the food-energy-climate change trilemma: toward a socio-economic analysis

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The Food-Energy-Climate Change Trilemma: Toward a Socio-Economic

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Special Issue: Energy & Society

The Food-Energy-Climate ChangeTrilemma: Toward aSocio-EconomicAnalysis

Mark HarveyUniversity of Essex

Abstract

The food-energy-climate change trilemma refers to the stark alternatives pre-

sented by the need to feed a world population growing to nine billion, the

attendant risks of land conversion and use for global climate change, and the

way these are interconnected with the energy crisis arising from the depletion of

oil. Theorizing the interactions between political economies and their related

natural environments, in terms of both finitudes of resources and generation of

greenhouse gases, presents a major challenge to social sciences. Approaches from

classical political economy, transition theory, economic geography, and political

ecology, are reviewed before elaborating the neo-Polanyian approach adopted

here. The case of Brazil, analysed with an ‘instituted economic process’ frame-

work, demonstrates how the trilemma is a spatial and historical socio-economic

phenomenon, varying significantly in its dynamics in different environmental and

resource contexts. The paper concludes by highlighting challenges to developing a

social scientific theory in this field.

Keywords

climate change, food security, ‘instituted economic process’, limits to growth, peak

oil, sociogenesis

Introduction

The principal purpose of this paper is to develop understanding of theinteraction between socio-economic and bio-physical systems by focusingon a particularly significant interaction complex. The concept of a

Corresponding author: Mark Harvey. Email: [email protected]

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‘food-energy-climate change trilemma’ identifies a strong interdepend-ency between the growth in food demand, the decline and increasinginsecurity of fossil energy resources, and the increase in anthropogenicclimate change arising from land conversion and use for both food andenergy. The trilemma represents an unprecedented challenge to contin-ued economic and social sustainability. Yet the trilemma takes variedforms and dynamics in different regions, with different pathways ofgrowth and development, in the context of varying resource endowments,and differential access or potential access to food and energy, of whateverkind.

As a concept, the trilemma first emerged within the natural andenvironmental sciences (Tilman et al., 2009), highlighting the evolvingdynamics between various kinds of resource finitude (fossil energy,land, water, etc.) and the generation of greenhouse gases from shiftingpatterns of utilization of these resources in economic development.Central to the trilemma concept, as discussed further below, is thecomplex interaction between different kinds of resource demand anduse, on the one hand, and different kinds of finite resource constraint,on the other, and their combined consequences for climate change.Much of this type of analysis operates in terms of global aggregations(e.g. of oil demand, CO2 emissions, food supply and demand, etc.),and thus talks generically of ‘anthropogenic’ climate change.Understanding these evolving and shifting dynamics – especially result-ing in the increasing importance of land use, land use change, andfood production – presents an ongoing challenge for natural andenvironmental science, and at the same time a quite distinctive chal-lenge for social sciences. The core argument of this paper is thatanalysis of trilemma dynamics in terms of sociogenesis arising fromthe interaction between diverse political economies and their variouslyfinite natural environmental resources requires significant newtheoretical development. Different political economies generatedifferent trilemma challenges as a consequence of their distinctivepolity-economy-nature interactions.

The paper first reviews a sample of theoretical approaches fromclassical political economy, innovation studies, political ecology,economic geography, and economic sociology, arguing in particular forthe openness of a neo-Polanyian approach to meet the challenge. Thesecond section outlines the natural science account of the trilemma.Using a neo-Polanyian approach, the third section will analyse the caseof Brazil as exemplary of socio-economic trilemma variations and theiruneven and emergent historical character. The conclusion draws togetherthe elements that point to the nature of the theoretical challenge to thesocial sciences, emphasizing that the paper seeks to identify thedimensions of the challenge rather than provide a fully developed theor-etical framework adequate to it.

2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)




The Theoretical Challenge to Social Science

Reading a 1986 paper of the economist Nikolas Kaldor entitled ‘Limits onGrowth’, one is struck by two things: first, he points to the long-standingpre-occupation of political economy to understand the dynamics of inter-action between economic growth and finite global resources, betweensocio-economic and biophysical systems; second, he was still intellectuallytrapped in a ‘pre-climate change, pre-peak oil’ epoch. The classical polit-ical economists of the time of the industrial revolution, Malthus and espe-cially Ricardo, had enunciated a Law of Diminishing Returns with respectto land as a finite resource. In their view, growth would inevitably find alimit as a consequence of the ever increasing economic resources, includ-ing notably labour, required to produce food and other products fromever more marginal land. Applied initially to food and land, Kaldorargues that the same principle can equally operate for all other finiteresources, such as fossil fuels, metals, and water, which also may drawlabour and technology more and more into the primary sector to thedetriment of growth in the secondary (industry and services) sector.

Yet, in a period only shortly following Hubbert’s prediction of anAmerican, rather than global, peak oil (Defeyes, 2001), this classic his-torical conception of a dynamic of diminishing returns lacks recognitionof the ‘energy cliff’ that confronts industrial capitalism for the first timein its historical experience. The Law of Diminishing Returns conceptu-alization does not visualize a finite resource disappearing on use: land-mass does not shrink progressively to zero as more and more of it issettled and cultivated. The classic political economy fails to distinguishclearly between finite amounts of a resource available for use (such asland area) and finite amounts of resources being used up (such as oil),and the range of intermediate kinds of finitude (such as land temporarilyor permanently exhausted through use or pollution). The Law ofDiminishing Returns operates within a fairly undifferentiated conceptof resource finitude, although tilting, from its origins, to the ‘availabilityfor use’ end of the spectrum. Moreover, with respect to energy resources,until the present epoch, the Law scarcely made an appearance, either inreality or in political economic thought. For, in previous energy transi-tions, coal energy had been adopted and developed without an exhaus-tion of wood-,1 charcoal- and peat-based energy. Likewise, oil andnuclear power were additions to the existing range of energy sources.

