Arctic Energy and Social Sustainability

120 Pages·2019·1.57 MB·English

by  Hanna Lempinen

Arctic Energy
and
Social Sustainability
Hanna Lempinen
Arctic Energy and Social Sustainability
Hanna Lempinen
Arctic Energy and
Social Sustainability
Hanna Lempinen
Aleksanteri Institute
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
ISBN 978-3-030-02268-6 ISBN 978-3-030-02269-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02269-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957441
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A
cknowledgements
One of my very earliest childhood memories is from the bathroom of
the apartment where my family lived until I was about three years old.
It was an unremarkable flat in a working-class apartment block, built out
of gray concrete and surrounded by other equally modest and equally
gray working-class apartment blocks. I remember the bathtub, with my
dad in it and with me standing in the room, closely observing his every
move while he conducted an experiment in which he attempted to set his
own fart alight. (For a brief while there was success.) I also remember a
cold, dark, snowy winter night at our cottage a few years later, when my
then-tiny little brother asked my father what color farts were. We took a
flashlight and went outside into the brisk air, one of us took their pants
off, and soon we all found out that they are grayish-white. It is with this
background that both my brother and I ended up in research.
As the roots of this book are in the work originally conducted for my
doctoral dissertation, it would not exist without the advice, support, net-
works, and endless understanding of my dissertation supervisors Monica
Tennberg and Lassi Heininen at the University of Lapland, with whom
I now have the privilege to continue working and writing as colleagues.
I am also especially thankful to Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen at the University
of Helsinki, who was not only a wonderful opponent for my doctoral
defense but also made it possible for me to continue working with
the topic of my dissertation as a postdoctoral researcher in one of his
research projects.
v
vi ACkNOWLEdGEMENTS
Additionally, as no work would see the light of day without funding,
I also want to express my gratitude to the University of Helsinki and the
Academy of Finland-funded project Assessing Intermediary Expertise in
Cross-Border Arctic Energy Development, of whose research activities this
work is a part. Without the grants received from several Finnish foun-
dations—the Finnish Cultural Fund, Lapland Regional Fund, Jenny and
Antti Wihuri Foundation, Oskar Öflund Foundation, and Emil Aaltonen
Foundation—the background work for this book would never have been
possible. In this, I am also thankful to Lapland University Press, the pub-
lisher of my doctoral dissertation, for the permission to adapt parts of the
dissertation for the publication of this book as well as to the editorial and
production teams at Palgrave.
Without the existence and support of friends and working commu-
nities, research would be solitary business. In this, I am thankful to my
colleagues, both at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki
and at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, who daily make
academic life less lonely and much more fun. As all work and no play
makes Jack a dull boy, I am also endlessly grateful to my colleagues-
turned-friends, Sandra Wallenius-korkalo, Suvi Alt, Sanna kopra, and
Joonas Vola, as well as the rest of the colorful bunch I have the privi-
lege to call family and friends—especially Tenu-Anna, kossu-Jossu, and
Tiuhti—because thanks to them there is always life outside academia.
It would be also unfair not to thank my partner, without whom there
would probably be no coffee, breakfast, walks, sleep, holidays, meaning,
happiness, or daily rhythm of any kind in the world.
As life has the peculiar tendency to happen exactly when you should
be focusing on important things at work, also the time spent in the com-
pany of what is now this book has come with its fair share of distrac-
tions. The years of research conducted for the doctoral dissertation were
shadowed by the terminal illness of my mom, who eventually passed
away just a month before my doctoral defense. during the process of
writing this book, life again took an unanticipated turn, when a surprise
addition to our small family of two let us know to expect their very unex-
pected arrival. This book should be out a month before the little one,
who will no doubt make sure that there will be plenty of more distrac-
tions to come.
Rovaniemi, Finland
August 2018
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Energy and the North 1
2 The Politics of Energy and Sustainability 17
3 The “Social” in the Sustainable 43
4 The Elusive Social and the Arctic Energyscape 63
5 Concluding Thoughts 81
References 97
Index 115
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Energy and the North
Abstract In political, popular, and scholarly debates, the Arctic is often
framed as the world’s new energy province; increasing consumption,
dwindling reserves, warming climate, and developing technologies are
