Oil - Softcover

Bridge, Gavin; Le Billon, Philippe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745649262 ISBN 13: 9780745649269

Publisher: Polity Pr, 2011

Synopsis

Oil pulses through our daily lives. It is the plastic we touch, the food we eat, and the way we move. Oil politics in the twentieth century was about the management of abundance, state power, and market growth. The legacy of this age of plenty includes declining conventional oil reserves, volatile prices, climate change, and enduring poverty in many oil-rich countries. The politics of oil are now at a turning point, and oil's future will not be like its past.

In this in-depth primer to one of the world's most significant industries, authors Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon take a fresh look at the contemporary political economy of oil. Going beyond simple assertions of peak oil and an oil curse, they point to an industry reordered by global shifts in demand towards Asia, growing reliance on unconventional reserves, international commitments to reduce carbon emissions and a growing campaign for fossil fuel divestment, and violent political struggles in producer-states.

As a new geopolitics of oil emerges, the need for effective global oil governance becomes imperative. Highlighting the growing influence of civil society and attentive to the efforts of firms and states to craft new institutions, this fully updated second edition identifies the challenges and opportunities to curtail price volatility, curb demand and the growth of dirty oil, decarbonize energy systems, and improve governance in oil-producing countries.

About this title

About the Author:

Philippe le Billon is associate professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia. He has worked for environmental and humanitarian organizations in Angola, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and the former Yugoslavia.

Gavin Bridge is a reader in economic geography at the University of Manchester. He has published widely on the geography of natural resources.

Review:

"Its accessible language, comprehensive treatment of the subject and affordable pricing make this indispensable reading."
International Affairs

"Brimming with rich conceptual insights and expert empirical detail."
Economic Geography

"You will not find a better guide to the new geopolitics of hydrocarbons."
Michael Ross, University of California Los Angeles

"No comparable book so effectively covers the core issues as well as Oil and none so effectively provides a road synthesis of key trends and debates with such economy of style and richness of detail."
Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

"This book is a 'must-read' antidote to current arguments about the scarcity of oil. Not only do Bridge and Le Billon comprehensively demolish those claims, they positively submit a twenty-first century 'beyond oil's prospective' for the future."
Peter R. Odell, Erasmus University, Rotterdam

"The book Oil published by leading resource geographers Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon in the 'Resources' series of Polity provides the most up-to-date and well-balanced analysis of the challenges faced by the global petroleum industry today and their implications for social studies of energy affairs. The book offers an empirically grounded and conceptually informed critique without being heavily immersed in critical geographical theory. Oil is an essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary politics of hydrocarbons and delivers much needed teaching material for both undergraduate and graduate courses on extractive economies."
Karg Kama, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

About this edition

• Publisher: Polity Pr
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0745649262
• ISBN 13: 9780745649269
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256