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Factualities of carbon data and imaginaries of oil in Stavanger, Norway

Fri, October 8, 8:00 to 9:30am EDT (8:00 to 9:30am EDT), 4S 2021 Virtual, 4

Abstract

From climate models to carbon budgets and carbon footprints, carbon data figures increasingly as a material in social and political life. This paper explores the role of carbon data in local understandings of Norwegian oil and gas production and carbon data’s position in negotiations over low-carbon futures.

The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the Norwegian oil-capital Stavanger among young climate activists and people working in the oil and gas sector. Stavanger is an especially interesting case: inhabitants are acutely aware of the destructive consequences of the oil and gas industry for the global climate, while oil and gas make up the foundation of the local labor market and the finances of the national welfare state. Furthermore, in the relatively small city of Stavanger, activists and industry people often share social ties of friendship or family.

The paper shows how carbon data is emically constructed as a fact that can be mobilized in a fact- and datacentric debate over the future of the oil industry. In conversation with scholarship on sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015; McNeil et al. 2017) the paper argues that differing imaginaries of oil play into how youth and industry people respectively understand, interpret and use carbon data as fact. Through an engagement with Michelle Murphy’s (2006) work on regimes of perceptibility the paper puts these findings in conversation with questions about the different types of knowledge that are at stake when living with the local multiplicity of the climate crisis in an oil city.

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