Limits to Terrestrial Extraction

Robert Kirsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000053418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Commodities
• Index: Business

This volume focuses on the social, cultural, and ecological consequences of a political economy of energy.

A political economy of energy holds that an enduring hallmark of the current context is a reorganization of human society toward energy extraction and production. Limits to Terrestrial Extraction looks at the construction of society itself as an energy-harvesting "megamachine, " the ecomodernist project of the latter half of the twentieth century and its disastrous environmental record, and mining Near Earth Objects to extract extraterrestrial resources. Each chapter explores a limit to terrestrial extraction – spatially, economically, or socially – finding that business as usual cannot yield a different world. The authors eschew easy answers of natural resource management or discourses of wise use, instead offering critiques of market society and its constitutive drive to produce and waste energy. Overall, this volume establishes the existential stakes and scope of change that will be required to build a better world.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental political theory, as well as social scientists and humanities scholars who study the intersection of energy and society.

1 Introduction

Robert E. Kirsch

At the 2019 Western Political Science Association annual conference, a group of environmental political theory (EPT) scholars presented work that theorized the politics of waste, energy policy, and energy production in a regime of ongoing climate change. The present chapters that emerged out of the papers on that panel engaged with some fundamental questions about social organization in a political economy of extraction. The paths to address these questions vary: Timothy W. Luke critiques the hollow promises of ecomodernism and ecopragmatism with their unwillingness or inability to challenge the system of production that consumes so much energy. These frameworks promised a brighter future of limitless energy abundance just around the corner, but instead delivered 40 years of devastating environmental impacts; Robert E. Kirsch brings in theorists not often thought of as political economists who contribute to a discussion of the need to profitlessly consume energy. In doing so, he makes the case for why capitalism is ill-suited for such profitless consumption, turning sites of extraction into sites of sacrifice; and Emily Ray and Sean Parson consider a future of asteroid and other Near Earth Object mining, and how such an extraterrestrial push for energy extraction is a continuation of the second contradiction of capitalism by searching for new markets out of Earth’s atmosphere. These far-ranging questions from an EPT perspective contribute to a growing body of work in political theory on economies of energy and energy extraction.

These analyses contribute to a growing body of literature in EPT and in political theory generally, of a political economy of energy and/or extraction. While it seems obvious in the current context, the concept of stored energy from material sources as a quantifiable contributor to production that is separate and distinct from human exertion is relatively recent.¹ This conception of energy as a possible external additive to facilitate labor has indeed changed the way that humans perceived themselves as energy-requiring bodies.² Far from simply offering policy prescriptions, or best-use practices for already-existing regimes, the critical perspective of many in the EPT community provides for radical analyses of the existential challenges of climate change as they unfold. The contributors to this volume add to this growing discussion and intersect with some of the following urgent themes.

Earthly gods

Luke takes up Stewart Brand’s version of ecomodernism with its concurrent politics of ecopragmatism which views the world as a modernist culture that must be contained, disciplined, and bounded. He notes Brand’s commandment that “We are as gods, and have to get GOOD at it.” Luke critiques this somewhat perverse notion of a stewardship which insists that humans have become the unwitting guardians and, indeed, makers of the planet, arguing that lurking behind them is a regime of control with a ruling class of wise administrators, whose plucky innovation and greening ethos will accept the difficult mantle of remaking the face of the Earth. This will necessitate a wildly disruptive plan of cordoning off large sections of the planet for conservation with little regard to people who live in those places, but that is the price to pay for a “good” global Anthropocene. Ray and Parson discuss a slightly younger set of earthly gods from Silicon Valley. In their chapter, the Silicon Valley innovators are anxious to break free from the terrestrial limits to their ambitions, to set up space colonies, mine asteroids, and begin the new age of interplanetary travel. Ray and Parson offer material reminders that asteroid mining is merely a desire to find new areas of extraction as a way to forego dealing with the environmental disaster of energy extraction on Earth. Their exospheric analysis of Near Earth Objects is grounded in the political contestations of borders, private property, and thus argues that off-Earth industry can only offer a fleeting freedom from the extraction of energy on Earth, and they are dubious that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are able to offer anything more concrete. Kirsch uses Lewis Mumford to reach back into the anthropological record to note that societies are often built around producing and storing a surplus of energy; the question is who gets to consume it. Those laying claim to the surplus consume it for their own ends, and often disastrously, and Mumford asks: “As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices are for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few.” Social organization provides the means for the earthly gods of Brand, Musk, and Bezos to have a surplus of energy to consume as they build monuments to themselves. There is little reason to believe that this arrangement will result in anybody being good at using their godly powers for anything else.

