What happens when we read the Irish literary canon for energy? We find numerous mentions of wind power, solar power, petrol, coal, peat, gas, and dung, and we find these energy resources and infrastructures trellised into plot lines and character arcs in some unexpected ways in Irish literature, from Joyce and Beckett to Heaney and McCormack. What emerges is a partial but suggestive cognitive map – of Irish energy economies, ecologies, and phenomenologies – that reveals Ireland’s unique energy signature and at the same time links Ireland to other imperial and global regimes of petromodernity.

In the early 1990s, when Texaco left its operation in Ecuador behind, the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon into a polluted resource environment came to light, attracting the interest of national and international NGOs and causing global and tedious legal aftermath: In the famous case Aguinda v. Texaco, a group of affected indigenous people and settlers sued the oil corporation to compensate for the environmental and social damage done in the Amazon – with mixed results. The final section of the book is structured in a loosely juridical fashion: starting with the discussion of the evidence – a summary of the recent history of the region and how human–nature relationships changed in the twentieth century – the conclusion problematizes the unfolding of the global legal battle and the contradicting judgments it produced. As the legal pathway appears to not offer justice to the affected people, a closing statement calls for alternative solutions to the plight of the Amazon, locally and globally.

Drawing on abundant fossil fuels endowments, Canada has built one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world. Within the Canadian federation, provincial governments control the vast majority of natural resources, including both hydro-electric potential and fossil fuels. However, the uneven distribution of those resources has yielded tremendous variation in the carbon intensity of provincial economies, and equally great variation in provincial governments’ climate ambitions. In this chapter, I identify three phases in Canadian climate federalism. From 1990 to 2006 a ‘joint decision trap’ prevailed in which the most fossil fuel-dependent provinces vetoed national solutions. From 2007 to 2015 a truncated innovation and diffusion dynamic emerged in which provincial leaders adopted ambitious and sometimes innovative climate policies. However, fossil fuel-dependent provinces did not follow their lead. Emissions reductions hard won by provincial leaders were undone by emissions growth by their recalcitrant neighbours. The third phase, since 2016, is characterised by federal unilateralism. While the mere threat of federal action initially yielded provincial collaboration in an ambitious pan-Canadian climate plan, successful implementation ultimately turned on the federal government’s willingness to follow on that threat. I conclude that, on balance, federalism has exacerbated the challenge of climate action in Canada.

Tapping the power of fossil fuels over the past century and a half has propelled a massive expansion of human enterprise and prosperity, yet it has also released toxic amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thereby endangering the future viability of human civilization. If global average temperatures rise 4 to 6 degrees above the level of preindustrial times, climate scientists nearly unanimously conclude that severe disruptions of global ecosystems will result. These disruptions include: self-reinforcing spirals of global warming caused by feedback factors like melting permafrost, ice loss, water vapor, and wildfires; acidification of ocean waters and flooding of coastal regions as sea level rises by as much as one foot per decade; growing frequency of severe weather events such as droughts, floods, superstorms, and heat waves; the spread of tropical diseases into temperate regions; and the collapse of agriculture in many parts of the planet, leading to waves of desperate climate refugees.

The claim that there exists a complex ‘nexus’ linking water and other global challenges has become a commonplace of discourse on resource governance. But how should the relations between water and cognate areas be understood? This final main chapter of the book takes up this question by examining the four main relations underpinning water security and insecurity today: with trade, agricultural production, energy and capital. The chapter considers these four relations in turn, in each case providing an overall mapping of the 'transformations and circulations' that define them and an assessment of how they shape water-related (in)securities, especially in the book's five divided environments. The chapter argues that water is much more a dependent than an independent variable in nexus relations and that patterns of water (in)security are determined neither by natural availability nor market efficiencies, but instead by countries’ positionings within a structurally unequal and hierarchical capitalist world order. Against neo-liberal arguments, the chapter thus argues that contemporary capitalist nexus relations are a central part of the problem of water – and climate – security.

This is the first of two chapters that focus on mitigation or emissions reduction. Chapter 6 addresses the primary cause of climate change, which is the emission of CO2 that derives from the combustion of fossil fuels. We review the oppositional forces of exploration and consumption in respect of fossil fuel reserves and the concepts of peak oil, gas, and coal. We turn next to the carbon cycle and how it is altered by widespread fossil fuel combustion. The low hanging fruit in mitigation is to electrify everything within reason and to simultaneously decarbonize our electrical supply. However, grid limitations, scant electrical storage capacity, and the intermittent nature of wind and solar combine to make deep decarbonization a more difficult challenge than is often appreciated. These factors along with the distinct consideration of national energy security help explain why fossil fuels are likely to persist late into this century as a source of dispatchable electric power. Finally, there are economic sectors such as aviation and steel making that lend themselves poorly to electrification and will likely remain recalcitrant sectors.

