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"RESOURCE EXTRACTION"
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BP blowout : inside the Gulf oil disaster
\"BP Blowout is the first comprehensive account of the legal, economic, and environmental consequences of the disaster that resulted from the April 2010 blowout at a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico. The accident, which destroyed the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killed 11 people. The ensuing oil discharge- the largest ever in U.S. waters-polluted much of the Gulf for months, wreaking havoc on its inhabitants and the environment. Daniel Jacobs tells the story that neither BP nor the federal government wants heard: how the company and the government fell short, both in terms of preventing and responding to the disaster.\"--book flap
Book
Fear and Fortune
Mongolia over the last decade has seen a substantial and ongoing gold rush. The widespread mining of gold looks at first glance to be a blessing for a desperately poor and largely pastoralist country where people's lives were disrupted by the end of the USSR and tens of millions of livestock were killed in devastating droughts in the early 2000s. Volatility and uncertainty as well as political and economic turmoil led many people to join the hopeful search for gold. This activity, born out of uncertain times, poses an intense moral problem; in the \"land of dust,\" disturbing the ground and extracting the precious metal is widely believed to have calamitous consequences. With gold retaining strong ties to the landscape and its many spirit beings, the fortune of the precious metal is inseparable from the fears that surround mining. Tracing the continuities and discontinuities between human and nonhuman worlds, Mette M. High follows the paths of gold as it is excavated and converted into \"polluted money,\" entering local shops and Buddhist monasteries, joining the illegal gold trade, and returning as \"renewed\" money for the \"big bosses\" of the gold mines.
High has done several years of fieldwork in Mongolia, spending time with the \"ninjas,\" as the miners are known locally, as well as the people who disapprove of their illegal activities and warn of the retribution that the land and its inhabitants may suffer as a result. This book is about radical change, or as many Mongolians put it, when life becomes \"strange\" and \"chaotic.\" High has gained a deep understanding of the processes by which Mongolians square a morally questionable activity with the lure of profit. How do they involve themselves with tainted sources of money, and can it ever be cleansed and made usable? Addressing how our lives and those of others are intimately intertwined,Fear and Fortuneoffers an expansive and capacious approach to understanding the high stakes involved in human economic life.
eBook
SHADOW AND IMPRESS: ETHNOGRAPHY, FILM, AND THE TASK OF WRITING HISTORY IN THE SPACE OF SOUTH AFRICA'S DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
The historiography of natural-resource extraction, especially in colonial contexts, is often torn between two temptations: to represent these histories in narratives commencing with discovery, and thus rupture; or to render them in tales of continuity and thus an identity that transcends history. In the increasingly common scenarios of deindustrialization, these twin temptations are sutured together via the figure of return. Thus, accounts of postindustrial life often construe it as a return to forms of life that preceded capital-intensive industrial practice, and are written in the idiom of the \"artisanal.\" In doing so, they mistake a mere form of appearance, which is to say an image of the past, for its repetition, effacing the degree to which the materialities of industrialization shape, as both shadow and impress, the corporeal gestures and unconscious habits of those who inhabit its ruins. At the same time, and in an era of memory studies, truth commissions, and heritage projects, people who inhabit the spaces of deindustrialization often believe that they can survive the destruction of their life-worlds only by giving themselves to be seen in the form of an image that resembles the past, and in a museological register. In this essay, based on two decades of field research in the areas of deep-level mining in South Africa, and an ongoing documentary film project with informal migrant miners called zama-zamas, I attempt to find another form and method for producing a historical and dialectical anthropological understanding of postindustrial life. The essay is an experiment in narrative that attempts to redeem a photographic and cinematographic tradition that is often culpable of reproducing the above-named temptations. The essay thus weaves together forms of the close-up—a gesture that seeks to get hold of history by means of an image—with contemplative reflections based in the temporally extended accounts of those who inhabit the ruins of deep-level gold mines. In so doing, I propose a means of rethinking historiographical practice in the context of an always already vanishing present.
Journal Article
Life in the Time of Oil
Life in the Time of Oil examines the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project-a partnership between global oil companies, the World Bank, and the Chadian government that was an ambitious scheme to reduce poverty in one of the poorest countries on the African continent. Key to the project was the development of a marginal set of oilfields that had only recently attracted the interest of global oil companies who were pressed to expand operations in the context of declining reserves. Drawing on more than a decade of work in Chad, Lori Leonard shows how environmental standards, grievance mechanisms, community consultation sessions, and other model policies smoothed the way for oil production, but ultimately contributed to the unraveling of the project. Leonard offers a nuanced account of the effects of the project on everyday life and the local ecology of the oilfield region as she explores the resulting tangle of ethics, expectations, and effects of oil as development.
eBook
Commodity frontiers and the transformation of the global countryside: a research agenda
Over the past 600 years, commodity frontiers – processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy – have absorbed ever more land, ever more labour and ever more natural assets. In this paper, we claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and thus the modern world. We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation and resistance in rural peripheries. To account for the enormous variety of actors and places involved in this history is a critical challenge in the social sciences, and one to which global history can contribute crucial insights.
