Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ENERGY ETHICS (The Ethics of Oil: Finance Moralities and Environmental Politics in the Global Oil Economy)
Período documentado: 2022-01-01 hasta 2023-06-30
ENERGY ETHICS addresses questions about the conflicting dynamics between finance moralities and environmental politics at a time of oil dependency and an uncertain climate future. What is the value of oil? How do such valuations, understood as both financial and ethical, intersect and inform the making of oil economies? To what extent can oil be an important industrial resource, a profit-yielding investment opportunity, and an undesired pollutant that brings about irreversible climate impacts? Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork and taking its starting point in people's own perceptions of and direct involvement in oil economies, ENERGY ETHICS has developed a new framework for understanding the relationship between oil, money and climate change.
Corporate capitalism is currently marked by a striking concern with ethics. While the language of ethics has been strongly adopted by corporate actors, it has also long provided a cornerstone for disapproval, with critics pointing to corporate shortcomings, if not outright failings. Ethics has thus become a battleground where corporations and critics uphold the kind of flourishing they believe should be brought into being. This ethicalisation does not necessarily imply that companies and their critics are now embracing deeper, more profound moral imperatives than they did in the past. Instead, it is a moment in capitalist practice when ethics is actively and concertedly demonstrated, with some practices being categorised and made visible as ethical, while others are not. This ethicalisation is particularly evident in the oil and gas industry where stakeholders are often highly unequally positioned and able to mobilise very different capacities, resources, and networks. To explore how people value oil at a time when ethics is forefronted, ENERGY ETHICS thus developed the concept of 'regimes of ethics' (High 2022a). It enabled the research team to carefully identify and analyse the intersection of moral selves and moral worlds, bringing together the multiple scales in which ethical activities are articulated. Rather than amplifying public-facing discourses of blame, the concept has offered depth to our understandings of how people make sense of and interact with oil. While environmental activists in Lancashire drew on notions of truth-making in their protests against shale gas developments (PhD2), expatriate oil workers conceptualised their work as sacrifices for their families in attempts to sustain love (Postdoc2). Energy elites in Norway questioned their own oil careers, uncomfortable with the lack of alignment with their visions of environmental flourishing (PhD1), while oil financiers in Texas (Postdoc1) and oil company employees in Colorado (PI) valued oil for generating vast amounts of energy and profits. ENERGY ETHICS has found that energy projects, of whichever kind, emerge as devotional projects, full of passion and commitment, articulating larger ethical visions and frontiers for action. Energy projects come to matter because they are also intensely held moral projects. To have meaningful and productive dialogues on matters of energy, ENERGY ETHICS thus concludes that it is crucial to recognise how ethics inform and underpin our conceptualisations of and commitment to energy projects.
Corporate capitalism is currently marked by a striking concern with ethics. While the language of ethics has been strongly adopted by corporate actors, it has also long provided a cornerstone for disapproval, with critics pointing to corporate shortcomings, if not outright failings. Ethics has thus become a battleground where corporations and critics uphold the kind of flourishing they believe should be brought into being. This ethicalisation does not necessarily imply that companies and their critics are now embracing deeper, more profound moral imperatives than they did in the past. Instead, it is a moment in capitalist practice when ethics is actively and concertedly demonstrated, with some practices being categorised and made visible as ethical, while others are not. This ethicalisation is particularly evident in the oil and gas industry where stakeholders are often highly unequally positioned and able to mobilise very different capacities, resources, and networks. To explore how people value oil at a time when ethics is forefronted, ENERGY ETHICS thus developed the concept of 'regimes of ethics' (High 2022a). It enabled the research team to carefully identify and analyse the intersection of moral selves and moral worlds, bringing together the multiple scales in which ethical activities are articulated. Rather than amplifying public-facing discourses of blame, the concept has offered depth to our understandings of how people make sense of and interact with oil. While environmental activists in Lancashire drew on notions of truth-making in their protests against shale gas developments (PhD2), expatriate oil workers conceptualised their work as sacrifices for their families in attempts to sustain love (Postdoc2). Energy elites in Norway questioned their own oil careers, uncomfortable with the lack of alignment with their visions of environmental flourishing (PhD1), while oil financiers in Texas (Postdoc1) and oil company employees in Colorado (PI) valued oil for generating vast amounts of energy and profits. ENERGY ETHICS has found that energy projects, of whichever kind, emerge as devotional projects, full of passion and commitment, articulating larger ethical visions and frontiers for action. Energy projects come to matter because they are also intensely held moral projects. To have meaningful and productive dialogues on matters of energy, ENERGY ETHICS thus concludes that it is crucial to recognise how ethics inform and underpin our conceptualisations of and commitment to energy projects.
