As Shown on the Graph: How Graphs Shape Oil Futures

• In Event: Energy Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper explores the graphical representation of oil as a “pedagogical technology” that has become the dominant visual mode for understanding oil and teaching the public about the future of carbon capitalism. From the growth of energy futures forecasting and the circulation of M. King Hubbert’s “peak oil” bell curve during the 1970s energy crisis, to the post 9/11 revival of peak oil and the recent ascendency of an “Energy Revolution” narrative, graphs have circulated as the primary form for representing the history and future of oil in the U.S. and global economies. Their popularity is rooted in their simplicity: graphs enable analysts to draw a line through the complexities of oil accounting to create arresting representations of the oil future. They are an efficient way to visualize a commodity with an elusive materiality that originates underground and spends most of its life in pipelines, refineries, and gas tanks before dissipating into the atmosphere. Graphs are not, however, the neutral representations of the “facts” about oil that they are often taken to be.

I argue in this paper that the visual rhetoric of oil graphs has both reflected and shaped oil discourse in the United States in powerful ways. Firstly, graphs are the product of the social and political assumptions about the future that inform the calculations that determine the course of their lines. Yet, through their minimalist form and associations with science, graphs lend an air of objectivity to political arguments, both masking and naturalizing the assumptions that inform them. Second, the simplicity of the graphic form has translated into their efficient circulation, which has tended to privilege quantitative considerations in oil futures discourse over social and political issues. Finally, by representing oil reserves, production, or consumption as a line of change over time, the temporal orientation of oil graphs is often weighted towards the past or the future and a binary of abundance and scarcity. This inherent temporality magnifies the dynamic of catastrophe and exuberance that Frederick Buell has noted in the cultural representation of oil.

It is important to critique the graphic forms that we rely on to chart the future of oil, in part because they offer a partial view of oil that is inimical the kind of energy transition that the reality of climate change requires. Oil graphs are a technocratic form that reduces to the question of oil to quantitative questions: how much is left, how long will it last, and how can we make more energy? Moreover, their temporality tends to elide the possibilities for change in the present by focusing on the quantitative possibilities of the future. By coming to understand how graphs shape our understanding of oil as an abstract, technocratic problem, we can begin to think about alternative ways to represent oil that might be amendable to a more sustainable future, irrespective of how much is left in the ground.

Author

• Caleb Wellum, University of Toronto, Canada