Fueling Oil Scarcity: Produced Scarcity and the Sociopolitical Fate of Renewable Energy

Oil anxieties usually stem from fears about running out of oil, but the true scourge of the past is overabundance. Oilmen conceal their in order to maintain profits and manipulate their monopoly on so that they may wield political power. To keep the price of high enough to sustain the industry, authorities have developed methods of producing scarcity. The results of making scarce have been harmful to society economically, politically, and socioculturally. Since current forms of alternative energy are naturally scarce, this article evaluates whether the effects of the curse arise from scarcity itself or from the production of scarcity. The destructive experiences with produced scarcity inform prospects for a future with alternative energy, including how these energy forms can be developed in ways that avoid the associated effects of the oil curse. Produced Scarcity The industry's primary challenge for the majority of the twentieth century was the of scarcity and the prevention of abundance. (1) Experiences of perceived scarcity--especially in the 1970s--and the current looming threat of peak derive not from geological limits but rather from methods of producing scarcity. The factors dictating scarcity lie above-ground--resource availability is often determined by the ways in which societies and economies are internally organized. (2) In the case of oil, scarcity arises from within the organization of the industry itself. (3) Academic analysis of the petroleum industry has revealed that geologically limited peak is not a real imminent threat, evident from the lack of consensus among corporations about whether peak is a threat at all. Some corporations add the peak theory to their repertoire of strategic imaginaries used for producing scarcity and controlling prices. (4) Mechanisms of Scarcity Production The methods by which scarcity is produced may shed light on whether the resulting problems derive from the methods themselves rather than being inherent to oil. The peak claim can be used to naturalize a situation whose origins are political and economic, transmitting the source of the perceived scarcity into the natural realm and thereby obscuring Big Oil's position of culpability. (5) Theories of resource scarcity include unequal resource distribution as one of three factors in producing environmental scarcity, where natural scarcity and population growth constitute the other two components. (6) The material properties of enhance the ability to control its accessibility. Crude extracted upstream must undergo various transformations that involve establishing connections and building alliances, translating forms of political power along the pipeline as the hydrocarbons are transformed. (7) Political agency arises through opportunities to slow, disrupt, or cut off the supply of at various nodes of transformation and transportation. Oil companies may introduce small delays, interruptions, and controls in order to enhance their power by limiting the flow of energy; they can raise prices by restricting output to engineer a shortage. (8) This capitalism of inefficiency has been exploited as companies insert controls over the conduits of production--bottlenecks through which must flow. When sources are controlled by the state, the government imposes political limits in order to control production. The story of wildcatter Columbus Dad Joiner provides a telling example: When Joiner discovered the single largest field in the history of the United States, the government eventually declared martial law in the East Texas fields and 4,000 troops were deployed to enforce the field's allowable production levels. (9) During the 1930s, when price instability was fueling an crisis, President Franklin D. Roosevelt assigned Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to handle the crisis. …