Contending Geo-Logics: Energy Security, Resource Ontologies, and the Politics of Expert Knowledge in Estonia
Contending Geo-Logics: Energy Security, Resource Ontologies, and the Politics of Expert Knowledge in Estonia
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争论的地质逻辑：爱沙尼亚的能源安全、资源本体论和专家知识政治
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发表时间：
2016
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通讯作者：
Kärg Kama
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kärg Kama
本文结合新兴的学术努力，将地缘政治中的“地理”置于前景，研究了某些低质量的地质物质如何构成战略性的“非常规”化石燃料资源，这些资源的开发被认为是能源安全原因不可或缺的。基于对爱沙尼亚油页岩开采的详细研究，本文具体分析了知识政治，它使这种碳密集型和能源效率低下的行业在国家层面得以延续，而且，它颠覆了欧盟政策所产生的能源部门放松管制和脱碳的新自由主义要求。这一分析引出了两个关键论点。在一个层面上，爱沙尼亚的案例证明了越来越多的人认识到“能源安全”代表了一个多方面和动态的结构，因为它特别强调了专家知识在其概念化和表现中的偶然性。在这种情况下，能源安全是通过不断变化和有争议的知识创造模式来表达的，在这种模式下，国家和市场主导的能源治理模式不断被重新谈判。然而，在另一个层面上，知识政治在这里被解释为通过争论化石燃料资源的本体论来行使，这些本体论以安全主张为中心，或者“地质学”，它对资源的物质性有成倍的影响。
ABSTRACT Engaging with nascent scholarly efforts to foreground the ‘geo’ of geopolitics, this article examines how certain low-quality geological substances are constituted as strategic, ‘unconventional’ fossil fuel resources, the exploitation of which is deemed indispensable for energy security reasons. Based on a detailed study of oil shale exploitation in Estonia, the paper specifically analyses the politics of knowledge that enable such carbon-intensive and energy-inefficient industries to perpetuate at the national level and, moreover, subvert the neoliberal imperatives of energy sector deregulation and decarbonisation arising from EU policies. This analysis leads to two key arguments. At one level, the Estonian case evidences and contextualises the growing recognition that ‘energy security’ represents a multifaceted and dynamic construct as it highlights, in particular, the contingency of expert knowledge in its conceptualisation and performance. What counts as energy security is in this case articulated via shifting and contested modes of knowledge-making, whereby state- and market-led modes of energy governance are continuously renegotiated. At another level, however, the politics of knowledge is explained here as exercised through contending ontologies of the fossil fuel resource that pivots security claims, or ‘geo-logics’, which has multiplying effects on resource materiality.