One of the reasons I have continued with All Our Yesterdays is because there are definitely lots of smart activists and academics out there doing great work who deserve a signal boost and the chance to cross-fertilise. One such person is Prof. Cyrus Mody… who kindly agreed to this interview. (If you read Dutch, check out this interview too).
1) Who are you and how did you come to be working on the 1970s Oil Industry from a perch in Netherlands?
I’m an historian of science and technology at Maastricht University. A lot of my research wanders into business history, environmental history, energy history – but my PhD is in Science and Technology Studies, and I approach all my research from the direction of science and technology. That’s perhaps my main contribution as a scholar – to get historians of science to think more about business, and to get business, environmental, and energy historians to think more about science (and to get all of them to think more about technology). Until recently, I was making those points mostly with respect to fields related to the microelectronics industry – fields like semiconductor physics, electrical engineering, nanotechnology, materials science. But in the course of that research (and in reading the secondary literature on similar science-oriented industries such as biotechnology) I noticed that the oil industry was absolutely everywhere in high-tech (and yet hardly anyone had pointed out that ubiquity). So around 2012 I started preliminary work on the project that became Managing Scarcity and Sustainability by trying to map all the “spillovers” from the oil industry into other high-tech domains that I could find.
At the time I was at Rice University in Houston – a great place to do oil history and energy humanities, and a wonderful place to be an untenured assistant professor because I had a lot of freedom to teach what I wanted and enough resources for the kind of research I was doing at the time. But I could see that I couldn’t study all the oil spillovers I was uncovering on my own – that would require becoming an expert in the history of too many fields, each of which deserved its own study. For reasons I won’t go into, at Rice I was never going to be able to put together the kind of team needed to tackle this topic. But in the Netherlands, team projects are common. It wasn’t an easy decision to move, but in doing so I’m now surrounded by a much more vibrant local/regional history of science and technology and STS community than I was in Houston, and I’ve been able to hire an incredible team (Odinn Melsted, Jelena Stankovic, and Michiel Bron) to work on Managing Scarcity.
2) Tell us about , “Managing Scarcity and Sustainability: The Oil Industry, Environmentalism, and Alternative Energy in the Age of Scarcity.” – what is the project, and how might it help us understand what is going on now?
Managing Scarcity and Sustainability (https://managingscarcity.com/) is a five-year project funded by the NWO (usually translated as Dutch Research Council; award VI.C.191.067). Our main focus is oil actors’ involvement in the global debate about resource scarcity, environmentalism, and sustainable growth/development in the “long 1970s” (which we usually define as the years 1968 to 1986). By “oil actors” we mean, firstly, oil firms as well as allied firms and trade associations; but we also mean individual oil executives and scientists and engineers with oil industry experience, as well as the firms (e.g., solar energy start-ups) and organizations (e.g., philanthropic foundations) that those individuals led.
The project is sort of two-pronged: on the one hand, we look at the technologies that oil firms (and the start-ups they invested in) developed in response to growing awareness of resource scarcity and environmental problems. Here, we’re mainly interested in solar, geothermal, and nuclear (both fission and fusion) energy as well as auxiliary technologies such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology; but we’re also trying to draw in researchers who are studying other oil spillovers, e.g., wind energy or fuel cells and advanced batteries. The oil industry was deeply involved in lots of alternative energy in this period, but pulled back (in many cases, abandoned) those investments in the 1980s.
The other prong looks at a network of current and former oil executives who stoked the global debate on resource scarcity, environmental problems (including climate change), and sustainable development. At the center of that network were: Robert O. Anderson (chair of both Atlantic Richfield – a mid-size oil company – and the Aspen Institute, as well as donor to many other environmental organizations and think tanks); Maurice Strong (a Canadian diplomat, chair of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development, but also an executive or board member with various oil companies including Ajax, Dome, Petro-Canada, and Tosco); and George Mitchell (often known as the “father of fracking” but also the sponsor of a series of Limits to Growth conferences and other environmental/sustainable development activities). Through collaboration with the Club of Rome, the United Nations, the Nobel Foundation, and an array of think tanks, this network was incredibly influential in the emergence of institutions of global environmental governance from the 1970s until the early 1990s.