expected to push energy-related activities further into the previously
inaccessible North. In this chapter, Lempinen takes a critical look at this
narrative, pointing out uncertainties related to future prospects of large-
scale energy development in the region. drawing attention to the prob-
lematic ways in which energy and its social sustainability are addressed
(energy being the production of oil and gas, and its social sustainability
remaining either sidelined or reduced to socioeconomic concerns), the
author argues for the dire need to critically investigate the political and
scientific “truths” that are being produced about energy and its social
dimension in the circumpolar North.
Keywords Arctic · Energy · Social sustainability
Sustainability science
Equally in political, popular, and academic debates, the Arctic has
become a buzzword during the last decade: The global significance
of the region has become all but synonymous with its vast oil and gas
reserves (USGS 2009; kristoferssen and Langhelle 2017, 31; keil 2017,
282). This heightened interest in the world’s “new energy province”
(koivurova 2017, 2) and the “last frontier” of global energy production
© The Author(s) 2019 1
H. Lempinen, Arctic Energy and Social Sustainability,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02269-3_1
2 H. lemPInen
(Nuttall 2010, 32) is often pictured as having taken shape and place in
the interplay of various overlapping and interconnected developments.
Most important, the projected growth of global energy consumption
plays a role in the puzzle: Worldwide energy demand is still expected to
increase by 30% by the year 2040. despite the rapidly increasing share
of renewable energy sources, most of this growth has been and is still
expected to be reliant on fossil fuels (IEA 2017, 1; 2018, 1). At the same
time, concerns over the availability of reliable and affordable energy sup-
plies have intensified. On the one hand, reserves at existing production
sites have been estimated to be gradually dwindling (Owen et al. 2010;
di Muzio and Salah Ovadia 2016, 2). On the other hand, political insta-
bilities and related delivery disruptions have contributed to increased
anxiety over the impact that political events might have on securing unin-
terrupted energy supplies (Liuhto 2009; Paillard 2010). In addition, the
changing climate has had a role to play: The retreating sea in the Arctic
region has been expected to make previously inaccessible areas better
available for energy extraction and transportation activities (Mikkola and
käpylä 2014, 16; Loe and kelman 2016, 25). Combined with evolving
production and transportation technologies (Nuttall 2010, 9 13), all of
−
these developments have been seen as pushing energy-related activities
further and further toward the previously inaccessible North (Fig. 1.1).
While this “widely circulated, orthodox version” (Hannigan 2015, 8)
of what energy means in the Arctic—or, conversely, what the Arctic region
means in the context of the global energy picture—has gained significant
foothold in the popular, political, and academic arenas, the chain of rea-
soning it is based on has also been brought into question on many fronts.
First, the widespread international interest in the energy endowments
of the Arctic region is not a wholly unforeseen phenomenon, and even
less novel is the idea of the North as a “storehouse of natural resources”
(AHdR 2004, 22) for global markets. In the specific context of energy,
the dawn of the commercial utilization of Arctic resources dates back to
1920s Canada and Alaska. Meanwhile, its expansion both in terms of
produced volumes and geographical terms has happened in and since the
latter half of the twentieth century and is continuing to happen as new
areas—for instance around Greenland, Iceland, and the northern seas of
Norway and Russia—have gradually come under exploration and exploita-
tion (AMAP 2007, 1). As such, the interest in large-scale utilization of
Arctic energy resources by outside actors cannot be seen as a completely
new development trend but rather as another step in the continuum of
1 INTROdUCTION: ENERGY ANd THE NORTH 3
Fig. 1.1 The Arctic from above
active exploitation of northern living and nonliving resources by non-Arc-
tic actors dating back to at least the late middle ages (Gritsenko 2018;
Nuttall 2010, 22). A noteworthy difference in the contemporary Arctic
energy interest and activity is, however, that the resources being targeted
are located farther away from the shoreline and existing infrastructure and
deeper under the icy Arctic seas (Pelaudeix and Basse 2017, 1).
While the discussion of whether the Arctic region can in any way be
seen as the “new” energy province for the world is noteworthy in its own
right, in terms of the region’s role as a future supplier for global energy
markets it is the concerns related to the Arctic energy reserves them-
selves that are more acute. Among the most concrete of these questions
is whether the much-desired hydrocarbon resources actually exist. While
the region has been estimated to hide a significant share of the world’s
remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves (USGS 2009), there are