First World Petro-Politics

First World Petro-Politics
Author: Laurie E. Adkin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 691
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1442612584

First World Petro-Politics examines the vital yet understudied case of a first world petro-state facing related social, ecological, and economic crises in the context of recent critical work on fossil capitalism. A wide-ranging and richly documented study of Alberta's political ecology - the relationship between the province's political and economic institutions and its natural environment - the volume tackles questions about the nature of the political regime, how it has governed, and where its primary fractures have emerged. Its authors examine Alberta's neo-liberal environmental regulation, institutional adaptation to petro-state imperatives, social movement organizing, Indigenous responses to extractive development, media framing of issues, and corporate strategies to secure social license to operate. Importantly, they also discuss policy alternatives for political democratization and for a transition to a low-carbon economy. The volume's conclusions offer a critical examination of petro-state theory, arguing for a comparative and contextual approach to understanding the relationships between dependence on carbon extraction and the nature of political regimes.

First World Petro-Politics

First World Petro-Politics
Author: Laurie Adkin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 691
Release: 2016-08-04
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1442699426

First World Petro-Politics examines the vital yet understudied case of a first world petro-state facing related social, ecological, and economic crises in the context of recent critical work on fossil capitalism. A wide-ranging and richly documented study of Alberta’s political ecology – the relationship between the province’s political and economic institutions and its natural environment – the volume tackles questions about the nature of the political regime, how it has governed, and where its primary fractures have emerged. Its authors examine Alberta’s neo-liberal environmental regulation, institutional adaptation to petro-state imperatives, social movement organizing, Indigenous responses to extractive development, media framing of issues, and corporate strategies to secure social license to operate. Importantly, they also discuss policy alternatives for political democratization and for a transition to a low-carbon economy. The volume’s conclusions offer a critical examination of petro-state theory, arguing for a comparative and contextual approach to understanding the relationships between dependence on carbon extraction and the nature of political regimes.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0

Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0
Author: Thomas L. Friedman
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2009-11-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1429963689

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Best Book of the Year A Businessweek Best Business Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year In this brilliant, essential book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman speaks to America's urgent need for national renewal and explains how a green revolution can bring about both a sustainable environment and a sustainable America. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the expansion of the world's middle class through globalization have produced a dangerously unstable planet--one that is "hot, flat, and crowded." In this Release 2.0 edition, he also shows how the very habits that led us to ravage the natural world led to the meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession. The challenge of a sustainable way of life presents the United States with an opportunity not only to rebuild its economy, but to lead the world in radically innovating toward cleaner energy. And it could inspire Americans to something we haven't seen in a long time--nation-building in America--by summoning the intelligence, creativity, and concern for the common good that are our greatest national resources. Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0 is classic Thomas L. Friedman: fearless, incisive, forward-looking, and rich in surprising common sense about the challenge--and the promise--of the future.

Petropolitics

Petropolitics
Author: Alan J. MacFadyen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781552385401

Winner of the 2014 Book of the Year Award from the Petroleum History Society!The importance of energy to the functioning of any economy has meant that energy industries are amongst the most regulated of industries. What might appear to be purely private decisions are made within a complex and evolving web of government regulations. Petropolitics: Petroleum Development, Markets and Regulations, Alberta as an Illustrative History provides an economic history of the petroleum industry in Alberta as well as a detailed analysis of the operation of the markets for Alberta oil and natural gas, and the main governmental regulations (apart from environmental regulations) faced by the industry. The tools used within this study are applicable to oil and gas industries throughout the world.

Understanding ExtrACTIVISM

Understanding ExtrACTIVISM
Author: Anna J. Willow
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2018-07-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429883897

Understanding ExtrACTIVISM surveys how contemporary resource extractive industry works and considers the responses it inspires in local citizens and activists. Chapters cover a range of extractive industries operating around the world, including logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and oil and natural gas extraction. Taking an activist anthropological stance, Anna Willow examines how culture and power inform recent and ongoing disputes between projects’ proponents and opponents, beneficiaries and victims. Through a series of engaging case studies, she argues that diverse contemporary natural resource conflicts are underlain by a culturally constituted ‘extractivist’ mind-set and embedded in global patterns of political inequity. Offering a synthesizing framework for making sense of complex interconnections among environmental, social, and political dimensions of natural resource disputes, Willow reflects on why extractivism exists, why it matters, and what we might be able to do about it. The book is valuable reading for students and researchers in the environmental social sciences as well as for activists and practitioners.

