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E-book Petrochemical Planet : Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation
The global petrochemical industry is at a crossroads. As an essential modern industry but also a major polluter, it faces threats to its core business. Petro-chemicals surround us in thousands of everyday products, yet they pose health and climate risks across every stage of their lifecycle. On the eve of the covid-19 pandemic, the petrochemical industry was facing mounting public pres-sure to address issues of climate crisis, plastic waste, and toxic pollution. The coronavirus pandemic and the historic crude oil crash of 2020 turned the industry upside down, temporarily casting sustainability issues to the sidelines. If the industry had been preparing for a fossil fuel endgame scenario already, what would the future after the pandemic look like in the global “Race to Zero”?1 This book argues that a profound planetary industrial transformation is underway, challenging the reigning age of plastics and fossil fuels, and opening new but tenuous possibilities for ecological alternatives. Century- old corporate and state alliances are being shaken as oil and chemical giants fight battles on multiple fronts to retain their power.Drawing on multi-sited research on the global petrochemical industry between 2015 and 2022, this book examines multiscalar battles over the stakes of transforming a toxic yet essential industry. The petrochemical industry has long viewed the world in terms of militaristic corporate strategies: to conquer markets across its value chain, deny responsibility for harm, and mitigate risk. In response, polluted communities living adjacent to industrial facilities, known as “fenceline communities,” have fought numerous battles with companies for recognition and redress.2 One of the key battles has been over the issue of social and ecological “expendability”: Whose voices and lives matter?3 Following global patterns of environmental injustice, the burdens of toxic petrochemical pollution are unequally distributed, heavily concentrated in low- income, working-class, and minority ethnic communities living on the fenceline of industry.4 For the past half century of environmental justice strug gles, we have witnessed a “double movement,” Polanyi’s concept under-lying the “great transformation” of the Industrial Revolution, between the destructive forces of capitalism and the salving counterforces of society.5David and Goliath metaphors of cap i talist conflict abound, but they have taken us only so far. Despite decades of strug gle, fenceline disputes over pet-rochemical pollution have rarely posed fundamental threats to industry. Yet the pressure for industrial transformation is intensifying, coming not only from activists and regulators but also from investors and shifting geopo liti-cal interests. Across our petrochemical planet, we face existential questions about societal and ecological values: What is “essential” or “expendable”? What is harmful or healthy? What is just and what are the alternatives? This book grapples with these impor tant questions, building on debates in environmental justice, corporate sustainability, just transitions, degrowth, and anti-colonial ecologies.
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