Paparazzi Ethnography

10/14: Friday, I had a chance to catch up with Dustin Mulvaney for coffee.

We both were heading over to the Environmental Politics workshop to discuss Matt Hubert‘s chapter on neoliberalism and the 1970s in the wake of the oil crisis. The workshop consists of about 20 persons sitting around a table. Matt introduced his piece, which everyone had read before hand. Then we discussed the work while Matt remained silent.

Chris Jones was there, who is working on energy transportation at the middle of the 19th century, so I had a chance to introduce him to Dustin.
Department. of Geography’s Michael Watts turned up, providing a few comments, as did Nancy Peluso. The evening before, I tagged along with Matt and members of the Department of Geography, Nathan Sayre, and Richard Walker, for dinner at Gather, a Berkeley locale, for steak and margaritas. I had a chance to talk with PhD student Teo Ballve about his work in Latin America on drug cartels and territorial governance.

10/07: I met with Dustin for coffee to discuss among other things his interest in carrying out a GHG Inventory/Life Cycle Analysis of Exxon-Mobil’s Shale Gas production.

He suggests that natural gas produced from hydraulic fracturing operations produces methane emissions that make the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) intensity of natural gas higher than coal. There is also significant uncertainty around the GHG intensity of Tar Sands extraction and Synthetic Fuel production. So what he aims to do is to conduct a peer-reviewed life cycle assessment of hydraulic fracturing operations (in collaboration with Exxon-Mobil).

The other major resource impact from hydraulic fracturing operations is water. Water footprinting includes more than water quantities consumed and quality of wastewater, but also factors such as geographic content of water extraction. Here, he proposes to evaluate the water footprints of hydraulic fracturing and tar sands operations in the context of the geographic areas of water impacts. For hydraulic fracturing, he would contextualize the water footprint in areas of high and low controversy (comparing Pennsylvania operations to those in New York). For tar sands he would evaluate water impacts at sites of extraction and along potentially vulnerable water supplies.

3/31: I met up with Dustin Mulvaney, post-doc at Berkeley, who received his PhD at UC Santa Cruz. Dustin works on solar energy and has been traveling around lately looking at various ways government, through the Department of Energy, lavishly funds speculative deals in solar electricity. In particular, he is concerned with the environmental aspects of desert clearing when installing solar power. Such activity begins when a company files an environmental impact report with government. The report demonstrates what will happen to nature when constructing and operating solar power installations. Often, these reports are called Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) documents. These LCAs are supposed to describe the entire impact of a technology on the environment, from its initial assembly, operation, all the way to when the product is dismantled.

What Dustin has been discovering in his research, however, is that the metrics for determining LCAs, that is, the actual methods used for identifying impacts in these reports, actually do not include many of the ways in which a technology impacts the environment. He mentions for example, that the desert turns out to be an environment that sequesters carbon, and that clearing the desert would release more carbon into the atmosphere. Well, this feature is glossed over in the environmental impact report. In the end, he points out that metrics used to create these increasingly popular LCA reports, are quite political, and often conceal many aspects of how solar power impacts the life cycle.

Our conversation began with a walk over to the north side of Berkeley campus to the Thai restaurant on Euclid, next to a coffee bar that we were eyeing. We settled in, ordering the same thing, which happens a lot with me, actually, as if I am interested in tasting what the other person feels about their food. Dustin had some fascinating things to reveal about solar power industry, government give-a-ways, land give-a-ways, and fabulous taxpaying dollars being spent all under the name of innovation and cleantech. One Israeli company, BrightSource Energy, for example, has managed to obtain nearly 2 billion dollars from the US government, for which the company has used to fund military contractors to build gearboxes, and traditional engineering firms (Bechtel) to construct tubes– not necessarily companies on the innovative edge.

After finishing off plates of rice, green beans, and tofu, we skipped out to the coffee shop and ordered mochas. Sitting on the street, we began our conversation again. Dustin knows a lot of people in his field who are working at multiple scales — not only knowledge and information in Washington, D.C. (at the high level of creating abstract laws), but also what is happening in the field offices of, say, the Bureau Land Management in New Mexico, who map and lease out land. In a sense, he is examining the entire commodity chain of solar power.

We have both been fascinated by the concept of clean in phrases like clean coal, cleantech, or what ever to which clean can be attached. But what does clean actually mean in these contexts? It refers of course, to energy technologies that release less carbon, and thus reduce chances of climate change. But is clean coal actually clean? Will mountain tops no longer be destroyed? Will streams no longer be polluted by the word clean in clean coal? In a word, no.

Actually, Dustin had a come up with a phrase to capture this mode of thinking, which he calls — The Reductionist Epistemology of Carbon.