Sparking a worldwide energy revolution
Subtitle: social struggles in the transition to a post-petrol world
By: edited by Kolya Abramsky
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Oakland, CA; Edinburgh
Language: eng
Number of pages: 668
ISBN-13: 9781849350051
Subjects: Power resources; Economic aspects; Energy policy
Description: "There are no technofixes. Neither 'clean' energy nor 'green' capitalism will preserve our lands, rivers, oceans, health, and lives. Neither governments nor corporations nor 'the market' can bring us out of the netherworld they themselves have created. Mother Earth calls to the grass-roots for entirely new social relations, human and less hellish. This sober and serious book heeds that call."ùPeter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All --

"Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution is a major contribution to the movement working for a transition from carbon capitalism to an ecologically sound energy system. It's an indispensable volume for the just energy transition movement. It will be referred to for years to come."ùSilvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch --

As the world's energy system faces a period of unprecedented change, a global struggle over who controls the sectorùand for what purposesùis intensifying. The question of "green capitalism" is now unavoidable, for capitalist planners and anti-capitalist struggles alike. From all sides we hear that it's time to save the planet in order to save the economy, but in reality what lies before us is the next round of global class struggle with energy at the center, as the key means of production and subsistence. --

There are no easy answers in this battle for control of the world's energy system. Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution is not a book of sound bites. It unpacks the seemingly innocent terms "energy sector" and "energy system" by situating the current energy crisis, peak oil, and the transition to a post-petrol future within a historical understanding of the global, social, economic, political, financial, military, and ecological relations of which energy and technology are parts. The authors probe the systemic relationships between energy production and consumption and the worldwide division of labor on which capitalism itself is basedùits conflicts and hierarchies, its crisis and class struggles. --

With over 50 chapters written by contributors from approximately 20 countries, Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution forms a collective map of the most dynamic struggles within the energy sector. --

Kolya Abramsky is a former visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Science, Technology and Society, in Graz, Austria, where he received the Manfred-Heindler Award for Energy and Climate Change Research, and in 2006 was coordinator of the Danish-based World Wind Energy Institute, an international effort in non-commercial renewable energy education, involving different renewable energy centers from around the world. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Part 1: Energy makes the world go round and work makes the energy sector go round; title: Part 2: Oil: the world's foremost energy sector in terminal crisis?; title: Part 3: Some regional perspectives on energy; title: Part 4: Community and worker struggles over ownership and control in the fossil fuel sector and their role in a transition to a post-petrol world; title: Part 5: Leading the way: a sample of emerging "best practices"; title: Part 6: Technofixes; title: Part 7: Moving fast to stay still: rebooting coal, oil, and nuclear; title: Part 8: Resurrection of the nuclear industry, its connection with global militarism and limited uranium supplies; title: Part 9: Whither coal: expanded production, leaving it in the ground, or simply running out?; title: Part 10: Agrofuels as the geopolitical handmaiden of the petrol industry: a tale of enclosure, violence and resistance; title: Part 11: Emerging social conflicts in the renewable energy sector: the example of wind; title: Part 12: Time to speed up! renewable energy as a possible way out of the world economic crisis?; title: Part 13: Towards a transition based on decentralization, common ownership, dignified work, and community autonomy; title: Part 14: Alliances and conflicts along the road to an anti-capitalist energy revolution.