What can we learn from this? Well, first, that climate denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable. All across the oil industry in the 1970s executives were publicly saying that we would need to rely more on non-fossil fuels: nuclear fission in the short term, geothermal in the medium term, and nuclear fusion and solar in the long term (by which they meant after the year 2000). And their companies invested accordingly. We’ve also known for a while that oil firms were aware of climate change in this period; but members of the Anderson-Strong-Mitchell network weren’t just aware of it, they were some of the loudest voices in the world drawing attention to it and calling for global governance structures to address it. Which means, second, that we have to look for a more complex explanation for why denialism became a more common strategy from the late 1980s onward. Our working hypothesis is that the declining price of oil meant these firms had less cash to invest for the long term. But, perhaps more importantly, the election of neoliberal regimes in the US, UK, Netherlands, Canada, and elsewhere meant those firms could no longer rely on the state as a partner in development of both alternative energy and climate regulation. Neoliberalism also encouraged hostile takeover bids by people like T. Boone Pickens, which forced oil firms both to liquidate assets in order to fend off those bids, and also to refocus on their “core competency” of getting oil out of the ground in order to assure investors that their main priority would be short-term returns rather than responsible long-term development of alternatives.
3) What is the “nanobubbles” project? What inspired it, what has it achieved, what next?
NanoBubbles is a large project funded by the European Research Council’s Synergy program (award 951393). We are a couple dozen researchers across more than a half-dozen universities in the Netherlands and France, drawn from history, sociology, philosophy, library science, computer science, nanoscience, STS, and other fields. The aim is to better understand the difficulties that scientists face in attempting to correct the scientific record, and also to study the systemic inducements to exaggeration, defense of erroneous claims, and even outright fraud in science. Some members of the group have personally experienced damaging repercussions from their attempts to correct errors in the scientific record; others have developed tools and approaches for studying some of the channels through which errors propagate (e.g., journal articles). My own interest stems in part from my earlier work on nanotechnology and in part from my current work (within Managing Scarcity) on climate denialism and on the oil industry’s inflation of “bubbles” in high-tech fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence. We’re about 18 months into the project, a lot of which was spent on hiring people and getting our infrastructure in place (e.g., ethics protocols), so our achievements thus far are mostly preparatory to what comes next; but I’d point you to work by some members of the project (Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and colleagues) on “tortured phrases” as an example of what we’re working on (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02134-0). Ultimately, at least in the Maastricht corner of the project (i.e., myself, Candida Sanchez Burmester, and Max Rossman), we’d like to do both traditional, labor-intensive qualitative research (participant observation at labs and conferences, historical research at archives) and also develop automated tools for scaling up qualitative research to much larger Ns in order to better understand how claims and counter-claims do or don’t circulate through (and gain traction within) scientific communities.
4) What do you think the main thing academics/politicians/activists/citizens need to understand/do differently around energy to help us miss our climate targets by a smaller margin than we otherwise would?
Well, energy and climate are too complex to point to a single “main thing.” But the lessons I’d draw from Managing Scarcity and NanoBubbles are these: denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable, and at one point a significant portion of the oil industry was working toward some kind of transition in both technology and governance; oil firms bear plenty of blame for their later support of denialism, but there are other actors (particularly neoliberal politicians and economists as well as the financial industry) who bear lots of blame too (and if we only address the oil industry but not those other actors we’ll never actually resolve the core issues); but even if some oil actors of the 1970s (people like Strong and Anderson) were moving in a more positive direction than that of their successors, their program was still too oriented to technological solutionism and economic growth; instead, we need an approach that prioritizes cultural change over (though not necessarily exclusive of) technological innovation, and that is willing to entertain alternatives to economic growth.
