Air in the Time of Oil: Regulatory Arbitrage and Urban Life in Africa

• In Event: Finitude in Other Terms: Uncommoning Extinction - II

Abstract

African minerals fuel industrialized life across the globe, while the toxic residues of their extraction plague communities throughout the continent. The Niger delta, one of the world’s most significant sources of petroleum, has harbored more than 7,000 oil spills. Converted into fuel and poured into gasoline tanks, oil from the delta generates additional Anthropocenic signatures – particularly in dense urban conglomerations, where residents spend hours in fearsome traffic jams, inhaling the fumes emitted by mopeds, taxis and buses. Current estimates put the annual premature death-rate attributable to outdoor pollution in African cities at 250,000 lives, up 36% from 1990. Yet African cities rarely appear in global pollution imaginaries. Until recently, this absence obscured a startling fact: the diesel fumes emitted by engines in Accra, Bamako or Dakar contain substantially higher proportions of deadly pollutants than those in the Global North. The high contaminant content results from a deliberate strategy on the part of commodity traders, who take advantage of thin regulations to maximize their profits by selling to African consumers fuel stock blends that are outlawed in Europe and North America. Such “regulatory arbitrage” places African cities at the heart of the Anthropocene. How have African urban residents responded?

Author

• Gabrielle Hecht, Stanford University