scholarly journals Pipeline Logic and Culpability: Establishing a Continuum of Harm for Sacrifice Zones

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ned Randolph
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Industrial Emissions ◽  
Land Loss ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Plant Emissions ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry

This article builds on the concept of Energy Sacrifice Zones, which has been used as a heuristic for areas negatively impacted by environmental degradation and/or pollution that harms nearby residents for broader economic gains elsewhere. Environmental justice scholars have since the 1980s identified urban “fence-line” communities as Sacrifice Zones, such as those along the industrialized Mississippi River corridor downstream of Baton Rouge, La., where public health and property values are impacted by plant emissions. More recent scholarship has identified analogous dispossession in coastal Louisiana, where indigenous and communities of color suffer environmental degradation and land loss from oil industry practices. Coastal oil and gas operations have left behind thousands of miles of pipelines, canals and subsiding oil fields that have accelerated marsh desiccation and land loss. This article argues that both inland and coastal areas of Louisiana are being sacrificed by the fossil fuel industry on a continuum of harm along pipelines from wellheads to inland plants. Oil wells, refineries, and petrochemical plants exist as nodes along a single line of production and manufactured demand for petroleum-based products, which also litter waterways and oceans. Such a continuum establishes a single Sacrifice Zone that conjoins multiple sites. Harmed communities need not be adjacent to one another to be considered logically contiguous and, therefore, subject to consideration of collective harm as long as they are linked by the material infrastructure that connects fossil fuel extraction, production and distribution. This zone of harm, once established, could be used to inform decision makers with more accurate and complex pictures of social and public health costs of industrial emissions and practices, particularly when considering proposals for plant expansions or new facilities. They may also be used to determine legal culpability in restitution claims by communities bearing the burden of the carbon economy.

scholarly journals Drilling for the future: Gendered justifications of the Arctic fossil fuel industry

Polar Record ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sohvi Kangasluoma
Keyword(s):  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Public Marketing ◽  
Oil And Gas Fields ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Gas Fields ◽  
Opening Up

Abstract Despite the global alarm caused by accelerating climate change, hydrocarbon companies are exploring and opening up new oil and gas fields all over the world, including the Arctic. With increasing attention on the Arctic, companies address the growing global environmental pressure in their public marketing in various ways. This article examines the webpages of Norwegian Equinor and Russian Gazprom & Gazprom Neft. Building on feminist discussions, I analyse the different justification strategies these fossil fuel companies working in the Arctic utilise in order to support their ongoing operations. This article concludes that in order to justify their operations in the Arctic, the Norwegian and Russian companies emphasise values based on discourses that have historically and culturally been associated with masculine practices, such as the control of nature enabled by technology. These justifications are thus reinforcing the narrative of the Arctic as a territory to be conquered and mastered. Even though the companies operate in different sociopolitical contexts, the grounds of justification are rather similar. Their biggest differences occur in their visual presentations of gender, which I argue is part of the justification. Approaching the fossil fuel industry from a feminist perspective allows questioning the dominant conceptualisations, which the justifications of Arctic hydrocarbon companies are based on.

scholarly journals Make Fossil Fuels Great Again? The Paris Agreement, Trump, and the US Fossil Fuel Industry

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Lukas Hermwille ◽  
Lisa Sanderink
Keyword(s):  
Energy Policy ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Oil And Gas Industry ◽  
Coal Industry ◽  
Paris Agreement ◽  
International Governance ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Climate And Energy Policy

Theoretical advances suggest that international governance in general and the Paris Agreement in particular provide a strong signal guiding sociotechnical systems toward decarbonization. We assess this signal and its effects empirically, by examining the struggle of competing narratives as present in the communications of leading US fossil fuel industry associations and companies. The results are then discussed in the context of the national and international climate and energy policy debates in a study period from late 2014 until the announcement of withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in June 2017. We find that the Paris Agreement has institutionalized a narrative paradigm that is surprisingly resilient. While the election of Donald Trump and his climate and energy policy led to a narrative shift in the coal industry, the oil and gas industry remained conspicuously silent in its immediate response and maintained its narrative strategies despite its alignment with the Paris Agreement.