Journal Article
Analysing the nexus between clean energy expansion, natural resource extraction, and load capacity factor in China: a step towards achieving COP27 targets
The excessive use of non-renewable energy in 21st-century economic growth has continued to hurt the environment by accumulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. However, promoting environmental sustainability requires expanding clean energy utilisation. In this study, we examine the effects of clean energy expansion and natural resource extraction on load capacity factor (LCF) in China from 1970 to 2018. Using the dynamic autoregressive distributed lag simulations approach, we extend the standard load capacity curve (LCC) hypothesis by incorporating clean energy expansion and natural resource extraction as main determinants of the LCF. The empirical outcomes reveal that economic expansion is, although positively associated with the LCF, but its squared term degrades the LCF. This confirms that the LCC hypothesis is not valid for China. Moreover, while clean energy expansion has a positive effect on the LCF, the effect of natural resource extraction is negative. These effects are stronger and statistically significant only in the long run. Therefore, this study highlights the potentials for a sustainable decarbonized economy in China by investing not only in clean energy sources but also efficiently use the available natural resources in the country.
Journal Article
The effect of natural resources extraction and public debt on environmental sustainability
PurposeThe rise in public debt and the increased extraction of natural resources in Ghana at a time that environmental degradation is escalating, especially with carbon dioxide emission, is worrying. This seems to cast doubt on the country's ability to meet the goals of the Paris agreement for climate change and ensuring sustainable development. Consequently, in this study, the effect of natural resources extraction and government debt on carbon dioxide emission is investigated.Design/methodology/approachThe Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis was adopted for this study. The Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square Model was used for assessing the data. An annual data from 1971 to 2018 was used for the analysis.FindingsThe long-run results based on the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square analysis reveal that natural resources extraction increases carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, the joint effect of post-oil production in commercial quantities and natural resources rent increases carbon dioxide emission. Further, the findings document that the initial stage of government debt improves environmental quality up to a point, beyond which an increase in debt hurts the environment. On the environmental degrading effect of economic growth, the findings validate the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis. It is also observed that urbanization degrades environmental quality.Practical implicationsThe study offers appropriate recommendations policymakers need to embrace towards the attainment of lower carbon emissions from the loans and natural resources rent to achieve environmental sustainability.Originality/valueThe effect of debt on carbon dioxide emission is assessed for the Ghanaian economy. It also contributes to studies on the natural resources-carbon emission nexus.
Journal Article
Unfulfilled promises, illegal resource extraction, and the legitimacy of park management in Ethiopia
Protected area management in developing countries faces legitimacy issues, especially with supposed participatory governance reforms and social-ecological disturbances. The legitimacy of decentralized governance, however, depends on its response to conservation promises and illegal resource extraction. This paper examines how unfulfilled promises, illegal resource extraction, and the legitimacy of protected area governance interact in agro-pastoralist communities. In this study we draw on primary data collected through household surveys, group discussions, and interviews. Using thematic analysis, we find that failure to deliver on promises of livelihood projects erodes governance legitimacy by fostering mistrust and injustice. This increases communities’ vulnerability to climate shocks and drives illegal resource extraction, which in turn weakens regulations and fuels further illegal activity through informal networks. Ultimately, pro-conservation behavior hinges on keeping promises and legitimate governance, not past motivations. We highlight the need to fulfill promises of livelihood projects as a pathway to restore the legitimacy of protected area governance and address livelihood vulnerability.
Journal Article
Diamonds, Rebel’s and Farmer’s Best Friend
This article investigates the impact of the world price of a “lootable,” labor-intensive natural resource on intensity of violent conflict. Results suggest that a price increase can have opposite effects at different geographical levels of analysis: a decrease in conflict intensity overall in resource-rich countries, but an increase in conflict intensity in resource-rich subnational regions. The article argues that intensity of violence decreases overall due to rising opportunity costs of rebellion but that violence concentrates in resource-rich areas as returns to looting rise. The article introduces a new measure of diamond propensity based on geological characteristics, which is arguably exogenous to conflict and can capture small-scale laborintensive production better than existing measures. The stated effects are found for secondary diamonds, which are lootable and related to opportunity costs of fighting, but not for primary diamonds, which are neither.
Journal Article
Urgent transition, urgent extraction? Global decarbonization, national governance, and local impacts in the Indonesian nickel industry
The shift to low-carbon societies will require large amounts of energy transition materials for batteries to support intermittent renewable energy generation. While this energy transition is still at an early phase, the risks of negative social and environmental impacts associated with the extraction of these materials are becoming increasingly apparent. The challenges associated with resource extraction are well documented. However, there are significant gaps in knowledge about how the energy transition reconfigures natural resource governance and how this shapes impacts from resource extraction. This knowledge is critical for understanding the full impact of transition policies, and for identifying opportunities for, and barriers, to more sustainable and just extractive practices. We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring how Indonesian nickel governance has been reconfigured and centralized in the context of early energy transition efforts, and examining the social and environmental impacts this is having in Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the largest nickel production areas in the world. Drawing on 88 interviews and six focus group discussions with key stakeholders, we show that while this centralization has enabled a 14-fold increase in extraction rates over a 10 year period, it has also resulted in a series of well-known negative social and environmental impacts that degrade important ecosystem services and threaten health, livelihoods, and ways of life. Importantly, these impacts are exacerbated by the rapidly shrinking political space for local participation caused by the centralization of nickel governance, highlighting the tension between urgency in up-scaling extraction of energy transition materials and undertaking a just low-carbon transition. Reflecting and addressing this tension will be essential to designing policies that can achieve just outcomes while successfully addressing the current nature and climate crisis.
Journal Article