Who will man the rigs when we go?” transnational demographic fever dreams between Qatar and Texas

The educational project of producing engineers in Qatar is uniquely embedded in global capitalism, particularly as a field closely tied to the development of the oil and gas industry, the military and logistics spaces across the Gulf. Over the past two decades, U.S. universities based in the region have become significant spaces where new generations of managerial engineering labor are educated. Drawing on 18 months of institutional ethnographic research, I examine Texas A&M University at Qatar’s (TAMUQ) role in managing the gender demographics of Qatari engineering labor and the experiences of students navigating these institutional mechanisms. The increasing number of women studying at Texas A&M’s engineering branch campus are publicly celebrated by the university as the embodiment of progress in Qatar. At the same time, TAMUQ has worked to mitigate the feminization of engineering through outreach activities that present engineering as a masculine patriotic endeavor. To unpack these contradictory tendencies, I build on the feminist concept of “demographic fever dreams.” Through an examination of contradictory population-based anxieties about Qatari engineering students, I argue that a U.S. land-grant university is a participant and driver of fantasies and fears regarding the future of racialized and gendered labor hierarchies and fossil-fueled capitalism in the Gulf. In doing so, this article offers a grounded feminist intervention to examine the connections between transnational education, U.S. hegemony, and the fossil fuel industry.

Resource Nationalism and the Violation of Indigenous Rights in Mexico’s Oil Industry: The Case of a Chontal Community in Tabasco

For decades, Indigenous communities living in Mexico’s oil-producing state of Tabasco suffered violence, environmental contamination, and the destruction of their traditional livelihood. The administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) taking office in 2018 promised to govern for the poorest people in Mexico, emphasizing the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. However, as part of his nationalist agenda AMLO is pursuing aggressive exploitation of hydrocarbons upon the lead of state-owned company Pemex. This article argues that the Mexican government still denies Indigenous peoples living nearby oil reserves the right to self-determination. We examine this phenomenon through the Chontal community of Oxiacaque in the state of Tabasco suffering environmental contamination and health problems caused by the oil industry. We emphasize the government’s use of resource nationalism to legitimize violence against Indigenous communities and their natural environments. Further, the expansion of social programs and infrastructure building serves to obtain Indigenous compliance with the unsustainable fossil fuel industry.

Planetary Challenges

The extraction and consumption of fossil-fuel-based energy has underpinned the growth of global capitalism over the past two centuries, resulting in an industry dominated by some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. However, the centrality of fossil energy to economic growth has also come at a huge environmental cost as escalating carbon emissions have generated a climate crisis that now threatens the future of organised human civilisation. This article explores the origins of the global fossil-fuel industry and its political response to the growing recognition of climate change and moves towards the decarbonization of economies. It highlights how the industry has engaged in various forms of political activity to defend itself from critique and delay the transition to a low-carbon economy. While this has been a successful strategy for over forty years, the article notes how the growing urgency of the climate crisis and the current global pandemic now pose fundamental threats to the continuation of fossil fuel expansion.

The green machine

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings The fossil fuel industry could gain significant competitive advantage if it embraces green innovation as a strategy. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

An inter-disciplinary approach to the energy transition in South Africa

The compelling need to tackle climate change is well-established. It is a challenge which is being faced by all nations. This requires an approach which is truly inter-disciplinary in nature, drawing on the expertise of politicians, social scientists, and technologists. We report how the pace of the energy transition can be influenced significantly by both the operation of societal barriers, and by policy actions aimed at reducing these effects. Using the case study of South Africa, a suite of interviews has been conducted with diverse energy interests, to develop and analyse four key issues pertinent to the energy transition there. We do so primarily through the lens of delivering energy justice to that society. In doing so, we emphasise the need to monitor, model, and modify the dynamic characteristic of the energy transition process and the delivery of energy justice; a static approach which ignores the fluid nature of transition will be insufficient. We conclude that the South African fossil fuel industry is still impeding the development of the country’s renewable resources, and the price of doing so is being met by those living in townships and in rural areas.

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

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.