U nited S tates. This literature has been constructed largely through a critique of regulation theory on two grounds: ignoring the ecological dimension and relying on periodization. Conversely, I aim to show that petro-capitalism can be usefully analyzed through the very classical regulationist lens that environmental appropriations jettison. First, rather than positing nature as an unexamined "extra-economic" dimension, the case of oil reveals how ecology can be integrated into a foundational concept of the regulation approach-the wage relation. Specifically, the F ordist wage relation of mass production for mass consumption was dependent on the construction of a specific kind of "high energy economy." Massive productivity gains in the labor process, powered by electricity, created larger pressures for an equally energy-intensive geography of consumption. In this respect, oil played a decisive role in the extension of the spaces between home and work through the partial generalization of automobility and single-family home ownership. Second, I attempt to recuperate the method of "periodization" by explaining how a set of institutional supports served to regularize the provision of oil through the domestic oil market from 1935 through 1972. I end with a discussion of the "institutional exhaustion" of a specifically national form of petro-F ordism during the 1970s.
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The premise of this essay is that energy geographies are complicated, and this in itself presents some pedagogical difficulties. As someone who wants students to critically examine and confront the ...complexity of energy systems, it can be frustrating when students react to demonstrate frustration, apathy, or even confusion. In what follows, I will lay out three complications of teaching energy geography: (1) empirical complexity, (2) confronting fossil fuel "embeddedness," (3) the energy culture fallacy.
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For many, the socio-ecological disasters do not represent isolated industrial accidents, let alone surmountable political challenges. Rather, they are events that both symbolically and materially ...bring into the present the specter of socio-ecological annihilation -- signs of the apocalypse. Despite the fear and anxiety, few, at least in the West, appear capable of imagining a political solution to the current socio-ecological predicament. Adapted from the source document.
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Market and climate chaos reveal electricity as a key site of struggle in the twenty-first century. The capitalist class and the Left are both split between capitalist utilities and unions on one ...side, and big tech, renewable capital, and green NGOs on the other. The socialist path is with labor.
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10.
Chemical Geographies Romero, Adam M.; Guthman, Julie; Galt, Ryan E. ...
GeoHumanities,
20/1/2/, Volume:
3, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The following are a series of essays that originated from panel on Chemical Geographies at the American Association of Geographers meeting in 2016. Although the essays explore different topics, ...collectively they call into question the relationship of geographic scholarship to chemistry.
