Anna Åberg

Natural Gas in Cold War Europe: The Making of a Critical Infrastructure

On January 1, 2006, Russian gas company Gazprom hastily decided to interrupt its delivery of natural gas to neighboring Ukraine. During a few dramatic days the Russian move raised concerns in large parts of Europe, since the interruption to Ukraine also had a direct effect on the gas supply to countries located further downstream the same pipeline. On January 2, gas companies in Hungary Slovakia, and Austria reported a drastic drop in pressure — at a time of peak winter demand for natural gas. The crisis threatened the steady supply of electricity and heat to a vast number of industrial enterprises, power plants, hospitals, schools, households, and other gas users.

Introduction to Special Issue on Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives

Over the past decade, environmental themes, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, have occupied significant space in narratives that circulate through legacy media as well as other popular channels such as online and mobile platforms, museums, films and literature. Environmental issues are de facto entangled with the politics and discourses of globalization, and such narratives are increasingly networked, connected and homogenized, multiplied and diversified. Popular narratives constitute powerful tools that shape the sociocultural context of environmental change, influence policymaking and inform public understanding to considerable degrees. Narratives portraying future scenarios and environmental transformations are used and remediated through a multitude of popular communication venues. This special collection of articles explores various constructions of the environment and environmental change mediated through virtual sites and thematic constructions in different popular venues, providing an account of how we imagine and reproduce ideas of the environment. We take popular communication here to include the entire “grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of everyday life” (Burkart & Christensen, 2013, p. 3) expressed in literature, media, film, social movements and other performances and speech acts. Several cross-cutting lenses are instrumental in seeking to grasp the complexities of how environmental themes travel through popular sites. A space-specific approach can help reveal the significance of space in considering environmental imaginaries. The actual and virtual sites and locales (e.g. museums, electronic media space, literature, film, music, archives, etc.) where narrative interventions materialize constitute spaces of narrativity. Narrated space (such as “the ocean” in a broad, and “the Arctic” or “the Ozone layer” in specific senses) signifies the site of environmental transformation. In the case of cinema, for example, this “territorial ontology that underlies the world of any film” (Ivakhev, 2013) emerges as a result of complex, multi-actor production choices and the viewers’ own implicit understandings and perception, while appearing as “given”. Due to both the networked nature of planetary scales (e.g. the Great Barrier Reef and the Arctic both being local/ized sites of global significance and human and non-human flows) and transmedial flows in today’s convergent media landscapes, a scalar conception that emphasizes the notion of scalar transcendence (Christensen, 2013) helps to further think of the actual-virtual sites and (re)mediated reach of environmental narratives and framings. The contributions to this special collection explore different narrative spaces and scales in popular science writing, zombie fiction, popular music, social media, and news media.

Looking for perspectives! EU energy policy in context

Transitioning to less carbon-intensive energy systems involves making difficult choices and priorities. This chapter imagines three individuals who are affected in different ways by EU energy policy. Their fictional stories illustrate that energy policies are embedded in social, historical and cultural practices and need to take a broader perspective than either technological fixes or a narrowly defined goal of low or zero carbon emissions to be fair and effective. We argue that this is often not reflected in the EUs energy policy frameworks, and use the Energy Roadmap 2050 to demonstrate our point. Contrary to the impression given by the roadmap, a narrow technocratic empirical basis for a policy is not enough to define and solve an energy problem. Energy issues are societal problems and need to be addressed as such.