Year 1: Setting up Project website, fieldwork arrangements for the research team, recruiting PhD1 and PhD2. Year 2: Recruiting Postdoc1 and Postdoc2, research team carried out fieldwork. Year 3: COVID-related lockdowns forced research team to return from fieldwork earlier than planned. The research team met regularly on a fortnightly basis for ENERGY ETHICS online writing-up seminars. The research team focussed on analysing gathered data, writing thesis chapters and journal articles. Launched 'The Energy Blog' on Project website. Published Special Issue of journal. Year 4: COVID-related lockdowns still affecting fieldwork. ENERGY ETHICS writing-up seminar continued. The Project's first Milestone event took place 9-13 Nov 2020, 134 attendees. The team developed a new 4th year undergraduate course, taught Jan-May 2020 with all team members involved. The Centre for Energy Ethics launched on 25 Feb 2021, directed by the PI. The Project's second Milestone event took place 25-26 Feb 2021, with online exhibition "Art of Energy", 199 attendees. Launched Project podcast "All About Energy". Year 5: PhD1 awarded Prize for a thesis chapter. ENERGY ETHICS writing-up seminars continued. Published 5 journal articles, contributed evidence to UK Government, developed a new MSc in Energy Ethics degree programme. The Project's third Milestone event took place 25-27 Oct 2021, 746 attendees. Year 6: PhD1 and PhD2 submitted their theses on time and graduated. PhD2 was awarded Prize for a thesis chapter. ENERGY ETHICS book writing seminar group met fortnightly. Published 3 journal articles. PI awarded a consortium grant to lead new interdisciplinary research alliance on energy from Oct 2023. The Project's final event, took place 6-8 2023, 218 attendees in person. In addition to journal articles, the research team has published its findings in book chapters, blog posts, policy briefs, and forthcoming monographs as well as in interviews, media coverage, and others.
PI has noted (High and Smith 2019, High 2022a) that research agendas in energy humanities often struggle to attend with nuance and analytical care to research participants' own ethical sensibility in relation to energy. Ethical criteria, ethical states, and ethical responses are brought to bear on the divergent paths that have been tried in the past and that can be pursued in the future. With climate change becoming an increasingly urgent issue, if not an emergency, the stakes involved in our energy practices are enormous and ever-rising. As a matter on which humanity and other beings depend for their livelihood, energy raises fundamental questions that involve judgements about our entangled telos. Questions about energy are intensely ethical as they encourage, if not demand, reflection on how we feel we ought to live. There is thus no 'neutral' ground on which to stand when judging the ways in which energy can contribute to or imperil the kinds of lives and societies we desire for ourselves and our others. Yet, given the geopolitics in natural resource extraction, the strong industry lobbies, and clear activist agendas, research participants' own sense-making can easily disappear from view and be overshadowed in academic publications by more vocal and vested voices. PI has observed how much of the existing literature in energy humanities has been framed by two overarching concerns: 1) Critiquing state and corporate power; and 2) advocating energy transitions that cast fossil fuel resources are necessarily immoral and renewable resources as their assumed opposites. These frameworks are animated by ethical views that can implicitly shape research agendas or sometimes result in strong accusations that obscure how our research participants themselves may consider the rightness and wrongness of energy resources and the societal infrastructures of which they form part. As such, these impositions hinder the anthropological project of understanding the diversity of living in the world by predefining how people ought to live, what kinds of societies they should want, and how they out to relate to the environment and other forms of life.