Reconceptualizing contemporary energy markets

This article provides a conjunctural synopsis of both empirical trends and new approaches to analytically and normatively assessing energy markets. The preceding eras of coal and oil entailed not only differing technologies but also historically distinct political geographies, modes of production, and characteristic commodities and systems of value. They also coincided with and helped reinforce several misleading assumptions: of ‘pure’, ‘stateless’ energy markets; of scarcity as a defining feature of all economies; of unlimited growth and of market equilibrium. These assumptions tended to reinforce established approaches to energy markets that were insufficiently historically grounded, abstracted from social, political and ecological relations, and – with particular reference to oil – premised on zero-sum geostrategic calculations of interest. They are inadequate to, or misleading about, fossil fuel markets, and do not adequately address such recent phenomena as unprecedented levels of financialization of the global economy with an unprecedented intensity of ecological crisis entailing, most prominently, global warming. These factors undermine the prior assumptions in several respects: it is not scarcity, but rather abundance of greenhouse gas emissions that is of paramount concern; this in turn necessarily implies that unlimited growth is neither possible nor desirable; and furthermore, that ecological degradation has fundamentally displaced the analytical plausibility of market equilibrium, no less than its normative appeal. An exercise in reconceptualizing energy markets is therefore one that should explore not only what was misperceived and what has changed but also what needs to change in order to restore economic, political and ecological sustainability.