From the perspective of this paper, moreover, the Kaldor review of theLaw of Diminishing Returns also conspicuously lacks any spatial dimen-sion. Notably, there is no discussion of where finitudes of land useresulted in effects on economic growth or, more generally, of how differ-ent geographies of resource finitudes (types of fossil energy, water, etc.)relate to different trajectories of development and/or sustainability crises.However, recent accounts of the ‘great divergence’ between regions of the

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world from the inception of the industrial revolution argue that, in add-ition to the accessibility of relatively cheap coal, especially in England(Allen, 2009), Europe and other thriving regions of the world such as theYangtze river basin, were increasingly faced by crises of land availability– finite resources of land limiting growth (Pomeranz, 2000). Only the newcolonization from European countries to the ‘New World’ broke out ofthat resource constraint, so providing European populations with hugenew resources of calories (sugar) and clothing (cotton) as well as the newslave labour forces to cultivate them.2

The industrial revolution and its accompanying urbanizationdepended in significant measure on the slave plantations of the NewWorld, and subsequent forced labour regimes stretching into the earlydecades of the 20th century. It was the unrecognized Great Escape fromthe Malthusian and Ricardian Law of Diminishing Returns, fixated asthis was on implicitly national territorial finitudes of land and labourresources. From 1700 to 1890 the area of cultivated land grew by 466 percent, historically by far the most rapid expansion, and predominantlyoutside Europe and China. North America witnessed an expansion of6,666 per cent over the same period – a rather unreal figure given the lowinitial base (Meyer and Turner, 1992).

This escape from national finitudes of land resources can now also beunderstood for its significance for anthropogenic climate change. Theconversion of uncultivated to cultivated land, and then the uses ofenergy, fertilizers and simply the emissions from tillage agronomies releas-ing the stored carbon in the top soil surface, are now recognized to bemajor sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (Houghton, 2003,2008). At present, anthropogenic GHG from land conversion and agri-culture is 2½ times greater than that from total global transport and its oilconsumption (World Resources Institute, 2005). So, at the inception of theindustrial revolution, there was a particular dynamic between socio-eco-nomic and bio-physical systems, a specific historical and spatial inter-action between land resource constraints and energy consumption. Thesatanic mills burnt coal, certainly, but they also processed cotton and wereworked by labour forces in part dependent on the calorific energy of sugar,entailing a rapid expansion of cultivated land in the New World as anadditional major source of anthropogenic climate change.

This historical interaction between socio-economic and bio-physicalenvironments can only now be seen as a distinctive ‘food-energy-climatechange’ constellation, spatially centred around England and the NewWorld sugar and cotton economies. The constellation was an historicallyemergent phenomenon, with a specific spatial and temporal scale. Theways in which classic political economy – here represented by Kaldor –conceived the interaction between political economies and finitudes ofresource in terms of a generic capitalist economy and despatialized finiteresources limits the understanding of those interactions.





Although historically overlapping, yet with no evidence of their‘speaking’ to each other, the more renowned Limits to Growth(Meadows et al., 2004 [1972]) operated with a very different perspectiveon the interaction between economic systems and the planet earth, yetone which was in its own way equally despatialized. Indeed, both sides ofthe debate between the Limits to Growth and innovation studies perspec-tives (Freeman, 1984, 1996; Cole et al., 1973) share the characteristic oftheorizing in universal global terms. The ‘limits to growth’ perspectiveaggregates total greenhouse gas emissions and projects their growth intothe future, on the assumption of projected exponential growth in demandfor energy, food, minerals, and global resources of all kinds. It suggeststhat ‘exponential growth has been a dominant behaviour of the humansocioeconomic system since the industrial revolution’. And, of course,greenhouse gases as such do aggregate, and have an aggregate impact onthe planet, although, as argued below, not as a consequence of a single‘human socioeconomic system’: the anthropogen. A counter-argumentfrom innovation studies suggests that the growth of scientific and techno-logical knowledge lacks any discernible limits, suggesting an equallyglobal but ‘infinite’ knowledge resource, potentially enabling, for exam-ple, the emergence of renewable energy or sustainable agriculture tapping– again for example – the also relatively infinite resource of solar energy(Freeman, 1984, 1996; Cole et al., 1973). From this standpoint, scientifictechnical fixes arising from inexhaustible knowledge resources are pro-jected as a global potential for a portfolio of ‘stabilization wedges’ (e.g.wind farms, solar energy, nuclear power using thorium, sustainableintensification of agriculture, etc.) (Pacala and Socolow, 2004; RoyalSociety, 2009; UK Government Office for Science, 2011). In contrast tothe classic political economy treatment of an abstract economy in inter-action with spatially unspecified resource availability, the much moreempirically driven ‘limits to growth’ view and its innovation studiescounterpoint are each propounding an interaction between a global eco-nomic system (as characterized by statistical techniques of aggregation)and the earth, and especially its atmosphere, as a global whole.

Transition theory has a much more circumspect view of the capacityfor technological innovation and growth of scientific knowledge to tran-scend limits to growth in its distinctive approach to transitions to sus-tainability. The approach stresses different levels of economicorganization and the interdependency of socio-technical systems, reinfor-cing the idea of path dependencies constraining radical technical change.Obstacles to radical and rapid decarbonizing of economies can be illu-strated by the interlocking of the petro-chemical complex, fossil fueltransport and power generation, its physical infrastructures, and, notleast, the associated taxation regimes, as analysed by Unruh (2000;Geels, 2002, 2004). The multi-level perspective (MLP), where differentinnovation and change processes occur at the ‘ground-level’ of niches,

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through socio-technical regimes, to the overall landscape of a socio-econ-omy, articulates the complexity of major socio-technological transitions.In developing the MLP approach, historically comparative exampleshave been drawn from a range of economic fields (land transport, sailto steam ships, sewerage, continuous flow mass production systems infactories, etc.) to provide examples of different types of transition (trans-formation of landscapes, reconfiguration, technological substitution, andre-alignment and de-alignment) (Geels and Schot, 2007). And finally,more recently, unlike earlier work, issues of economy-nature interactionshave been introduced, suggesting that climate change constitutes a novelenvironment for innovation, requiring some adaptation of the theoreticalframework. Transitions to sustainability are contrasted with earlier cases.Notably, the state and public authorities as key agents of innovationachieve much greater recognition than previous accounts, which werecharacterized by more bottom-up niche novelty and innovation (Geels,2010). This theoretical shift has further been amplified by the analysis oftransitions to renewable energy, where the state is attributed a muchgreater role (Smith et al., 2005).

