Analyze

See the Full Article on how COVID is impacting different domains of the energy sector.

“‘For utilities regulated by [public utility commissions], the commissioners are going to be focused in the coming months and year or two on things that are related to COVID and helping customers who can't pay their electricity bills, which means it's going to be harder for the commissions to have time to focus on [carbon-cutting] proposals,’ said Julia Hamm, CEO of the Smart Electric Power Alliance.”

“The Southeast is a focal point during the pandemic, as it has a high energy burden because so many people live in older, inefficient homes in a region that faces high heat and humidity. Consumer advocates criticize electric companies and their regulators for not making energy efficiency more of a priority.”

International Energy Agency (IEA) will host an online summit with representatives from countries representing 80% of the world’s emissions. They will discuss a “sustainable recovery plan” to the recession spurred by the pandemic. Watch it live July 9th.

Texas RR Commission denies request for oil production cuts, arguing that the free-market should be left to determine how much oil is economical. They say that oil will not recover until the pandemic is behind us. However, the commissioners unanimously decided to relax “various fees including ones that help hire inspectors and plug abandoned wells; gave operators more leeway in cleaning up dirty oil and gas pits in ways that could lower administrative fees for lawbreakers; suspended automatic hearings for some oil and gas operations; and expanded the sorts of underground material in which operators could store crude oil.”

Republican Politicians are using the economic fall out from COVID-19 to claim that any environmental expenses are unnecessarily burdening an already struggling economy.

This article discusses the adoption of labor concerns by the environmental movement in an attempt to win over unionized workers in the fossil fuel industry to support a “just transition.”

This article is discussing how the massive bust after the pandemic is reshaping people’s perception of the viability of working in the fossil fuel sector. Many young, educated workers (even those in petroleum engineering) in the energy sector are preferring the steady work of renewables over the boom and busts of the oil economy.

Normally, 80 to 90 percent of petroleum engineering graduates have job offers by their final semester, but neither he nor the majority of his classmates had jobs lined up, he said. Although he has begun to see petroleum engineering jobs posted again, he hasn’t had any luck. He plans to hone his digital skills and has started looking at engineering jobs with pipeline companies as an alternative.

“I always joked that I would be graduating in a downturn, but I never in my wildest dreams thought it would be this bad,” Mangum said. “It’s only been about a month since I’ve graduated so I’m not in desperate straits yet, but I can definitely feel the pressure mounting to find employment of some kind.”

Results from a survey of 168 energy firms show that “Of the oil producers and service companies that responded, only 3% said drilling activity will recover to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year, while 39% said it will take to 2022 or later and 16% — roughly 1 in 6 energy firms — said it will never recover. The Dallas Fed carried out the survey from June 10-18.”

California is reconsidering it s “cap and trade” approach to energy transition/decarbonization. “Launched in 2013, California’s cap and trade program sets an overall cap on greenhouse gas emissions each year but offers flexibility in how companies achieve it by allowing them to buy and sell pollution credits in auctions. … California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said that its possible this could become a trend: Future auctions might continue to flatline because of the recession and too many pollution credits floating around the market. … The Legislative Analyst’s Office warns too many credits might interfere with reaching California’s 2030 climate goals. … A think-tank analysis published in January suggested altering the minimum price at which cap-and-trade credits are sold, recommending that the price rise and fall in response to rising and falling emissions. … As California’s leadership haggled over the budget, Wieckowski’s proposal was scrapped. Blumenfeld said in his letter that California needs more time to understand the long-term consequences of the pandemic.”  

I am wondering how the book's central concept,  "landscapes of power,"  can be used to think about energy and infrastructural projects outside the Navajo context? The four modalities of power that make up this landscape are deeply influenced by your ethnographic data, and throughout the book you emphasize the need to pay attention to the particularities of places and communities. Thus, I would surmise that other landscapes of power would consist of different configurations of modalities of power? If so, how would you advise research into these other landscapes? What would should scholars pay attention to?

What motivated the structure of the book and the use of the interludes in particular? I'd like to learn more about the decision to include them as interludes. What was the idea behind these moments of reflection that both supplement and bring a brief pause to the argument?

How has the book been received among the communities that you work with? What have been the consequences, if any, for those actors and organizations who were featured in your analysis?

While it is certain that black communities in the US are being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, the extent to which this is the case is still unknown. In Texas, there is only an 18% gap in the demographic data on the races of positive COVID-19 cases, which is much smaller than the 65% gap nation-wide. Still, this gap means the true prevalence of COVID-19 among black communities could range from being roughly equal to their population share to nearly three times worse (Martinez and Keller 2020). Furthermore, while Texas testing sites are recording the race/ethnicity of people who test positive for COVID-19, these articles in the Austin Statesmen and Austin's local NPR attest to the need to record similar data for rates of hospitalizations and death. Austin-Travis County does not record this data, which is why the City is unable to report any race-related differences in the distribution of COVID-19 fatalities (Platoff 2020). Across the state of Texas, only 1/3 of confirmed COVID-19 fatalities have data of the race or ethnicity of the deceased.