scholarly journals Impacts of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement: Effects on Finance, Policy and Public Discourse

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 2529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam Bergman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Grey Literature ◽  
Fiduciary Duty ◽  
Student Groups ◽  
Finance Industry ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

The fossil fuel divestment movement campaigns for removing investments from fossil fuel companies as a strategy to combat climate change. It is a bottom-up movement, largely based in university student groups, although it has rapidly spread to other institutions. Divestment has been criticised for its naiveté and hard-line stance and dismissed as having little impact on fossil fuel finance. I analyse the impact of divestment through reviewing academic and grey literature, complemented by interviews with activists and financial actors, using a theoretical framework that draws on social movement theory. While the direct impacts of divestment are small, the indirect impacts, in terms of public discourse shift, are significant. Divestment has put questions of finance and climate change on the agenda and played a part in changing discourse around the legitimacy, reputation and viability of the fossil fuel industry. This cultural impact contributed to changes in the finance industry through new demands by shareholders and investors and to changes in political discourse, such as rethinking the notion of ‘fiduciary duty.’ Finally, divestment had significant impact on its participants in terms of empowerment and played a part in the revitalisation of the environmental movement in the UK and elsewhere.

scholarly journals Scale effects on land loss modeling in the Mississippi River Delta

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Nina S.-N. Lam ◽  
Heng Cai ◽  
Lei Zou ◽  
Kam-biu Liu
Keyword(s):  
Mississippi River ◽  
Neighborhood Effects ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Scale Effects ◽  
System Modeling ◽  
River Delta ◽  
Neighborhood Size ◽  
Mississippi River Delta ◽  
Land Loss ◽  
Loss Modeling

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> In complex natural-human system modeling, often times a first step is to examine the relationships between a dependent variable and a number of independent variables at their locations. The neighborhood effect, also known as a scale effect, has seldom been considered in the analysis. Previous research has shown that scale effects affect the reliability of analysis results, and rigorous scientific studies should take an extra step to examine the scale effects for more accurate analysis and modeling. However, detecting the neighborhood effects of various variables and then incorporating them into a holistic modeling system posts a serious challenge because of the fundamental difference in properties between variables from the human component (e.g., census data) and variables from the natural component (e.g., landscape properties). Moreover, uncertainties involved in data, data scale, algorithms, and scale of analysis make the findings and the interpretations of the findings unreliable. A major issue of modeling neighborhood effects is the determination of appropriate neighborhood size, also known as the spatial context scale or the operational scale. It has been shown in the literature that neighborhood effects vary with the neighborhood size used to compute the effects. Thus, research on how to determine the neighborhood size that best captures the scale of operation of a phenomenon is very much needed so that we can have more confidence in the modeling results.</p><p>This study examines the use of variogram in detecting the appropriate neighborhood size of the variables involved in land loss modeling in the Mississippi River Delta. The goal is to find out the best combination of variables and their neighborhood sizes that best explain the variation of land loss patterns in the Deltaic region. The Mississippi River Delta has been suffering substantial land loss during the past several decades. Land loss has been a subject of intense research by many researchers from multiple disciplines, aiming at mitigating the land loss process and its potential damages. However, a majority of land loss projections were derived solely from the natural processes, such as sea level rise, regional subsidence, and reduced sediment flows. Very few studies have incorporated human-induced factors such as land fragmentation, urbanization, energy industrialization, and marine transportation. Even fewer have studied the scale effects. A study that captures and quantifies both natural and human factors as well as their neighborhood effects would help uncover the complex mechanism of land loss and provide a more accurate spatiotemporal projection of land loss patterns and probability.</p><p>The analysis procedures are as follows. (1) First, the study area is rasterized into 1-km by 1-km grids. (2) A set of natural and human variables related to land loss in the deltaic region are collected. (3) Variogram analysis of each variable is conducted to identify the spatial neighborhood size of each variable, and a neighborhood variable for each independent variable is created. (4) Elastic Net regression analysis is applied to test and select the significant variables that affect land loss. Regression results between the model with and the model without neighborhood variables are compared. Through this study, we should be able to derive a more accurate land loss model for detailed analysis and future projections.</p>