However, a lack of comparative analysis of political economies ofcapitalism – let alone of non-capitalist economies contemporary and his-torical – is a feature of transition theory. In that sense, the MLP as ananalytical framework is presented as a general model, applicable to anypolitical economy in any spatial context. It is striking, for example, thatthe analysis of the transition from cesspits to sewerage systems in theNetherlands paid so little attention to economy-nature interactions(Geels, 2006). A comparison with a similar transition in the UnitedKingdom suggests that a major sustainability crisis, the ‘Great Stink’of London, was a significant and decisive disruptive event in a transitionprocess. The crisis arose from an interaction between particular socio-technical regimes, a polity, and a specific natural environment (Harvey,2012; Halliday, 2001). Likewise, Evans’s analysis of the transition ofwater and sewerage provision in Hamburg emphasizes the distinctivespatial and historical configuration of a ‘free city’, largely independentof the Prussian state. Hamburg, with its mercantile elite, was a uniquepoint of confluence of migrating people, international trade, rivers andwater-borne disease (Evans, 1987). The societal and spatial decontext-ualization of the MLP representation into three levels, and an implicitassumption of its general applicability, filters out analysis of politico-economic variation and spatio-environmental context in the cases it ana-lyses. So explanation of major variations in transition trajectories andfossil carbon path dependencies are difficult to encompass in MLP rep-resentation as it stands, especially given the significance of spatiallylocated resource finitudes and their use in inducing climate change.

Unlike these theoretical limitations in addressing resource finitudesand climate change arising from abstract and unspatialized economies,





the aggregate anthropogen, and decontextualized MLP transitions, somepolitical ecology, resources geography and recent economic geographyapproaches take these issues as central. In part derived from Marxisttenets of O’Connor’s (1998) second contradiction (the intensifying ten-dency of capitalism to undermine the reproduction of the necessaryenvironmental and resource conditions for continued accumulation),and Marxist theories of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005), a strong theoret-ical strand takes neoliberal attempts at marketization of the environmentas the focus of this perspective on political-economy interactions withnatural environments. Supportive evidence of this approach is found inthe formation of markets for renewable energy from previously uncom-modified natural resources, the use of carbon trading mechanismsfavouring large corporations for CO2 emissions reduction (Castree,2009), and the erosion of common pool resources (Prudham, 2007;Mansfield, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2004, 2007). The most strident versionof this view of the ‘neoliberalization of nature’ assumes a single hege-monic form of global capitalism, both ideological and institutional(McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Heynon et al., 2007). Rather thanexamining interactions between different political economies and theirenvironments, whether in terms of access to, and use of, finite resourcesor GHG emissions, this deployment of the concept of neoliberalizationemphasizes general worldwide processes such as deregulation, appropri-ation by dispossession, and marketization.

However, others have stressed both the variety of neoliberalizations(Peck and Tickell, 2002) and the disjunctures between neoliberalist ideol-ogy and its instantiations, emphasizing the contradictions between theideology of spontaneous emergent self-regulating markets and strongstate intervention and regulation, often with the state as architect andgovernor of markets (Mansfield, 2004; Bakker, 2003, 2005). In a recentreview of the literature on the neoliberalization of nature, Castree inparticular has pointed to definitional weaknesses, but above all to amethodological failure of using singular exemplary cases as instancesof general neoliberalizing processes, rather than a comparative and his-torical method necessary for understanding the kind of variation indi-cated by Peck and Tickell (Castree, 2010). More recently, Peck (2013) hasadvocated a Polanyian turn to economic geography, especially the later‘anthropological’ Polanyi, precisely because of its comparative and his-torical approach.

The neo-Polanyian ‘instituted economic process’ (IEP) approachadopted here takes historical and spatial variation as central to all itsanalysis, and to an as yet limited extent has addressed some polity-econ-omy-nature interactions (Harvey, 2007). Building on Polanyi’s later work(Polanyi, 1957), economies are analysed in terms of relational configur-ations of processes of production, distribution, appropriation and con-sumption. The analytical approach explores how economies – the

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configurations – are instituted and transformed in space and time, andhow spatio-temporal scales of configurational organization are formed,rather than found, within a pre-given multi-level ontology. Economies offood (exemplified by the tomato) (Harvey et al., 2002), knowledge(Harvey and McMeekin, 2007), water (Harvey, 2012), and energy(Harvey and Pilgrim, 2012) have been analysed for their variation andtransformation in space and time. In Exploring the Tomato, contrastswere drawn between the Northern European glasshouse and theSouthern European polytunnel regimes, related to the availability anduse of, respectively, fossil fuel or solar energy. The particular competitiveadvantage of the Dutch use of their North Sea natural gas resource forheating glasshouses was seen as contributing to the demise of theGuernsey tomato. Moreover, by contrasting the UK supermarket withthe Dutch export-oriented small producer economies of tomatoes, thesepolitical economy/natural environment interactions pointed to sources ofvariation within given, similar environmental settings, notably the dis-tinctive forms of hybridization and innovation resulting in Tesco tomatovarieties or the Dutch ‘Greenery Tomato’: different hybrids in differentsocio-economic spaces. A similar type of analysis of political-economy/environment interactions was developed in relation to European,Brazilian, and American biofuels. Continental European biodiesel, withits use of rapeseed as an already established temperate zone crop as itsfeedstock, interlocked with a tax regime that had established dieselpowertrains as the dominant light vehicle type in the previous decade.The European biofuel trajectory contrasted with the Brazilian tropicalresource of sugarcane bioethanol, or the USA’s lock-in to maize as afeedstock. Different political economies in interaction with differentenvironmental resources and dominant agricultures resulted in differenttransitions to renewable transport energies.

Further, Polanyi’s central concept of the ‘shifting place of the econ-omy in society’ has been expanded by considering different modes ofinstituting economic configurations, especially the changing relationbetween polity and economy manifest in responses to peak oil and cli-mate change. Whether for biofuels or wind farms, solar or nuclearenergy, nation-states have engaged in highly interventionist, often long-term strategic reconfigurations of economies of energy, entailing newindustrial divisions of labour, operating in politically instituted markets.In this respect, diverse political modes of instituting economies of energyhave been widely commented on, attracting the somewhat anachronisticlabel of ‘climate Keynesianism’, for example, in the case of carbon offsetmarkets (Newell and Patterson, 2010). This perspective of varied modesof economic transformation and reconfiguration, with different polity-economy dynamisms, has parallels with Block’s conceptualization of the‘hidden developmental state’, a characterization of strong but unspokenstate interventionism in the US economy, which departs sharply from its





paradigm reputation as the homeland of neoliberal, free market eco-nomic organization (Block, 2007, 2008; Block and Evans, 2005).Moreover, as economic reconfigurations responding to peak oil, foodsecurity, or climate change are witnessing new forms of political inter-vention, so new spaces open up for social and political movements toshape these reconfigurations – notably in the case of NGOs with respectto European renewable transport energy (Pilgrim and Harvey, 2010;Harvey and Pilgrim, 2012).

