Market Cities, People Cities by Kevin T. Smiley & Michael Oluf Emerson

Author:Kevin T. Smiley & Michael Oluf Emerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026000 Social Science / Sociology / General
Publisher: New York University Press

Energy Fortunes

Energy is at the core of the environment. Houston and Copenhagen offer two critical lessons in how cities’ economic growth can be tied to the extraction of natural resources for human consumption. Both cities exist, and are even the subjects of a book such as this one, because of energy. The historical similarities turn into contemporary contrasts.

As we saw in chapter 1, Houston has been tied to oil since oil was struck in Texas at the dawn of the twentieth century. Oil took off in Houston when federal funds helped to build the Houston Ship Channel in the 1910s.5 It helped the city weather the Great Depression and the Great Recession, and fueled a boom in population that has increased sixteen-fold in a century. Even though reorganization reoriented the economy partly in the 1980s thanks to the oil bust of that decade, Houston remains inextricably tied to all things oil and gas.

Today, this means that Houston is the oil capital of the world. It is home to the world’s largest petrochemical facility (ExxonMobil’s refinery in Baytown), the world’s largest pipeline company (Kinder Morgan), and the world’s largest oil fields services company (Schlumberger). Estimates suggest that half of the jobs in Houston are tied to the oil industry.6 The economy is deeply tied to extractive industries in Houston. This fact imprints anything related to the environment in Houston.

Copenhagen has a more complicated history with energy, one that can be more or less divided into three parts. It should be noted that Copenhagen history and Danish history are closely integrated here. Before the early 1970s, Denmark did little to develop its natural resources and therefore was hit badly by the global oil crisis of 1973.7 In response to this, phase two meant the exploitation of natural resources, especially rich oil reserves in the North Sea. It included coal power plants, and, later, using natural gas for energy throughout the country. The country had used 92 percent of its energy from imported oil in 1972, but by 1997 Denmark had become a net energy exporter, a remarkably large change in just a quarter century.8 It would remain an exporter until 2013. Some of the country’s biggest companies remain tied to these industries, such as the largest, Maersk, a shipping specialist headquartered in Copenhagen. The third phase involved a green transition. Renewable energy sources were developed slowly, increasing with the heightened salience of global climate change beginning in the 1990s. Wind power now accounts for 42 percent of electric power in the country.9 The goal is to be using 100 percent renewable energy in Denmark in 2050, an ambitious plan exceeded only by Copenhagen’s 2025 carbon neutral plan.10

The cumulative effect of these three phases produces a curious energy history. Copenhagen, and Denmark generally, was not historically linked to fossil fuel energy sources. But, for about a quarter century from the 1980s until very recently, fossil fuels powered the entire country, gave rise to enormous wealth, and created a huge number of contradictions for a place linked as one of the world’s greenest.

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