The Nation as Energy: Imagining Society through Energy Intensity

Mapping the Global Energyscape

The image above, published by the International Energy Agency, claims to map the world's total production and consumption of energy in multifarious states and materials as they flow from and to innumerable origins and destinations. Although the diagram includes sources from wind to coal to geothermal heat, the common unit of measurement—the Mtoe—converts this plurality into a single unit deemed most accessible for thinking energy today: "Million tonnes of oil equivalent." This global view of energy flow and translation demonstrates how extensively today's energy topologies, or "energyscapes," have been analyzed, mapped, and imagined in the particular terms of the current fossil fuel infrastructure.¹ Research institutions, such as the International Energy Agency and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, as well as private companies like

Figure 1.

International Energy Agency, "Sankey Chart," www.iea.org/Sankey/, 2019.

Enerdata and Shell, produce innumerable charts and maps that analyze energy data cut along various lines of measurement such as source, type, place of origin, consumption rates, reserves, energetic density, and so on. Any interested analyst can, for example, view interactive maps detailing global gas trade flows, the world's fleet of nuclear reactors, the hourly operating data of US electricity grids, the world's solar energy production and consumption totals, or even future energy projections and forecasts that balance quantitative data with qualitative factors such as the expected implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement commitments. The availability of such data discloses its necessity for a diverse set of actors (including the IPCC, banks, corporations, government institutions, academic researchers, and transparency organizations), and it rivals the intensity of statistical scrutiny once reserved for the movement of monies and populations.

Nothing could seem more straightforward, more present to perception than the clear graphic display of physical and measurable materials moving from their origin to their place of use. Panoptic energy maps such as these present the global energy landscape as thoroughly charted and impartially transparent to view; these depoliticized and depopulated visualizations present energy flows almost as a natural circulation, like ocean currents or wind maps. While undoubtedly useful for certain types of analysis and decision-making, these energy maps nonetheless train vision to a particular energopolitical framework—they are a single point of entry onto a global picture of immense complexity of materials, geologic process, economies, labor practices, and political treaties. Questions we may ask of this apparent totality include: What were the labor and environmental conditions under which these materials were obtained? Are fuels flowing from sites under legal challenge counted? Are all military energy expenditures registered? How does energy consumption break down from the national scale to its distribution among various neighborhoods? Are energetic exchanges in societies not sutured to the fossil fuel infrastructure perceptible and countable in Mtoe? What energetic materials, transformations, and assemblages are obscured by this picture? How did we come to take this mode of viewing human activity for granted, along with its many associated assumptions regarding energy and culture?

This essay examines the origins and conditions of the energopolitical context from which this representational horizon of knowing energy extraction, translation, and use came to operate, and it explores how this framework continues to constrain and shape the discourse of energy transition in the present moment. I argue that a specific epistemology of energy emerged with the creation of

Figure 2.

International Energy Agency, "Energy Flow Chart," www.iea.org/etp/explore/, 2019.

Figure 3.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy, "Estimated U.S. Energy Consumption 2018," flowcharts.llnl.gov/.

"industrial disarmament" programs in 1944 and 1945, as the US government planned an aggressive campaign to permanently change Germany's and Japan's economic and military power with a strategy of "industrial control." While the panoptic surveillance of global energy flows may be considered part of routine governance today, the programmatic management of energy flows and the networks of relationships that regulated them was a...