Yet, although the IEP approach has addressed polity-economy-naturevariation, involving dynamics of interaction with natural environmentalsettings and access to resources, it has done so only to a limited extent.Notably, it lacks analysis of the kind of feedback loop interactionsinvolved in the food-energy-climate change trilemma. It is yet to addressvariation in sociogenic (as against anthropogenic) climate change. Thetheoretical challenge is to take the state-of-the-art natural scientificunderstanding of these complexities – how land use change generatesgreenhouse gases, what are the biophysical consequences of shifts fromfossil energy to bioenergy, what are the diverse energy inputs involved infood production, etc. – in order to develop an analysis of the variedpolitico-economy/nature interactions generating varied trilemma conse-quences in different regions of the world. So, rather than attempting toconstruct a parallel social science ‘materiality’ (Bakker and Bridge, 2006),it is to current state-of-the-art natural and environmental science(including its controversies) of the trilemma that we first turn, beforelooking to Brazil as an example of a particular trajectory of trilemmaevolution.

The Emergence of the Abstract, Natural Science, Conceptof the Trilemma

Although scientifically appreciated for many years, the significance ofland-use change and agriculture as sources of greenhouse gases cameinto full focus with the controversies surrounding the competition forland between biofuels and food (Gallagher, 2008). At the height of thefood and oil price spikes of 2007–8, Searchinger and Fargione(Searchinger et al., 2008; Fargione et al., 2008) published papers inScience arguing that the carbon footprint of biofuels was far greaterthan previously calculated and, far from being benevolent for climatechange, biofuels were a cure worse than the disease (Doornbosch andSteenblick, 2007). Simplifying the argument, the production of biofuels,particularly from food crops such as maize in the USA, raised the priceof food and stimulated agricultural production elsewhere, thus leading tothe conversion of more uncultivated to cultivated land. This is termedIndirect Land-Use Change (ILUC), and ILUC was suggested as a sig-nificant source of greenhouse gases, which should be included in the

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carbon footprint of biofuels. The argument has been contested frommany angles, and it could just as easily be argued that high oil pricesstimulated the production of alternative biofuels, which then led toILUC, so increasing the carbon footprint of oil (Harvey and Pilgrim,2011). Nonetheless, once land-use change fell under the floodlights ofcontroversy, attention to the much wider issue of land-use change, espe-cially direct land-use change for food to feed the growing global popu-lation, achieved much greater prominence, and led to the articulation ofthe natural science concept of the ‘food-energy-climate change trilemma’(Tilman et al., 2009).

In Figure 1, the interactions between socio-economic and bio-physicalsystems are displayed as an undifferentiated global phenomenon, aggre-gating all socio-economic activity. As an exercise, it is worthwhile run-ning through the natural/environmental science account of the dynamics,in simplified form.

From the top of the diagram, assumptions are made that there will beboth an increase in demand for food, with rising standards of nutrition,and a world population growing from 6.5 billion to a projected plateau of9 billion (IAASTD, 2009; Evans, 2009; Royal Society, 2009; Pretty,2008), and an increase in demand for energy. Increased demand forfood directly increases demand for productive land, and for increasedproductivity of agriculture. Increased demand for energy, and in particu-lar transport energy, with the transport fleets of China and India either

Figure 1. The ‘food-energy-climate change trilemma’: A natural science representation.





overtaking or having just overtaken that of the USA, will increasedemand for oil. Further, plastics derived from oil and other key indus-trial materials also place increased demands on oil. Yet, oil being a finiteresource, with many suggesting that global peak oil has already occurred(Aleklett et al., 2010), or will shortly (IEA, 2013), increasing pressure isplaced on finding substitutes for oil, of which biomass is a prime candi-date, not only from biofuels but also from biomaterials and industrialbiotechnology. Failure to find substitutes for oil, in the view of theInternational Energy Authority, is likely to result in an economic depres-sion which would make the current economic crisis appear no more thana dimple on the way (IEA, 2011–12). Oil price-induced depression affectsthe poorest regions far more extremely than the rich, in part fromimpacts on food prices. Given especially that agriculture is dependenton considerable energy inputs, the choice is not energy or food.Moreover, less intensive agriculture would mean more land for thesame amount of food, and it has been argued that the use of chemicalfertilizers, in spite of their carbon footprint, has consequently less envir-onmental impact than less intensive agriculture (Burney et al., 2010). Butfinding biomass alternatives to fossil fuels also increases pressure on landcultivation and conversion. So the pressure for land comes from a doublepincer movement, and risks to climate change and biodiversity increase.This then constitutes the trilemma: more food results in more climatechange. Burning fossil fuels leads to more climate change. Failure to findalternatives to oil results in unending economic depression. Biomassalternatives increase demand for land-use change, leading to more cli-mate change. More climate change results in less land availability andless productivity of much existing agricultural land, and so underminesfood supply. And, indeed, results in major disruptions to life on theplanet as we know it.

Trilemma Interactions and Reactions: The ExemplaryCase of Brazil

The natural scientific account of the trilemma, necessary for understand-ing complex biophysical dynamics, assumes generic, unspecified humansocio-economic activity. In this section, a preliminary attempt will bemade to develop an IEP approach to understanding sociogenic varietiesof trilemma generation, the emergence and progression of the trilemma,or, as importantly, the transitions or transformations responding to itsvaried sustainability crises. Brazil is taken as an exemplary case toexplore these interactions: the sources of variation in the dynamicsbetween regions, and the spatially and temporally uneven developmentof, and responses to, the different horns of the dilemma (energy, food,climate change). To anticipate, Brazil reacted similarly to the USA to thefirst oil shocks of the 1970s, but then pursued a very different strategic

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response. And, partly as a consequence of its biofuels strategy, it hasbeen in the forefront of controversies and responses to developing sus-tainable agriculture regulation. In so doing, for example, its ZeroDeforestation Policy (however effective or not in practice) is symbolicof a political redefinition of the finitude of land, by ruling in and out theavailability of different types of land for agricultural or other human use.Finitudes are politically modified, thus changing the goal posts of limitsto growth.

