Energy Futures: Through the Looking Glass of “Experts”
By Rebecca Wright and Frank Trentmann (Material Cultures of Energy Project, Birkbeck College, University of London)
Barely six months have passed since the World Energy Council released its 2016 Scenarios report on the future of global energy demand. The world’s primary energy demand, it predicted, would peak before 2030 thanks to technological innovation, ‘more stringent energy policies’, and a shift from fossil fuels to renewables. One thing the scenario did not envisage was the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States the following month. On 9 March 2017, Scott Pruitt, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, rejected the findings of scientific experts that CO2 was a primary cause of global warming. Three weeks later, Trump turned denial into reality when he signed an executive order that cancelled US-commitments to clean power, and will revive the coal industry.
Six months is a short time in human history but may be hugely consequential for life on the planet. The future of energy is wide open. History cannot predict the outcome. But it can help us understand how and why certain visions of the future have gained power in the past and helped shape the present. The Trump moment is the latest chapter in a longer story of shifting and contested expertise.
Throughout the twentieth century energy futures proliferated, providing states with blueprints for development. These were not objective projections of energy use, but the constructions of experts, with their own disciplinary backgrounds, models, and beliefs about what the future will look like. In turn, these futures influenced policy and shaped the energy systems we live with today.
In the last hundred years, expertise shifted from fuel experts to economists. In the first half of the twentieth century, energy futures were conceived by fuel experts trained in the natural sciences, geology and administration. Their method was to gather statistics about natural resources through national, international and specialist bodies, such as the U.S. Geological Survey and the World Power Conference. The aim was to quantify reserves rather than anticipate patterns of demand. After the Second World War, technocratic expertise gave way to economics and forecasting.
The shift in expertise towards economic models can be seen in two fuel reports published just four years apart by the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). The first report, Europe’s Growing Needs of Energy[1], was written in 1956 by Sir Harold Hartley, a physical chemist who had been Chairman of the World Power Conference between 1935 and 1950, and later its President (1950–1956). Hartley also led the British delegation at the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources (UNSCCUR). Hartley’s report reflected his scientific and administrative background. Europe faced an imminent energy shortage, the report predicted, unless sufficient policies were put in place to stimulate coal production and fuel efficiency. In contrast, the 1960 OEEC report, Towards a new Energy Pattern in Europe, [2] written by the economist Austin Robinson [3], projected a much rosier picture of Europe’s energy future. Here the market was the optimal allocator of resources. Where Hartley saw the energy mix as a series of individual fuels bolstered by specialist policies, Robinson envisaged an energy future where energy was steered by market forces and price.
Expert models gained their status from how they circulated within wider ‘expert communities’. In the post-45 era, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was an attractive model for an exportable future, hailed by experts at the UNCCUR as a paradigm for organizing their resource strategies [4]. The expert cultures of international organizations served as the incubators for these models and their application. The UN drew heavily on the TVA model, while the OEEC (later the OECD) became a ‘temple for growth’ establishing GNP as the international standard for national economies. [5]
The shifts in expert paradigms took place within broader shifts in political ideology. The Cold War in particular deepened the mark of ideology on energy futures. The 1952 report, Resources for Freedom (otherwise known as the Paley Report), published by the President’s Materials Policy Commission, set out growth, individual choice and the market as central to American freedom and made them the fundamental cornerstones of energy policy.[6]
Ideology was not mere rhetoric, but played itself out in the different forecasting methods adopted by free and planned economies[7]. In their estimates of future electricity consumption, planned economies drew heavily upon fixed targets to guide choices, whereas market-oriented countries, such as the U.S., had a more open view of the future, relying on a process of extrapolation from past trends moving forward.
Political ideologies thus merged with expert models to determine what should and should not be included in energy futures. This had major consequences for what was known about the components and dynamics of demand, and especially private demand. In early twentieth-century North America, when progressivism was at its height, emphasis was placed on the role of individuals and households to steward natural resources responsibly. However, after 1945, as experts came to draw more heavily on economic models, people all but disappeared in discussions where price and aggregate growth dominated. Energy futures were now the result of an abstract market. The price mechanism had taken the place of moral care for national resources and nature.
Just because they were written by recognised experts, however, it would be dangerous to assume that forecasts were the only forum in which energy futures were discussed. In 1953, for example, over a thousand men and women gathered at the Mid-Century Conference on Resources for the Future in Washington to discuss the findings of the Paley report.[8] Here they talked freely about the role of alternative lifestyles and changing consumption practices. Public education campaigns and popular culture also kept alive the idea that consumers had a role in directing how energy would be used and what for. In 1951, for example, the North Carolina Resource Use Education Commission organized a popular campaign across the state and produced a film, The Tar Heel Family, to convey an important message to the public about the value of energy conservation.
Energy futures reveal the growing gulf in the twentieth century between an increasingly technical, official culture of experts, with their scientific models and abstract aggregates, and the day-to-day expertise of real people actually using energy. Visions and forecasts of energy needs rested on a set of assumptions about the expertise that mattered and the factors that counted.
These were filtered through political ideology and gender, as experts were typically men from developed Western nations. Not only did this neglect a large segment of the public — the women who oversaw domestic consumption in the home — but it also held up the world to a particular standard: the American standard of living. The future the experts constructed thus converged towards a universal pattern of energy use. At a time when some developed countries are phasing out nuclear power and promoting renewables while others are reviving coal and still others are turning to micro-grids, it is high time to acknowledge the blind spots of these narrow and universalist expert models — and to allow other voices and visions to join the debate about our energy future.
Notes
- Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, Europe’s Growing Needs of Energy, How Can They Be Met? Paris, 1956
- Organisation for European Economic Co-operation and Energy Advisory Commission. Towards a New Energy Pattern in Europe. Paris, 1960.
- Treasurer of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) from its launch in 1952 until 1958.
- See also Those Dam(n) Experts: The International Expertise of the Tennessee Valley Authority by Vincent Lagendijk, published 2 May 2017.
- Matthias Schmelzer, The Hegemony of Growth. The OECD and the Making of an Economic Growth Paradigm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
- President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom: A Report to the President, Washington: G.P.O, 1952.
- United Nations Secretariat, Economic Commission for Europe. Methods Employed for the Determination of Electric Power Consumption Forecasts. Geneva. 1956.
- Mid-century Conference on Resources for the Future, The Nation Looks at Its Resources; Report of the Mid-Century Conference on Resources for the Future. Washington, D.C., December 2, 3, 4, 1953.”
Rebecca Wright is a Research Fellow in Mass Observation Studies at the University of Sussex, where she is examining attitudes towards energy in the Mass Observation Archive. Between 2013–16 she was a Research Fellow on the AHRC collaborative project, “Material Cultures of Energy,” at Birkbeck College where she worked on ‘Energy Futures’. She completed her PhD at Birkbeck College in 2016, and has held fellowships at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., and the Huntington Library in California. In 2013 she co-authored a history of the World Energy Council with Hiroki Shin and Frank Trentmann. Her research explores the cultural factors and representational structures that surround energy systems.
Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the “Material Cultures of Energy” project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). He is also a member of the research centre DEMAND (Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand). In 2014 he was Moore Distinguished Fellow at Caltech. In 2017 he was awarded the Humboldt Prize for Research by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His many publications include The Handbook of the History of Consumption (2012, editor) and Free Trade Nation which won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2009. His latest book is Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (Penguin 2016) with several foreign translations to appear in 2017.
