Arctic Energy and Social Sustainability

Hanna Lempinen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783030022686
• eBook ISBN: 9783030022693
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: Biological Sciences

In recent years the Arctic has become the focus of political, popular and scholarly debates around the future of our world's Energy. Increasing consumption, dwindling reserves, climate warming and developing technologies are expected to push energy-related activities ever further into the previously inaccessible north. Within this framework, energy in the Arctic is predominantly understood as synonymous with oil and gas production for international exports; meanwhile, any social sustainability concerns associated with energy-related developments remain largely neglected or reduced to regional socioeconomic concerns.
Lempinen adopts an alternative approach, exploring how energy and its societal aspects are defined and debated in the context of the circumpolar north. Combining an in-depth conceptual discussion on energy and the social dimension of sustainability with an empirical focus on the scientific and political "truths" produced about energy and society in the Arctic energyscape, this book is an enlightening read for students, scholars and professionals interested in issues related to energy and society in the Arctic or beyond.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019

Hanna LempinenArctic Energy and Social Sustainabilityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02269-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Energy and the North

Hanna Lempinen¹

(1)

Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Hanna Lempinen

Abstract

In political, popular, and scholarly debates, the Arctic is often framed as the world’s new energy province; increasing consumption, dwindling reserves, warming climate, and developing technologies are expected to push energy-related activities further into the previously inaccessible North. In this chapter, Lempinen takes a critical look at this narrative, pointing out uncertainties related to future prospects of large-scale energy development in the region. Drawing attention to the problematic ways in which energy and its social sustainability are addressed (energy being the production of oil and gas, and its social sustainability remaining either sidelined or reduced to socioeconomic concerns), the author argues for the dire need to critically investigate the political and scientific “truths” that are being produced about energy and its social dimension in the circumpolar North.

Keywords

ArcticEnergySocial sustainabilitySustainability science

End Abstract

Equally in political, popular, and academic debates, the Arctic has become a buzzword during the last decade: The global significance of the region has become all but synonymous with its vast oil and gas reserves (USGS 2009; Kristoferssen and Langhelle 2017, 31; Keil 2017, 282). This heightened interest in the world’s “new energy province ” (Koivurova 2017, 2) and the “last frontier” of global energy production (Nuttall 2010, 32) is often pictured as having taken shape and place in the interplay of various overlapping and interconnected developments.

Most important, the projected growth of global energy consumption plays a role in the puzzle: Worldwide energy demand is still expected to increase by 30% by the year 2040. Despite the rapidly increasing share of renewable energy sources, most of this growth has been and is still expected to be reliant on fossil fuels (IEA 2017, 1; 2018, 1). At the same time, concerns over the availability of reliable and affordable energy supplies have intensified. On the one hand, reserves at existing production sites have been estimated to be gradually dwindling (Owen et al. 2010; Di Muzio and Salah Ovadia 2016, 2). On the other hand, political instabilities and related delivery disruptions have contributed to increased anxiety over the impact that political events might have on securing uninterrupted energy supplies (Liuhto 2009; Paillard 2010). In addition, the changing climate has had a role to play: The retreating sea in the Arctic region has been expected to make previously inaccessible areas better available for energy extraction and transportation activities (Mikkola and Käpylä 2014, 16; Loe and Kelman 2016, 25). Combined with evolving production and transportation technologies (Nuttall 2010, 9−13), all of these developments have been seen as pushing energy -related activities further and further toward the previously inaccessible North (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

The Arctic from above

While this “widely circulated, orthodox version” (Hannigan 2015, 8) of what energy means in the Arctic —or, conversely, what the Arctic region means in the context of the global energy picture—has gained significant foothold in the popular, political, and academic arenas, the chain of reasoning it is based on has also been brought into question on many fronts. First, the widespread international interest in the energy endowments of the Arctic region is not a wholly unforeseen phenomenon, and even less novel is the idea of the North as a “storehouse of natural resources” (AHDR 2004, 22) for global markets. In the specific context of energy , the dawn of the commercial utilization of Arctic resources dates back to 1920s Canada and Alaska. Meanwhile, its expansion both in terms of produced volumes and geographical terms has happened in and since the latter half of the twentieth century and is continuing to happen as new areas—for instance around Greenland, Iceland, and the northern seas of Norway and Russia—have gradually come under exploration and exploitation (AMAP 2007, 1). As such, the interest in large-scale utilization of Arctic energy resources by outside actors cannot be seen as a completely new development trend but rather as another step in the continuum of active exploitation of northern living and nonliving resources by non-Arctic actors dating back to at least the late middle ages (Gritsenko 2018; Nuttall 2010, 22). A noteworthy difference in the contemporary Arctic energy interest and activity is, however, that the resources being targeted are located farther away from the shoreline and existing infrastructure and deeper under the icy Arctic seas (Pelaudeix and Basse 2017, 1).

While the discussion of whether the Arctic region can in any way be seen as the “new” energy province for the world is noteworthy in its own right, in terms of the region’s role as a future supplier for global energy markets it is the concerns related to the Arctic energy reserves themselves that are more acute. Among the most concrete of these questions is whether the much-desired hydrocarbon resources actually exist. While the region has been estimated to hide a significant share of the world’s remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves (USGS 2009), there are no universally shared definitions or criteria for calculating the estimated reserves; in addition, “the only truly ‘known’ volumes of oil and gas are those that have actually been produced” (AMAP 2010, 2–4). This makes estimates of future production amounts at best uncertain and open to interpretation. If the estimated reserves actually do exist, the question still remains whether they can be extracted in a manner that is both economically profitable and feasible within the internationally agreed greenhouse emission goals . Indeed, staying under the vital two-degree global warming target set in the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC 2016) has been calculated to mean utilizing a fraction of the currently known resources that are located elsewhere in the world and leaving practically all capital-intensive Arctic hydrocarbon reserves unutilized (McGlade and Ekins 2015). Considering that fossil fuels contribute to around two-thirds of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions (IEA 2015, 11) and that the year 2017 saw record-high carbon dioxide emissions from both the energy sector and overall (IEA 2018, 3), it is safe to conclude that adding even a “modest Arctic energy boom” to the global emission balance would send the world far beyond emission levels deemed acceptable or safe under the Paris Agreement (Forbis and Hayhoe 2018, 2).

On a related note, the assumed “Arctic Paradox” (Palosaari and Tynkkynen 2015, 91)—the Arctic becoming more accessible for hydrocarbon resource extraction as a result of the climate impact of that same extraction—has also been brought into question. The changes in climate are expected not only to reduce the ice cover but also lead to more extreme and more unpredictable weather conditions that will potentially make energy extraction in the North much riskier both operationally and financially (Emmerson and Lahn 2012; Harsem et al. 2011). The uncertainties posed by these risks could be further exacerbated by the unpredictability of international energy markets, competition with conventional and unconventional energy production elsewhere around the globe and domestic and international political events and regulatory mechanisms (Keil 2017; AMAP 2007, v). Woven together, the arguments laid out above have sparked debate over the economic and environmental sustainability of Arctic energy projects as well as the feasibility of developing the Arctic as the world’s “new energy province” (Koivurova 2017, 2). They also construct an Arctic region of a rather different kind: one that is and w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Energy and the North
• 2. The Politics of Energy and Sustainability
• 3. The “Social” in the Sustainable
• 4. The Elusive Social and the Arctic Energyscape
• 5. Concluding Thoughts
• Back Matter