To illustrate the significance of this social scientific focus of trilemmadynamics, a good starting point is the contrast in the actual carbonfootprint of Brazil compared with other global economies, as portrayedin the UN Environment Programme’s analysis of a prospective failure toadequately respond to the challenge to reduce that footprint. The twofigures below, taken from The Emissions Gap Report 2012 (UNEP, 2012),represent, first, the distinctive carbon footprint signatures of differentcountries and regions; and, second, the better-known summary of therelative per capita carbon footprints of different countries and regions.

Figure 2 demonstrates the starkest contrast between South Korea,Canada, Australia and the USA, at one extreme, and Brazil at theother. As a medium per capita greenhouse gas emitting economy(Figure 3), and one of the most dynamic economies of the BRICgroup, Brazil displays a remarkably distinctive carbon footprint. Thecombined total of emissions from energy conversion, industrial use,and transport is below 30 per cent of their total emissions. In all countriesleft of Mexico in Figure 2, this energy-industry-transport subtotal is

Figure 2. Sectoral shares of national greenhouse gas emissions of G20 countries.

Source: UNEP, 2012.





above 80 per cent of total emissions. Conversely, in the case of Brazil,over 60 per cent of its emissions arise from agriculture, especially defor-estation and peat destruction. Yet Brazil is not notably less industria-lized, energy-consuming, or lacking in transport systems than many ofthe comparator cases. Rather, Brazil has been engaged in a particulartrajectory of political economy-environment interactions, a particulardynamic of development, over several decades. To take two key compo-nents of this distinctive trajectory, Brazil has continued to invest heavilyboth in hydroelectric power and the development of biofuels as an alter-native to fossil fuels for transport, discussed more fully below. As aconsequence, in 2005, Brazil had the highest level of renewable energyof any world economy – indeed, at 29.1 per cent, almost three times theworld average of 11.4 per cent (DIEESE, 2007).

Clearly, both biofuels and hydroelectric power have a land-use relatedcarbon footprint, whether in terms of deforestation or cultivation, socontributing to the contrast with another BRIC economy, Russia,where flaring from gas and oil production combines with the fossil fuelextraction to give that economy its distinctive carbon signature. At thesame time, however, Brazil has become a major, and advanced, agricul-tural export economy: the world’s leading exporter of poultry, red meat,coffee and sugar, the second largest exporter of soy beans, soy meal andsoy oil, and the third largest exporter of corn (Wilkinson, 2009;FAOSTAT, 2012). In terms of the emergent trilemma, Brazil is contri-buting to meeting growing global demand for food, and this is

Figure 3. Per capita greenhouse gas emissions for 1990, 2005, 2010, and 2020 for G20

countries. Source: Olivier et al., 2012.

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manifested in its pattern of GHG emissions from food production anddeforestation. The emerging trilemma dynamics of Brazil contrasts withother regions and nations of the world, while interlinked through tradewith those regions, with their distinctive dynamics. However, as withother ‘exported’ carbon footprints, these cannot straightforwardly bere-attributed to consumer (importing) nations. As will be seen below,the key issue is how food is produced, and where, in the producer country.On the one hand, much depends on the forms of agriculture and landconversion, with potentially huge variations in carbon footprint (e.g.slash-and-burn versus recovery of degraded land). On the other,Brazil’s natural endowments of high rainfall and sub-tropical solarenergy in principle permit lower carbon footprints for producing foodand biomass than temperate zone regions, so potentially contributing toa global realignment of agriculture as a response to climate change.

In analysing the emergent character of the Brazilian trilemma dynam-ics, different phases are distinguishable, with different horns of the tri-lemma developing unevenly: energy security, land finitude, renewableand environmental concerns, first for biofuels, then for food. Energysecurity and the issue of finite resource constraints was the first ‘horn’to markedly shift the configuration of the Brazilian economy. There hasnot been, and will not be, any simple physical ‘peak oil’ created bytechnologically available means of extracting finite physical resources(Cavallo, 2005; Bridge and Wood, 2010; Bridge and Le Billon, 2013;Sorrel et al., 2009). The 1970s oil price spikes occurred just as theUSA passed its Hubbert’s peak of domestic conventional oil production,leading to progressively increased dependency on Middle East oil, and itsvulnerability to political shocks. These price shocks were hence powerfulevents which conditioned political perspectives to the geopolitics of oil asa finite, spatially concentrated resource in the decades that followed.

The Energy Security Imperative

Under the dictatorship of the Generals (1964–85), ‘state entrepreneur-ship’ in Brazil became a major development strategy, notably with acentral role for Petrobras, the national petroleum company, and itsaffiliated petrochemical industrial base (Evans, 1979, 1982). So, whenconfronted with the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks, although initially resistant,Petrobras was to become a central strategic instrument for the substitu-tion of imported petrol by home grown bioethanol from sugarcane. Interms of the polity-economy-nature interactions, Brazil had already anestablished path-dependency conditioning this strategic response. Thepre-existing concentration and centralization of the sugarcane industryunder the Instituto do Acucar e do Alcool (IAA), established in 1933 byPresident Vargas, imposed an integrated market price, price stability, andproduction quotas for different regions (Johnson, 1983; Nurnberg, 1986).





The Generals’ successive responses to the first ‘peak oil’ shocks exem-plified a shift in trilemma dynamics through politically instituted econo-mies of vehicles and transport energy. The two phases of the strategy,ProAlcool I and ProAlcool II in 1975 and 1979 respectively, establishedunder legal decrees, responded in turn to each of the oil price shocks,described as a ‘politicised market economy’ for energy (Barzelay, 1986).Each phase of the ProAlcool programme entailed novel political instru-ments within a broad orientation (Lehtonen, 2007; Puppim de Oliveira,2002; Rosillo-Calle and Cortez, 1998). In the first phase, there was amandated uptake of 20 per cent anhydrous ethanol, which could beblended with petrol without requiring vehicle engine modification.Petrobras was mandated to purchase the bioethanol from state-subsi-dized biorefineries at a fixed price. The IAA was funded to develop anational agricultural research programme to develop new varieties ofsugarcane, to optimize sugar content for bioethanol conversion.Petrobras, already the dominant distributor of petrol, extended its roleas blender and distributor of the fuel.