Introduction to the concepts of energy-water nexus, water withdrawal, water consumption, and impaired water

An overview of the evolution of different fossil fuel sources, including coal, conventional and unconventional (tight) oil, oil sand, conventional natural gas, unconventional shale gas, and coalbed methane. The chapter provides the data on energy flows and evaluates the global energy consumption for understanding the magnitude of these developments. The chapter also presents the traditional water–energy concept; the amount of water withdrawal and consumption for fossil fuel exploration in the recovery stage (coal mining, oil and gas drilling, mining, hydraulic fracturing, oil enhancement), processing (coal washing, oil refinery), conversion (electricity production), and post-conversion (waste disposal). The chapter examines the water intensity metrics by normalizing the water volume-per-energy unit of electricity, with an emphasis on the distinction between water withdrawals and water consumption, and considering the complete lifetime cycles of water extraction for energy exploration, processing, and generation.

This final chapter does not cover any new principles; instead it presents case studies that have a huge global impact in terms of both managerial and government decision making. These case studies relate to: the role of big tech firms in the economy and the opportunities and threats that they present; the problems that the Covid-19 pandemic has posed for governments at the global level; and the problems that climate change is posing for both governments and firms, again at the global level. The last two cases involve geopolitical issues that go beyond the scope of the text, but it is important for managers to have a general appreciation of these issues in order to anticipate government policy and respond appropriately. The questions at the end of the case studies are intended to prompt students to utilize principles explained throughout the text to develop an understanding of the relevant issues and determine optimal courses of action.

The haunted house in contemporary Gothic literature and film serves as a means of conceptualising the current environmental crisis and troubled relationships with the humanity-supporting ecosystems that this brings. The ‘bad oikos’ – a haunted house whose haunting derives from the ‘malign sentience’ of a living house – confronts audiences with both nonhuman agency and the human entanglement with it, and so demands that we extract ourselves from what Amitav Ghosh has termed ‘modes of concealment’ regarding climate change and other anthropogenic environmental impacts. This chapter examines the development and recent popularity of the bad oikos, exploring its origins in 1970s debates over ecofeminism and fossil fuels in texts such as Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978), and then sketching its contemporary contours in a recent spate of texts from Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) through Netflix’s hit show The Haunting of Hill House (2018) to It! (2017) and the surreal YouTube animated series Ghost House (2018–). Investigating the specific anxieties that impel these new versions of the bad oikos, the chapter considers the links that such texts forge between between large-scale environmental degradation, child abuse and identity-shifting transcorporeality.

The purpose of this chapter is threefold: (1) It explains energy as a concept that has transformed over the years and explains the difference between primary, secondary, renewable and non-renewable energy resources. In so doing, it refers to UN Statistics Division/International Energy Agency sources. (2) It explains how the rules of international trade law are relevant to the energy sector and when these rules become applicable to trade in energy; and (3) It explores the major changes energy markets have undergone in recent decades, focusing on decarbonization, decentralization and energy security.

This chapter is devoted to one of the commodity groups, energy, and there are at least four reasons for affording a special prominence to this commodity group. The first is the heavy dominance of energy raw materials in the commodities universe. This is true both for trade and for the contribution they make to GDP. The second reason is that supply scarcities led to an extraordinary price increase for oil in the past 40 years, and its causes warrant an explanation. The third reason is that fundamental changes are occurring in oil and gas production technologies that promise to replace historical scarcity of supply and high prices with abundance. The fourth reason is the general perception that the energy system is going through a transition toward low carbon sources, due to technical advances in non-fossil energy alternatives as well as policy efforts to hinder climate change. The four reasons that make energy special also provide the structure of the chapter.

This chapter first illustrates the fundamental characteristics of coal, including: (i) History of coal; (ii) Where coal resources are currently located across the globe; (iii) Technological aspects of coal exploration, production and transport; (iv) Global coal production, consumption and trade trends. It then outlines the environmental issues associated with the utilization of coal in electricity generation and heating. To conclude, the chapter outlines the social and political issues related to the phase-out of coal.