Choosing among Implausible Leaders

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-54
Author(s):  
Peter Drahos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
European Union ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
The United States ◽  
Driving Mechanism ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
System P ◽  
Energy Union ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry

China is an implausible leader for the globalization of a bio-digital energy paradigm, but the United States and European Union are even less plausible candidates. The chapter shows how the fracking revolution has turned the United States into an energy-secure fossil fuel superpower. No US president can close down the fossil fuel industry. The New Green Deal is unlikely to have much impact on US politics and is only of modest interest to Wall Street. The European Union’s Energy Union initiative is important. But the European Union’s leadership of the bio-digital energy paradigm is hampered by the different energy and industrial interests of its members. Despite China’s corruption problems, it is the least implausible leader of an energy revolution. China’s improved standard-setting capacities are outlined. The chapter concludes by discussing China’s pressure-driving mechanism, a distinctive tool of governance that allows China to overcome problems of fragmentation in its system.

scholarly journals Towards space based verification of CO<sub>2</sub> emissions from strong localized sources: fossil fuel power plant emissions as seen by a CarbonSat constellation

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 5147-5182
Author(s):  
V. A. Velazco ◽  
M. Buchwitz ◽  
H. Bovensmann ◽  
M. Reuter ◽  
O. Schneising ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Power Plant ◽  
Systematic Error ◽  
Co2 Emissions ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Systematic Errors ◽  
Random Errors ◽  
Power Plant Emissions ◽  
Global Coverage ◽  
Plant Emissions

Abstract. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) that cause global warming. With electricity generation through fossil-fuel power plants now as the economic sector with the largest source of CO2, power plant emissions monitoring has become more important than ever in the fight against global warming. In a previous study done by Bovensmann et al. (2010), random and systematic errors of power plant CO2 emissions have been quantified using a single overpass from a proposed CarbonSat instrument. In this study, we quantify errors of power plant annual emission estimates from a hypothetical CarbonSat and constellations of several CarbonSats while taking into account that power plant CO2 emissions are time-dependent. Our focus is on estimating systematic errors arising from the sparse temporal sampling as well as random errors that are primarily dependent on wind speeds. We used hourly emissions data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) combined with assimilated and re-analyzed meteorological fields from the National Centers of Environmental Prediction (NCEP). CarbonSat orbits were simulated as a sun-synchronous low-earth orbiting satellite (LEO) with an 828-km orbit height, local time ascending node (LTAN) of 13:30 (01:30 p.m.) and achieves global coverage after 5 days. We show, that despite the variability of the power plant emissions and the limited satellite overpasses, one CarbonSat can verify reported US annual CO2 emissions from large power plants (≥5 Mt CO2 yr−1) with a systematic error of less than ~4.9 % for 50 % of all the power plants. For 90 % of all the power plants, the systematic error was less than ~12.4 %. We additionally investigated two different satellite configurations using a combination of 5 CarbonSats. One achieves global coverage everyday but only samples the targets at fixed local times. The other configuration samples the targets five times at two-hour intervals approximately every 6th day but only achieves global coverage after 5 days. From the statistical analyses, we found, as expected, that the random errors improve by approximately a factor of two if 5 satellites are used. On the other hand, more satellites do not result in a large reduction of the systematic error. The systematic error is somewhat smaller for the CarbonSat constellation configuration achieving global coverage everyday. Finally, we recommend the CarbonSat constellation configuration that achieves daily global coverage.

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