The response to the second oil shock was more radical, this timeincluding a transition to new vehicles, innovating a fuel-vehicle technol-ogy system. Engines developed by the state-controlled Centro TecnologiaAeronautica to run on 100 per cent hydrous ethanol were manufactured,by negotiated agreement and government-signed contracts, with themajor global car manufacturers (Fiat, VW, Mercedes Benz, GM andToyota) (Goldemberg, 2008). Manufacturers saw this as a market oppor-tunity – albeit politically constructed – and actively sought and promotedthe development of an ethanol car fleet (Barzelay, 1986), producing250,000 cars by 1980, 350,000 by 1982. Using procurement as an instru-ment, all state cars were obliged to be 100 per cent ethanol, and subsidieswere given on vehicle prices. By the early 1980s, 80 per cent of all newvehicles sold were ethanol-only.

The period of military dictatorship manifested strong and authoritarianpolitical direction – symbolized by the effective imposition of the 100 percent ethanol car – but nonetheless resulted in the emergence of new mar-kets, with both indigenous and foreign capital and market players: the‘tripod’ (tri-pe) policy of development based on a combination of multi-national, national and local enterprises under state tutelage (Evans, 1979,1982). The fall of the dictatorship, and the establishment of a democraticpolitical regime, saw the dismantlement of some, but by no means all, ofthis political legacy. The ethanol blendingmandate remained, but the pure-ethanol car almost disappeared. Fuel prices were de-regulated between1997 and 1999, and under theWashington consensus the Cardoso govern-ment pursued a policy of stimulating FDI. The IAAwas abolished in 1990,but with the result that the primary sugarcane producing region in south-central Brazil effectively eliminated the previously uncompetitive north-east region. Petrobras remained a dominant player, if less of a direct agent

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of government policy. Oil prices returned to their pre-shock levels – untilthe progressive rise in the late 1990s – but the relative end-price of ethanolto consumers remained below 60 per cent that of petrol for most of the firstdecade of this century, only twice briefly going above 70 per cent(De Almeida et al., 2007).

So, in spite of liberalization of the economy, the period from 1985–97was one of stabilization at the peak levels achieved under the ProAlcoolprogramme. It is worth emphasizing that this renewable transport energyplatform had no ecological imperative behind it – a politically anachron-istic perspective at that time – and so achieved major ecological benefitsaccidentally. Following a period of volatility in the late 1990s, a newsurge in bioethanol production occurred, with the evolution of bothnew political orientation and new political instruments. The politicallydirected development pathway continued to play a major role through-out, with the biofuel industry a significant sector, employing 700,000directly and a further 200,000 indirectly – 100 times more jobs per unitof energy than the oil industry (De Almeida et al., 2007). But, especiallyafter Brazil’s major oil discoveries in the Tupi oilfields, the energy secur-ity dimension diminished in significance compared with the growth of theglobal export market, demand being driven largely by ecological object-ives in Europe. During this period, Brazil became the premier worldexporter of bioethanol. Nonetheless, given the price trend of fossilfuels, bioethanol was also becoming more competitive in the domesticmarket, placing Brazil in an enviable position to face ‘peak oil’ or oilshocks.

The Shift to Climate Change Mitigation

Under President Lula, a range of new political directions to innovationoccurred, although in a very different mode to that under the dictator-ship. Perhaps the most visible and significant development has been theemergence of the fully flex-fuel vehicle (FFV), capable of running on 0–100 per cent of petrol, liquid gas, or bioethanol. Again, the governmentplayed a key role in negotiating with car manufacturers for the produc-tion of FFVs, guaranteeing subsidies on purchase. As a consequence, by2006, 80 per cent of new car sales were FFV, presenting the advantage forthe consumer of eliminating the risk of relative price shifts betweenfuels in a period of considerable volatility. The effects of the FFV innov-ation on domestic market growth of bioethanol production are seen inFigure 4.

As significant has been the re-orientation of policy goals combiningenergy security with ecological sustainability. There has been major fund-ing of basic scientific research, often co-ordinated with commercial R&D,with a vision of coordinated innovation from crop, cultivation, biorefin-ery through to multi-product outcomes. FAPESP, the Sao Paulo State





research funding body, has supported the development of sugarcane gen-omics (Harvey and McMeekin, 2005), and the development of transgenicand advanced hybridization technology sugarcane in the technology clus-ter near the University of Campinas (notably Alellyx and Canavialis).Dedini developed world leadership in biorefinery engineering, withadvanced operations producing surplus electricity from bagasse, as wellas fertilizer from vinasse (previously a pollutant to the water-table). Theproduction of electricity for the grid (bio-electricity) has quadrupledbetween 1995 and 2005, now yielding 3 per cent of the total electricitysupply. Dedini, supported by FAPESP, has been operating a commercialdemonstration plant for ligno-cellulosic bioethanol with Copersucarsince 2003, producing 5000 litres per day. At the same time, even whileretaining sugarcane as a primary feedstock, there has been politicalstimulation of greater experimentation in crop characteristics, biorefineryoutputs, and vehicle manufacture. The guiding political orientation ofthese initiatives is now strongly governed by both climate change miti-gation and renewable energy supply: ecological and economic sustain-ability for transport energy. As Mathews has pointed out, one of theconditions of developing a biofuels futures market, now established inBrazil, has been quality assurance and standardization, including

Figure 4. Development of the Brazilian ethanol sector: Millions of tons of processed

sugarcane. Source: Romanelli (2008).

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regulation for sustainability (Mathews, 2008). Biofuel production inBrazil entered firmly into the perspective of greenhouse gas mitigationand biodiversity protection.

