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.
