Carbon Technocracy

Author : Victor Seow
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226826554
Total Pages : 413 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Carbon Technocracy written by Victor Seow and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine. The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.

Author : Peter Thorsheim
Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821446274
Total Pages : 429 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inventing Pollution written by Peter Thorsheim and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going as far back as the thirteenth century, Britons mined and burned coal. Britain’s supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal, which powered industry, warmed homes, and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain’s cities and towns filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke. Yet, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment. Even as coal production in Britain has plummeted in recent decades, it has surged in other countries. This reissue of Thorsheim’s far-reaching study includes a new preface that reveals the book’s relevance to the contentious national and international debates—which aren’t going away anytime soon—around coal, air pollution more generally, and the grave threat of human-induced climate change.

Author : Andrew Wallace
Publisher : Andrew Wallace
ISBN 13 : 9163312492
Total Pages : 139 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Technocracy: Building a new sustainable society for a post carbon world written by Andrew Wallace and published by Andrew Wallace. This book was released on 2007 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Timothy Mitchell
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1781681163
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Carbon Democracy written by Timothy Mitchell and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history—and of the political and environmental crises we now face.” —Guardian Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.

Author : Andy Bruno
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110714471X
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Nature of Soviet Power written by Andy Bruno and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.

Author : Mike Hulme
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429821158
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contemporary Climate Change Debates written by Mike Hulme and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Climate Change Debates is an innovative new textbook which tackles some of the difficult questions raised by climate change. For the complex policy challenges surrounding climate migration, adaptation and resilience, structured debates become effective learning devices for students. This book is organised around 15 important questions, and is split into four parts: What do we need to know? What should we do? On what grounds should we base our actions? Who should be the agents of change? Each debate is addressed by pairs of one or two leading or emerging academics who present opposing viewpoints. Through this format the book is designed to introduce students of climate change to different arguments prompted by these questions, and also provides a unique opportunity for them to engage in critical thinking and debate amongst themselves. Each chapter concludes with suggestions for further reading and with discussion questions for use in student classes. Drawing upon the sciences, social sciences and humanities to debate these ethical, cultural, legal, social, economic, technological and political roadblocks, Contemporary Debates on Climate Change is essential reading for all students of climate change, as well as those studying environmental policy and politics and sustainable development more broadly.

Author : Jeffrey A Engel
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674027043
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cold War at 30,000 Feet written by Jeffrey A Engel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a gripping story of international power and deception, Engel reveals the "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain. As allies, they fought Communism; as rivals, they clashed over which would lead the Cold War fight. In the quest for sovereignty and hegemony, Engel shows that one important key was airpower, which created jobs, forged ties with the developing world, and ensured military superiority, ultimately affecting forever the global balance of power.

Author : Jonathan Chait
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062426990
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Audacity written by Jonathan Chait and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An essential starting point for those assessing the Obama presidency.” —Washington Monthly Two presidencies later, the time has never been better to revisit the legacy of Barack Obama. In Audacity, New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait makes the unassailable case that, in the eyes of history, Obama will be viewed as one of America’s best and most accomplished presidents. Over the course of eight years, Barack Obama has amassed an array of outstanding achievements. His administration saved the American economy from collapse, expanded health insurance to millions who previously could not afford it, negotiated an historic nuclear deal with Iran, helped craft a groundbreaking international climate accord, reined in Wall Street and crafted a new vision of racial progress. He has done all of this despite a left that frequently disdained him as a sellout, and a hysterical right that did everything possible to destroy his agenda even when they agreed with what he was doing. Now, as the page turns to our next Commander in Chief, Jonathan Chait, acclaimed as one of the most incisive and meticulous political commentators in America, digs deep into Obama’s record on major policy fronts—economics, the environment, domestic reform, health care, race, foreign policy, and civil rights—to demonstrate why history will judge our forty-fourth president as among the greatest in history. Audacity does not shy away from Obama’s failures, most notably in foreign policy. Yet Chait convincingly shows that President Obama has accomplished what candidate Obama said he would, despite overwhelming opposition—and that the hopes of those who voted for him have not been dashed despite the smokescreen of extremist propaganda and the limits of short-term perspective.

Author : Matthew Paterson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108838464
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In Search of Climate Politics written by Matthew Paterson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the crucial - but oddly neglected - question of what it means to say climate change is political.

Author : Jeffrey Friedman
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190877170
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Power Without Knowledge written by Jeffrey Friedman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technocrats claim to know how to solve the social and economic problems of complex modern societies. But as Jeffrey Friedman argues in Power without Knowledge, there is a fundamental flaw with technocracy: it requires an ability to predict how the people whom technocrats attempt to control will act in response to technocratic policies. However, the mass public's ideas-the ideas that drive their actions-are far too varied and diverse to be reliably predicted. But that is not the only problem. Friedman reminds us that a large part of contemporary mass politics, even populist mass politics, is essentially technocratic too. Members of the general public often assume that they are competent to decide which policies or politicians will be able to solve social and economic problems. Yet these ordinary "citizen-technocrats" typically regard the solutions to social problems as self-evident, such that politics becomes a matter of vetting public officials for their good intentions and strong wills, not their technocratic expertise. Finally, Friedman argues that technocratic experts themselves drastically oversimplify technocratic realities. Economists, for example, theorize that people respond rationally to the incentives they face. This theory is simplistic, but it gives the appearance of being able to predict people's behavior in response to technocratic policy initiatives. If stripped of such gross oversimplications, though, technocrats themselves would be forced to admit that a rational technocracy is nothing more than an impossible dream. Ranging widely over the philosophy of social science, rational choice theory, and empirical political science, Power without Knowledge is a pathbreaking work that upends traditional assumptions about technocracy and politics, forcing us to rethink our assumptions about the legitimacy of modern governance.