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1. Ownership in the Electricity Market: Property, the Firm, and the Climate Crisis

Author:
Gregory Ferguson-Cradler
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo)
Abstract:
Electricity is a key area in climate mitigation. The sector needs to significantly expand while transitioning to renewable production, all in an extremely short timeframe. This paper focuses on ownership and control in the electricity sector in an era of climate change. Borrowing substantially from classical American Institutionalism, heterodox theories and histories of the firm, and legal institutionalism, this paper discusses the historically constituted nature of the categories of property, capital, and the firm and how these literatures provide helpful frameworks for analyzing the recent history and possible futures of electricity sectors. A short discussion of the recent history of the German electricity sector, particularly the large utility RWE, will briefly illustrate the approach. Climate change mitigation will require revised notions of ownership and an updated theory of the firm, property, and corporate governance for the Anthropocene.
Topic:
Climate Change, Electricity, Property, Anthropocene, and Energy Transition
Political Geography:
Europe, Germany, and Global Focus

2. AUra's Openings

Author:
Anna Tsing
Publication Date:
01-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene
Abstract:
This opening essay has two purposes: first, to offer a small introduction to the papers by Lien, Swanson and myself that follow; and, second, to introduce Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) as a program for studying human-disturbed landscapes. I am in debt to Lien and Swanson for showing me catachresis as a feature of Anthropocene research. Catachresis helps me as I grope for language to describe AURA as an impossible program: a program dedicated to confusing disciplinary boundaries and to describing the challenges of life within the ruins created by modernization’s vast “improvements.” Following their guidance, I allow salmon to lead the way, saving AURA and landlocked landscapes for the sections that come after. Consider Swanson’s description of the strange Hokkaido device called an “Indian water wheel.” Hokkaido fisheries expert Ito Kazutaka visited Oregon’s Columbia River in 1886 and observed water wheels used to capture salmon; when he returned home, he combined the American technologies he noted with a Honshu-style (i.e., central Japanese rather than Hokkaido-based) fishing weir to create what he called the Indian water wheel. And what was “Indian” about this hybrid? Ito meant Native American, unselfconsciously commemorating the indigenous people whose access to salmon was interrupted by frontier-conquest technologies such as the water wheel. Certainly, “Indian” is catachresis. It usefully makes us pause. Japanese salmon are enacted in historically shifting hybrids of U.S. and Japanese frontier technologies recalled through the indigenous displacement they have in common. (In this regard, it seems useful to note that the water wheel was eventually outlawed in Oregon because it also killed off too many salmon.) Inappropriate language appropriately startles us. Connection, comparison, and displacement are wound together in forging modes of being both human and salmon; this is the condition of our times.
Topic:
Environment, Water, Fishing, and Anthropocene
Political Geography:
Europe and Norway