Revisiting power and powerlessness: Speculating West Virginia’s energy future and the externalities of the socioecologial fix

China is positioning itself, simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically, as a global leader in both renewable energy research, development, and deployment, and fossil fuel investment, exploration, and consumption. The newly merged mega-company, China Energy Investment Corp., has just agreed to invest an unprecedented $83.7 billion into shale gas, power, and chemical projects in West Virginia. This decision comes after a visit to China by the United States’ President Trump, during which he secured commitments for over $250 billion in energy investments across the U.S. This paper traces some of the historic processes that have contributed to this current conjuncture in West Virginia’s recent history, in part by revisiting Gaventa’s (1982) examination of power and powerlessness in an Appalachian coal community.

In many ways, this deal is just the latest instance of a long-standing pattern in which global capital invested in fossil fuel extraction moves to further exploit and dispossess those who live in the extraction area. In other ways, though, the current conjuncture is distinct, marked by a combination of populist and authoritarian politics that, in the U.S., have touted false promises to ‘bring back coal’ and rejuvenate a struggling local economy and in China have led an authoritarian state to maintain economic growth for the nation at all costs. While investment and dispossession in Appalachia have long been international in scope, the sheer scale of this investment, as well as its particular political-historical context, thus make this case unique. Further, this paper seeks to position these historical arguments within the context of what McCarthy (2015) has suggested may be a potential ‘socioecological fix’ to climatically precarious capitalist development, and to theorise the ways in which the energetic needs of a socioecological fix in the Chinese context, in which large-scale renewables are being implemented at an unprecedented rate, are externalized into developing and emerging peripheries. While any socioecological fix may turn on “appropriating and commodifying new aspects of the biophysical world on unprecedented scales” (McCarthy, 2015: 2496), this paper aims to explore the ways in which these large-scale shifts to renewables in some places articulate with and exacerbate long-standing reliance on fossil fuel extraction and oppression in others.

This paper was presented at the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) 2018 Conference: "Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World"