Cyrus Mody, Maastricht University, will share his paper "Oil Spillovers and the Ambiguities of Scarcity in the Long 1970s"on Tuesday 22 March at 2pm Eastern. Here is the abstract:
"The 1970s saw an intense global debate about resource scarcity and related issues: consumption, conservation, pollution, overpopulation. This debate was propelled by events such as publication of the Limits to Growth report and the UN Stockholm Conference of 1972, and especially the OAPEC oil embargo of 1973. From 1973 to 1979, the experience of car-free Sundays and long lines for petrol (temporarily) persuaded global publics that oil was a finite and scarce resource.
There are many conspiracy theories - some of them plausible - about the oil industry's role in the embargo and in the scarcity debate more generally. What is certain is that people associated with the oil industry fostered that debate - from both the "cornucopian" and "neo-Malthusian" camps. Oil actors and oil firms were also surprisingly active in alternative energy in this period: most of the major companies and many of the minors had in-house programs and/or partnerships in nuclear energy (both fission and fusion), solar, geothermal, the hydrogen economy (batteries, fuel cells, and electric cars), biomass, etc. The windfall profits and political pressures arising from the oil crises of '73 and '79 also led oil firms to invest massively in non-oil technologies: biotech, artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing, and even advanced golf club technology! Yet when the price of oil declined in the 1970s oil companies retreated from those investments and slowly turned to climate denialism as an alternative strategy.
This talk surveys the oil industry's complex role in all kinds of technological activities (or "oil spillovers") throughout the 20th century, and the intensification of those spillovers in connection with the scarcity debate of the 1970s. I will further attempt to draw out some insights relevant to sustainability transition and innovation studies and to current debates about the oil industry's culpability for climate change."
You can find Mody's webpage here: https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/c.mody
...and more on his oil research here: http://www.maastrichtsts.nl/managing-scarcity-and-sustainability