Energy

For thousands of years, human beings have extracted energy for food, transport and processing from solar-based biomass, wind, water as well as animal and human muscles. With the emergence of global capitalism, the energy basis of modern societies has undergone a deep transition toward fossil energy – coal, gas, and oil. With the aim of avoiding technological inevitability or deterministic abstractions, an adequate analytical perspective to depict the politically contested, as well as the socially and geographically uneven character of “energy” is required. The level of global energy consumption is constantly on the rise. Since the 1990s, the Americas have experienced an important increase in the level of primary energy consumption per capita, but it has nevertheless remained at 30 percent below the global average. Struggles around energy have usually involved resistance movements fighting against powerful national and transnational energy companies. The political-economic perspective of Political Ecology sheds light on the social-ecological materiality of energy.