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Energy futures : finance and petroculture
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Pitt Scott, Harry (2022) Energy futures : finance and petroculture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3883983
Abstract
‘Energy Futures: Finance and Petroculture’ is a study of how finance shapes the economic and cultural world of petroleum, or ‘financial petroculture.’ It begins with the claim that finance is a central, if often unrecognised, feature of energy systems and cultures, because of its capacity to make representations of the future into reality. I analyse ‘energy futures’ as a mediating concept, naming a mode of financial representation that conjoins financial instruments and a way of framing the future of energy. I show that finance establishes a dominant speculative logic in relation to energy and ecology, conditioned by anticipations of future energy states as energised ways of life and forms of value. It establishes the future in the present, as the present strives for an alternate energy future. As financial markets, ecological crisis, and energy transition begin to contour the shape of the future, financial representation becomes a privileged site for a cultural and economic theory of energy. Through the interpretation of different cultural forms – literature, architecture, visual media, and financial writing – I propose a cultural history of energy futures, asking: how do culture and capital come together through financial representation to shape the real and imagined future of energy?
I track energy futures from the energy crisis of 1973, after which the historicity of petroleum became inseparable from financial representations, to the concerns crystallising around the Anthropocene, as the fossil economy undermines its own socio-ecological conditions of reproduction. I identify the economic and cultural logic of financial value claims to fossil energy through offshoring: the separation of energy and capital, through markets, infrastructures, and landscapes, from democratic political cultures. I then argue that this era is best periodised as a ‘long transition’ between energy regimes, and that energy transition is a problem of representation for a financial petroculture: what will sustain its energy futures after petroleum, and how does offshoring shape the culture of clean energy it is invested in? This thesis claims that energy transition, a temporal mode of thinking the future, is constitutively calibrated in a field of financial representation, which is given historical form through electrified infrastructure, architecture, and media. It concludes with a critical reading of cultural forms that prefigure alternative relations to energy to those that render it amenable to financial accumulation.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HG Finance T Technology > TD Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Financial futures, Petroleum chemicals industry -- Economic aspects, Fossil fuels -- Environmental aspects, Energy transition, Energy development -- Economic aspects, Infrastructure (Economics) | ||||
Official Date: | July 2022 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Macdonald, Graeme, 1969- | ||||
Format of File: | |||||
Extent: | vii, 239 pages : illustrations | ||||
Language: | eng |
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