Moral Economy: Energy Transitions and the Distribution of Harm

Peter Ore, Queens College, CUNY

Energy is one product of the metabolic process. Waste is another. Where energy produces value, waste produces harm. Energy transitions, then, are also redistributions of harm. This paper examines efforts to construct moral economies for the redistribution of harms in energy transitions. The regime of muscle and wood in the 19th century meant knee-deep piles of feces in city streets and heavy exposure to combustion products inside the household. The regime of coal blackened skies and lungs between the Civil War and WWII. The gas and oil economy of the postwar era meant ozone, sulphur dioxides, and fine particulates. Each regime had its own set of moral and political settlements about the distribution of harms. In the rhetoric that dominated atmospheric politics in the 19th century, the harms of manure, dust, and smoke were a problem of public morality and hygiene. The interwar period saw the first effort to develop a standard, actuarial balance between harms from what came to be called "air pollution" and the putative benefits of industrial progress. By the postwar era, national air pollution accounts created local demand for the definition of "air resources" and "air rights." With the passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970, communities were granted "air banks" and required to develop inventories of pollution sources. This moral economy --- a formal exchange of human life for industrial progress --- made our own atmospheric politics possible, but it cannot help us address the harms of climate change. I make the case for moving from public accounting to public control. Where public accounting makes the balance of harms explicit, public control empowers exposed populations to determine the balance point.

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 Presented in Session 2. States, Politics and Society