Law Commons^™

Petro-Market Civilization. (20 November, 2012), Timothy Dimuzio

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Prologue: The Rule of Threes

Lending weight to the popular saying that bad things always come in threes, three events in April of 2010 underscored the level of capitalist civilization’s addiction to carbon energy. On the 3rd of April off the coast of north eastern Australia, the Shen Neng 1, a Chinese owned coal tanker hauling 68,000 tons of coal collided into the Great Barrier Reef – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – at full speed. The impact ripped the ship’s haul, leaked three to four tons of the worst quality fuel oil into one of the world’s most fragile …

Capitalizing A Future Unsustainable: Energy, Finance And The Fate Of Market Civilization (Video Podcast), Timothy Dimuzio

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Debates on peak oil and other non-renewable energy resources that power modern industrial economies are becoming well known - if only in caricature.

Capitalizing A Future Unsustainable: Global Energy And The Fate Of Market Civilization, Timothy Dimuzio

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Liberal capitalist polities are being held up as the ultimate civilizational achievement precisely at a point in time when the energy intensive built environments & rampant & senseless consumerism of these societies are threatened by ecological devastation & the coming end of cheap & abundant fuel. Throughout the twentieth century this pattern of high energy consumption social reproduction was largely shaped by the global energy industry & the industries it spawned and/or allowed to flourish. Yet due to a number of foreseeable, if not entirely predictable, future obstacles & challenges, this blueprint of development seems doomed to failure. However, despite …