The Imperial Messenger

The Imperial Messenger
Author: Belen Fernandez
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1844677494

The Imperial Messenger reveals the true value of this media darling, a risible writer whose success tells us much about the failures of contemporary journalism. Belén Fernández dissects the Friedman corpus with wit and journalistic savvy to expose newsroom practices that favor macho rhetoric over serious inquiry, a pacified readership over an empowered one, and reductionist analysis over integrity. The Imperial Messenger is polemic at its best, relentless in its attack on this apologist for American empire and passionate in its commitment to justice. About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the words of one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was “running up like parchment in the fire.” From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century. In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it’s time to revive the tradition. Verso’s Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.

The Imperial Messenger

The Imperial Messenger
Author: Belén Fernández
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1781684235

The Imperial Messenger reveals the true value of this media darling, a risible writer whose success tells us much about the failures of contemporary journalism. Beln Fernndez dissects the Friedman corpus with wit and journalistic savvy to expose newsroom practices that favor macho rhetoric over serious inquiry, a pacified readership over an empowered one, and reductionist analysis over integrity. The Imperial Messenger is polemic at its best, relentless in its attack on this apologist for American empire and passionate in its commitment to justice. About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the words of one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was "running up like parchment in the fire." From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century. In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it's time to revive the tradition. Verso's Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.

Crude Democracy

Crude Democracy
Author: Thad Dunning
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008-09-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780521730754

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that natural resource wealth promotes autocracy. Oil and other forms of mineral wealth can promote both authoritarianism and democracy, the book argues, but they do so through different mechanisms; an understanding of these different mechanisms can help elucidate when either the authoritarian or democratic effects of resource wealth will be relatively strong. Exploiting game-theoretic tools and statistical modeling as well as detailed country case studies and drawing on fieldwork in Latin America and Africa, this book builds and tests a theory that explains political variation across resource-rich states. It will be read by scholars studying the political effects of natural resource wealth in many regions, as well as by those interested in the emergence and persistence of democratic regimes.

Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice

Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice
Author: Peyman Vahabzadeh
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2016-12-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3319442279

This interdisciplinary volume offers a range of studies spanning the various historical, political, legal, and cultural features of social justice in Iran, and proposes that the present-day realities of life in Iran could not be farther from the promises of the Iranian Revolution. The ideals of social justice and participatory democracy that galvanized a resilient nation in 1979 have been abandoned as an avaricious ruling elite has privatized the economy, abandoned social programs and subsidy payments for the poor, and suppressed the struggles of women, workers, students, and minorities for equality. At its core, Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice seeks to educate and to develop a new discourse on social justice in Iran.

Christian Churches and Nigeria's Political Economy of Oil and Conflict

Christian Churches and Nigeria's Political Economy of Oil and Conflict
Author: Nkem Emerald Osuigwe
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2014-09-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1443867098

The received account on African evangelical Christianity regarding social witness in a section of Western scholarship is that it is anti-development and a-political. Such an account heavily draws from an instrumentalist and functionalist assessment of such Christianity without recourse to its emic perspective. Using the case-study method, this book presents an ethnographic examination of this functionalist reading by investigating, describing and analysing evangelical Christian theological and socio-political consciousness within the context of oil and conflict in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. Adopting approaches from practical theology, congregational studies, and anthropology of religion, the author challenges such a reading using data gathered from three congregations in the region. His discourse revolves around answers to the following four critical questions: • What are the underlying theological issues and beliefs of Nigerian evangelical Christians within the context of oil and conflict? • What is their prevalent praxis within the context of Nigeria’s political economy of oil and conflict? •How accurate is the received account that African evangelical and ‘fundamentalist’ Christianity lacks social responsibility and is a-political and anti-development? • What would a contextual political theology for Nigeria’s political economy of oil look like? The theological issues are varied and the prevalent praxis nuanced, which then serves as a veritable critique of the claim that African evangelical Christianity lacks social responsibility due to its preoccupation with soul-winning. Whereas such Christianity places much emphasis on the winning of souls as an expression of its spirituality, it is neither oblivious nor indifferent to its socio-political milieu. Rather it sees such spirituality as a form of political praxis. Some of the trajectories of the spirituality include a theology of conversion, a theology of prayer, and an ethics of crude oil, with Total Freedom as the nomenclature for the specific theological perspective offered for Nigeria’s political economy of oil. While locating this theological perspective within the taxonomy of Liberation Theology, the affinity and dissonance between the two are identified.