The Coal Evangelists

• In Event: Frameworks for Speculation: Science, Economy, and the Uncertain Environment

Abstract

In the early 1980s, the end of oil was nigh. Energy forecasters believed that OPEC and other oil-exporting countries were rapidly approaching a limit in their production capacities, at which point, demand would exceed production and the oil would simply stop flowing. If the world wanted to ensure continued economic growth, it would need to find alternatives to oil.

In response, American scientists and government officials launched an aggressive campaign to convince the non-Communist world to rapidly transition away from oil and onto coal (which, not coincidentally, the US happened to have in abundance). At the heart of this campaign was the Energy Supply Planning Model (ESPM). An influential model used by both government and industry groups, the ESPM was developed by the Bechtel Corporation, the US-based engineering and construction mega-firm that had built much of the world’s energy infrastructure—from petroleum pipelines and oil refineries to nuclear power stations and hydroelectric dams. Using Bechtel’s in-house data on past engineering contracts, the ESPM modeled the massive federal and international investments—on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars—that would be required to build out the coal-based infrastructures and international supply chain routes and successfully restructure the world’s economies toward coal.

This paper situates the ESPM in the context of larger Cold War-era uncertainties about the future of oil. It shows how, in the ESPM, ideological assumptions about the economic growth imperative, anti-colonial resource nationalism, and the liberal international economic order collided. The paper also uses the history of this transition to coal campaign to consider how policymakers and scientists grappled with the tension between the exigencies of the looming oil crisis and the need to stave off catastrophic global warming.

Author

• Leah Aronowsky, Columbia University