| Autor: |
Sowers, Elizabeth, Ciccantell, Paul, Smith, David A. |
| Předmět: |
|
| Zdroj: |
Conference Papers - American Sociological Association; 2019, p1-36, 36p |
| Abstrakt: |
Energy transitions are often portrayed as inexorable technological advances that displace earlier energy systems because of the new energy source's greater technical efficiency and cost savings for capital. However, a few have argued that interest in new energy sources is often motivated by a desire to reduce vulnerability to labor (e.g. oil required much less labor than hand digging for coal in the late 1800s and early 1900s and typically requires less labor than even modern large scale coal mining, LNG production and transport takes almost no labor). In this paper, we utilize our raw materialist lengthened GCCs approach to focus on the role of labor in the development of new energy sources over the last two centuries. Rather than being a simple matter of technical and cost superiority, these transitions can be better characterized as the addition of new energy sources to the capitalist world-economy (Ciccantell and Gellert 2018). We argue that much of this process of addition of energy sources is the result of capital's desire to reduce its vulnerability to demands and disruptions by labor organizations by creating new energy GCCs that incorporate new energy supplies in new areas worked by new and often unorganized workers. In the two newest forms of energy extracting and production, hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas and renewable energy wind and solar power, we find a surprising reversal of this long term trend toward using less labor per unit of energy produced. The goal of our final paper will be to deeply probe these empirical patterns and attempt to move our conceptual understanding of how labor, tempered by various global political economy and world-system forces, factors into the changing mix of energy sources in particular countries and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| Databáze: |
Supplemental Index |
| Externí odkaz: |
|