Sites of sovereignty

Each of these contributions makes the case that there is more to extraction than the mere removal of fuel from the ground (or asteroid) for conversion into energy. Kirsch argues that Georges Bataille’s theory of a “general economy” shows that however long energy can be converted and stored, because it is itself based on the sun’s waste, that energy must eventually stay wasted. Sites of sovereignty are determined by who gets to control the ultimate wasteful consumption of energy, which Kirsch notes gives lie to the notion of productive consumption or constant profitable reinvestment, even in terms of energy production. Ray and Parson take that insight to its terrestrial limit and point out not only the difficulties of private property relations and treaty statuses in extraterrestrial extraction, but also that the carving up of space itself is a Schmittian boundary-drawing. Rather than the frontier that belongs to no one, space colonization is acts of sovereign appropriation. Luke’s critique of the ecopragmatists operates on a similar notion of sovereignty when discussing stewardship. They believe that they are the right people to govern the new planetary arrangement, and their vision of stewardship draws new lines of livable spaces and appropriate technologies and ways of life. The stewards take Earth’s excess energy and put it to use to sustain a certain kind of lifestyle. While it may be tempting think that once humans are free of the planetary boundaries or have enough energy for a certain kind of life that these sovereign orderings of disciplined subjects will evaporate, but as each author notes, society itself is organized for unrelenting extraction.

The consequences of normal politics

One of the central arguments of Luke’s chapter is that while the ecomodernists have been advancing an ecopragmatist agenda, uninterrupted, for almost four decades, not only is there little to show for it, but environmental degradation continues unabated. This is why he suggests that current suites of environmental policy are concerned with delusion and delay, with their attendant destruction being justification for further rounds of ecopragmatism. Ray and Parson argue that the piecemeal ownership of Near Earth Objects by sovereign states will open up new markets in a neoliberal space race; the frontier discourse of outer space is simply the managed absence of the state that makes markets work. Energy problems on Earth will not be solved by finding new sources of energy in space. For Ray and Parson, the arrow goes the other way – the problems of energy production on Earth will merely be exported to Near Earth Objects in space. Kirsch finds that market societies, because they are unable to waste profitlessly, will insist on finding new areas of investment and warns that, historically, this means disastrous insistences on building new markets – through warfare or even through manufacturing destructive sites of energy production. Luke’s argument that normal politics does not seek to change the relations of production but rather only change their focus, intensity, or implementation can only delay ecological collapse, not reverse it.³

The chapters in this collection ultimately argue in their own way that the current mode of environmental policy cannot lead to a sustainable future unless social relations and the relations of production are fundamentally changed. This is an enormous challenge, and on an increasingly vanishing timeline. Yet the critical engagement of political economies of extraction seeks to accomplish just such a goal.

Notes

1. 1 Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
2. 2 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
3. 3 Timothy W. Luke, Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

2 Mumford and Bataille

Toward a political economy of energy consumption

Robert E. Kirsch

Introduction

While Lewis Mumford and Georges Bataille were writing contemporaneously in the mid-twentieth century, it would seem like quite a stretch to suggest that their bodies of literature had an obvious affinity to each other. Indeed, there is very little in the academic literature that puts these thinkers in conversation. While this lack of engagement might suggest that there is nothing to be gained by doing so, this chapter argues that if these two thinkers are thought in explicit terms as theorists of energy, a comparison, and indeed synthesis, becomes a visible and fruitful undertaking. This chapter attempts just such a synthesis and begins with a brief exposition of each thinker as a theorist not only of technology but also of energy. Specifically, it takes up Mumford’s conception of technics as an organizing force of society itself for the capture and storage of energy that he called the “megamachine.” It also takes up Bataille’s theory of a “general economy” in which a given society is dependent on sumptuously consuming excess energy after social reproduction and growth, if it is necessary or possible.

These two strands will be synthesized in a loose contribution to a philosophy of energy and will critique the recent push to open new avenues of terrestrial, and increasingly extraterrestrial, extraction. Most of the excitement around frontiers of extraction is hyped up by Silicon Valley, but Mumford warns that the earthly gods that pilot the megamachine are content to build pyramids to their posterity (or in the current context, rocket ships as Mumford points out), and Bataille is wary of the capitalists that insist on finding “productive” outlets for their surpluses, because the quest for infinite productivity often ends in disaster. The chapter ends with an appeal to a view of energy that should give critical pause to consider whether organizing the megamachine on a global level to find the new frontier of energy production. Rather, it shows the limits of the rationality of terrestrial extraction. By exploring t...