Lula then also initiated a biodiesel programme, which had the jointaims of diminishing Brazilian dependence on imported diesel, developingnew technologies and crops, and specifically targeting poverty reductionfor small farm holders (Wilkinson and Herrera, 2008). Petrobras wasassigned the role of guaranteed purchaser in auctions for a variety ofcrops (jatropha, castor, soy) from small holders, especially in the north-east. In order to develop this market, again with a long-term vision,mandates, now dropped for ethanol, are imposed for biodiesel, with a2 per cent blend required for 2008, rising to 5 per cent in 2013, under the2005 National Programme for the Production and Use of Biodiesel(De Sousa and Dall’Oglio, 2008; Pousa et al., 2007). However, to date,this early experimentation with novel crops and technologies for biodie-sel remains marginal compared with the dominant technology of biodie-sel from soy (Wilkinson and Herrera, 2010).

The Food-Climate Change Imperative

Ironically, this failure of Lula’s biodiesel programme for crops other thansoy has contributed to the emergence of the third horn of the trilemma, thefood-climate change challenge. As a food-energy crop of major globalsignificance, soya has been one of the most significant sources of deforest-ation in the Matto Grasso, the famous ‘arc of fire’, along with slash-and-burn expansion of cattle farming. As Nepstad et al. (2006, 2008) andHecht (2005) have indicated, direct land use change, arising in part fromthe global market demand that has now placed Brazil in the position of aleading soya and meat exporter, has been by far the most significant com-ponent of Brazil’s agricultural carbon footprint. In the period of theCardoso government, and under the Washington Consensus, thismarket-led expansion of food production exemplified the challenge ofBrazil’s third horn. This was in contrast to the biofuels programme withits strong political direction, innovation and expansion of soya and meatproduction, involving major multinational companies as well as Brazilianlarge agribusiness, which for two decades developed in relatively unregu-lated market conditions.

However, for many of the same political and environmentalist con-cerns now required by global trading of biofuels, Brazil has also beendeveloping sustainability regulation for food production, in a varietyof ways. Although climate change mitigation joins with biodiversityprotection and protection of indigenous peoples’ rights to land andwater use, political direction of market development, especiallythrough sustainability regulation, has marked the last decade. Mostnotably, the zero deforestation policy, considerably strengthened in





May 2011, and reinforced by some quite vigorous enforcement byIBAMA (Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos RecursosNaturais Renovaveis) and the military, has resulted in a remarkablereduction in rates of deforestation in recent years. Many factors mayhave contributed to this reduction, in addition to the use of carbonoffset trading (the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation andDegradation and REDD+ schemes adapted from the KyotoProtocol) (Hall, 2008; Bellassen et al., 2008). These political strategiesfor shaping market development have been described as the BrazilianWorkers Party’s ‘tropical Keynesianism’ (Hecht, 2011). From thestandpoint of this paper’s analysis, the distinctiveness of this type ofregulation is that land resource finitudes are being defined politically,for reasons of climate change mitigation. The availability-to-use fini-tude of land as a resource may never have been a purely physicalcharacteristic of land mass, but new climate change parameters nowinform regulations permitting or restricting land availability for agri-cultural use. More generally than anti-deforestation measures, whichare not only driven by climate change mitigation, sustainability ofsome key ‘trilemma’ crops, especially those which are multi-purposefood-energy crops, has emerged as a matter of concern. So, in con-junction with biofuels sustainability certification, both major marketactors and some environmentalist NGOs, such as WWF, have beenpromoting sustainability regulation for the food chain, albeit unevenlyand without universal or uniform standards, exemplified by theRoundtable on Sustainable Soya, or the Better Sugar Initiative(Wilkinson, 2011). Both government policy and social movementsare responding, however partially and marginally, to Brazil’s distinct-ively developing trilemma dynamics. But, to stress again the uneven-ness of trilemma developments and responses to them, sustainabilityfood regulation and roundtables are yet on the horizon for poultryfarming and marginal for cattle production – in spite of their signifi-cance for greenhouse gas emissions.

Summarizing the emergent trilemma and responses to it in Brazil,a number of key features stand out. First, there is uneven developmentof the different horns of the trilemma, as well as the way they conjoinin distinctive ways over time. The dominance of energy security and devel-opment, which saved Brazil $69 billion in oil imports for the duration ofthe ProAlcool programme (De Almeida et al., 2007), became entangledwith controversies over land-use change. Eventually, a strongly environ-mentalist agenda promoted the further development of renewable trans-port energy. Through a particular linkage, mediated by the soybean, theclimate change dimension of its cultivation spilled over into the muchwider issue of greenhouse emissions arising from direct land-use changefor food and normal practices of agricultural cultivation. So soybeans asfood became problematized and subject to sustainability regulation.

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Second, in terms of dynamics, there were sharply contrasting institutedforms of economic organization for biofuels (with a leading role of thestate in politically-driven innovation), and for global food markets (espe-cially under Cardoso, where unregulated markets placed Brazil in a lead-ing position in world trade). Long-term political strategy for developingrenewable transport energy based on sugarcane, spanning dictatorshipand democratization, has placed the country in an enviable leadershiprole in terms of climate change and green road transport energy.Sugarcane is widely recognized as the most environmentally beneficialresource for renewable transport energy (Woods et al., 2009). However,to stress again the relationship between polity, economy and environ-ment, this is a distinctively sub-tropical political option for restructuringeconomies of energy. At the same time, radical changes and growth ofmulti-national involvement, with GM soybean crops, and application ofleading-edge industrial agronomies, restructured and developed a dis-tinctive market-organized economy in Brazil.

Third, Brazil can be seen as a locus for developing sustainability regu-lation, whether in redefining availability-for-use land or in certification ofsome food crops. However, in addressing climate change mitigation, over-all there has been a combination of innovation and regulation, neither onesufficient without the other. Again, the specificities of Brazil need to bestressed, both in terms of the intensifying and the mitigating tendencies oftrilemma development. Land conversions of the scale occurring in Brazilare not an option in Europe, and in the USA evidence is of fairly stable,even declining, areas of cultivation – including, for example, for soybeans(Harvey and Pilgrim, 2011). Finitudes of land play very differently in dif-ferent regions. The Zero Deforestation policy, for the many reasonsalluded to above, is a Brazilian response to a Brazilian trilemma dynamic.

Having said that, similar analyses could be made for the USA orEurope, where very different socio-economic and bio-physical inter-actions, with different carbon signatures, are involved. To indicate justone contrast with respect to the energy-climate change dimension of thesetrilemma interactions, the USA – with a focus on energy security – placesa higher premium on energy autarchy, both in its impressive drive forrenewables and with its search for new national sources of gas and oil,using hydraulic fracturing or horizontal drilling for tight oil in NorthDakota and Texas. In so doing, it locks the USA into fossil fuel depend-ency, intensifying the oppositions between different horns of the tri-lemma. For many European countries, energy autarchy, whether bymeans of renewables or fossil fuels, is not an option.

