ABSTRACT
Institutional theory, behavioral science, sociology and even political science all emphasize the importance of actors in achieving social change. Despite this salience, the actors involved in researching, promoting, or deploying negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies remain underexplored within the literature. In this study, based on a rigorous sample of semi-structured expert interviews (N = 125), we empirically explore the types of actors and groups associated with both negative emissions and solar geoengineering research and deployment. We investigate emergent knowledge networks and patterns of involvement across space and scale. We examine actors in terms of their support of, opposition to, or ambiguity regarding both types of climate interventions. We reveal incipient and perhaps unforeseen collections of actors; determine which sorts of actors are associated with different technology pathways to comprehend the locations of actor groups and potential patterns of elitism; and assess relative degrees of social acceptance, legitimacy, and governance.
ABSTRACT
Between the second half of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the prospect of shale gas extraction in Europe at first prompted fervent political support, then met with local and national opposition, and was finally rendered moot by a global collapse in the oil price. In the Europe-wide protests against shale gas and the main technique employed to extract it, hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), counter-expertise played a crucial role. This kind of expertise is one of the main elements of "energy citizenship," a concept recently developed in the field of energy humanities which describes the empowerment of citizens in decision-making processes related to energy issues. This paper provides a socio-historical analysis of the co-production of counter-expertise and energy citizenship in the two European countries endowed with the largest shale gas reserves: Poland and France. In my analysis, concerns over the disruption of the food-water-energy nexus due to possible pollution emerge as particularly important. I argue that the exchange of information between activist groups and NGOs, as well as between activist groups from distant European locations, allowed for the creation of a genuinely transnational and science-based anti-fracking movement.
Subject(s)
Hydraulic Fracking , Natural Gas , Europe , Poland , WaterABSTRACT
By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had acquired a strong position as a world oil exporter, thanks to major discoveries in the Ural-Volga area. In order to transport their oil to strategic areas within the Union and to Europe, the Soviets devised a project to build a colossal pipeline system. This plan caused anxiety at NATO since Russian oil could be wielded as a weapon to weaken the West both militarily and economically. In order to complete the system, however, the Soviets needed large-diameter steel pipes and equipment, which they had to import from the West. Thus in 1961 the U.S. delegation at NATO proposed a comprehensive embargo of large-diameter pipes in order to delay the system's construction. I argue that the definition of what oil pipes were as technological artifacts, as well as their final content, was ultimately shaped by the NATO debate on this U.S. proposition.
ABSTRACT
Between 2001 and 2009, the area of Naples, South Italy, repeatedly hit the headlines of national and international media due to the waste management crisis that on many occasions filled up the streets of the region with huge piles of waste. What soon emerged as the main bone of contention concerned the connections between the population's health and the presence of dumps on the territory. What the risks for health actually were, who was entitled to assess them, and whether pollution from proximity to dumps caused health problems were all topics that came to the fore during a debate that took place within the Italian epidemiological community, alongside the political and governance crisis.
Subject(s)
Environmental Pollution , Humans , ItalyABSTRACT
The unique family of membrane-bound proton-pumping inorganic pyrophosphatases, involving pyrophosphate as the alternative to ATP, was investigated by characterizing 166 members of the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot + UniProtKB/TrEMBL databases and available completed genomes, using sequence comparisons and a hidden Markov model based upon a conserved 57-residue region in the loop between transmembrane segments 5 and 6. The hidden Markov model was also used to search the approximately one million sequences recently reported from a large-scale sequencing project of organisms in the Sargasso Sea, resulting in additional 164 partial pyrophosphatase sequences. The strongly conserved 57-residue region was found to contain two nonapeptidyl sequences, mainly consisting of the four 'very early' proteinaceous amino acid residues Gly, Ala, Val and Asp, compatible with an ancient origin of the inorganic pyrophosphatases. The nonapeptide patterns have charged amino acid residues at positions 1, 5 and 9, are apparent binding sites for the substrate and parts of the active site, and were shown to be so specific for these enzymes that they can be used for functional assignments of unannotated genomes.
