ABSTRACT
The inherent question of this volume, the relation between time and globalization, finds form in the oil pipeline. Snaking across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, miles of pipe take shape in order to convey fossil fuels from the source of extraction to refineries and distribution centers. Pipelines are part of a mechanism in fossil capital that generates an experience of the pure present. So long as oil keeps flowing, the length and duration of the journey does not matter – each instant when oil is fed into the mouth of the pipeline is completed in the barrel at the other end.2 Without an adequate replacement or an alternative way of organizing the social, fossil fuels continue to be the driver of contemporary life. Pipelines are the mechanism that keeps the motor running. But what kind of future does pipeline construction build? As the epigraph bears out, fossil-fuelled global warming is an historical
event unlike any other in that it is intensely recursive. Thus, I consider oil pipelines as instruments that have profound impacts on the experience of the present and on how others might experience the future. While it may address supply side problems, this infrastructure brings future costs with it that do not appear in its schematics. In this chapter I explore two modes of resistance to pipeline development in order to better frame the ideological problems posed by high-density energy. Here, the pipeline becomes a tool for understanding and critiquing fossil capital, while modes of oil-infrastructure resistance offer further insight into the scope and velocity of the inertia of energy.