Finitudes, Transformations and Transitions

The Brazilian example represents an exploratory attempt to develop aneo-Polanyian IEP analysis of the socio-economic and bio-physical





environment interactions central to trilemma dynamics. Challenges of‘peak oil’, food production, land as a resource, and climate changevary importantly from one economy or region to another. To makethe very banal but increasingly significant point, it matters greatly howmuch and where carbon fossil (conventional and unconventional) or landresources are located. There is simply more solar energy available inBrazil than in the temperate North, and that opens possibilities for vari-ation in political-economic trajectories. Moreover, these finitudes are notjust physical quanta located in geographical space. As we have seen withland – the original focus of the Law of Diminishing Returns – how muchland is available for use has been redefined in certain political spaces bysustainability regulations responding, at least in part, to climate changerisks. The 2010 catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil well in theMexican gulf, or similar events in polar regions, may likewise set politicaland economic limits to what oil resources may be available to be ‘used-up’. The contrary dynamic of some innovation pathways (fracking, hori-zontal drilling) opening up resources previously deemed unexploitablemay themselves be subject to regulatory limitations of varying rigourin different political contexts. Although the International EnergyAgency has significantly revised its view of US energy supply for tri-lemma dynamics (IEA, 2011–12, 2013), the critical issue is the US polit-ical priority of energy security over climate change in determiningwhether and how much of this resource is exploited. So, again, the criticalinteraction is between the economy and environmental resources within apolitical space.

Illustrated by the example of Brazil, a similar argument also applies tofood security, and the major trilemma challenge of feeding a globalpopulation expected to plateau at approximately 9 billion. Although inpurely bio-physical terms, the energy inputs required to produce a givenquantity of food are much lower in sub-tropical rain-fed zones (reducingclimate change impacts), how and where such food is grown, what landsare converted to what uses, becomes critically important, and increas-ingly subject to politically strategic responses to climate change. Thefinitude of land in terms of availability for use is becoming – howevertardily and inadequately – politically redefined in terms of what use, whatagronomies, rather than use in the abstract. The choice between slash-and-burn and sustainable intensification – to counterpose two extremes –is a political as much as a technological one, as is evident already fromthe political regulations in different regions for the use of GM technol-ogies. Certain lands are available for certain uses (GM soya, cotton,corn, etc.) in some regions, not in others.

The argument is not that finitudes are politically constructed, let alonediscursively construed. There are natural ‘givens’ open to some politicalcircumscription in varied triangular relations of polity-economy-naturein different material environments. The argument in this paper is

Harvey 21




nonetheless that this conceptualization of resource finitudes significantlychanges perspectives on limits to growth by placing them within thevaried dynamics of these triangular relations as they develop in differentregions and nations across the globe. The dynamics are not uniform andglobal, however much the planet and its atmosphere are shared by theworld’s peoples. Although gases and world demand for oil may aggre-gate, it is critically important to disaggregate the dynamics that generatethem.

In closing, the neo-Polanyian approach illustrated here is far fromfully developed in relation to the theoretical challenge for understandinginteractions between political economies and natural environments. Toemphasize this incompleteness, it is useful to point to some key missingdimensions yet to be addressed. First, the analysis needs to address issuesof resource depletion in a more fundamentally comparative way, in termsof the located finitudes of resources and the significance of the materialrootedness of economies in their natural environments. Second, in aban-doning anthropogenic in favour of sociogenic climate change, the IEPframework needs to address the developing dynamisms which producethe markedly varied carbon signatures of different nations and regions.The very different political challenges for climate change mitigation inBrazil, the US, Europe, China, India, Africa . . . are embedded in thesecontrasting polity-economy-nature relational spaces and dynamisms.The analysis needs to be complemented by natural scientific analysis ofthe impacts of these different trajectories as they develop. Third, theBrazilian case is marked by a radical political change of regime, and ofpolitics within a democratic regime. The different political institutionsand politics in the USA, Europe, and China, for example, themselvesmay condition and constrain radical transitions to sustainability, in termsof lock-in or entrapment, in ways that have not been analysed here.Fourth, emergent trilemmas bring to the forefront the nexus of intercon-nections between food, land, energy and climate change, and the inter-dependent and antagonistic forces of sustainability transformations anddoomed path dependencies. The choice is not to feed the 9 billion ordevelop renewable energy, to mitigate climate change or develop newdirections of economic development. To explore these developments,analysis needs to be undertaken at the geopolitical level, incorporatinginternational trade and supranational political regulation and strategicresponses to trilemma dynamics. And this list of further dimensions iscertainly itself incomplete.

Notes

1. There has been a controversy suggesting that coal was adopted in circum-stances of a crisis of exhaustion of timber supplies (Nef, 1932), but the current





view is that coal-use developed because in England in particular it was acheaper and more efficient energy resource for many purposes, initiallyindeed for domestic heating (Thomas, 1986; Allen, 2009).

2. Pomeranz calculated that already by 1830 the colonized land producing sugarto replace calories and cotton to replace wool equated to 30 million ghostacres that should be included in the agricultural land count for Englandalone. Ghost acres for England effectively nearly doubled the nation’s landresources by that time (Pomerantz, 2000: 275–6). It should be noted that thiscalculation excludes consideration of the later use of nitrogen fertilizers – firstguano, and later industrially produced nitrogen phosphates.

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Mark Harvey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex andDirector of the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology andInnovation (CRESI). His books include Exploring the Tomato (2002;with Huw Beynon and Steve Quilley), Economies of Knowledge (2007;with Andrew McMeekin), Karl Polanyi: New Perspectives on the Place ofthe Economy in Society (2007; co-edited with Ronnie Ramlogan and SallyRandles) and Markets, Rules and Institutions of Exchange (2010).

This article is part of the Special Issue on Energy & Society, edited by

David Tyfield and John Urry.



http://cip.cornell.edu/biofuels/

http://cip.cornell.edu/biofuels/

http://theoryculturesociety.org/tcs-31-5-sep-2014/


the food-energy-climate change trilemma: toward a socio-economic analysis

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