William Boyd

Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature

Existing literature suggests that food, fiber, and raw material sectors differ from manufacturing in significant ways. However, there is no analytical basis for engaging the particular challenges of nature-centered production, and thus the distinct ways that industrialization proceeds in extractive and cultivation-based industries. This article presents a framework for analyzing the difference that nature makes in these industries. Nature is seen as a set of obstacles, opportunities, and surprises that firms confront in their attempts to subordinate biophysical properties and processes to industrial production. Drawing an analogy from Marxian labor theory, we contrast the formal and real subsumption of nature to highlight the distinct ways in which biological systems - in marked contrast to extractive sectors - are industrialized and may be made to operate as productive forces in and of themselves. These concepts differentiate analytically between biologically based and nonbiologically based industries, building on theoretical and historical distinctions between extraction and cultivation.

Ways of Seeing in Environmental Law: How Deforestation Became an Object of Climate Governance

Few areas of law are as deeply implicated with science and technology as environmental law, yet we have only a cursory understanding of how science and technology shape the field. Environmental law, it seems, has lost sight of the constitutive role that science and technology play in fashioning the problems that it targets for regulation. Too often, the study and practice of environmental law and governance take the object of governance - be it climate change, water pollution, biodiversity, or deforestation - as self-evident, natural, and fully-formed without recognizing the significant scientific and technological investments that go into making such objects and the manner in which such investments shape the possibilities for response. This Article seeks to broaden environmental law’s field of vision, replacing the tendency to naturalize environmental problems with an exploration of how particular scientific and technological knowledge practices make environmental problems into coherent objects of governance. Such knowledge practices, or ways of seeing, are instrumental in shaping regulatory possibilities and must be interrogated directly as key constituents of particular forms of governance. The argument is developed through a case study of how tropical deforestation, which accounts for some 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions but which was expressly excluded from the Kyoto Protocol, has recently become a viable object of climate governance, demonstrating the fundamental importance of conceptual advances in carbon cycle research, the synoptic view of global land cover change made possible by remote sensing, and new carbon accounting techniques in rendering the problem comprehensible for climate policy. Building on the case study, this Article identifies and elaborates on three general ways of seeing - kind-making, calculability, and equivalence - that operate through particular scientific and technical practices to shape and inform the substance of environmental law, with specific attention to the implications of the overall approach for a comprehensive theory of the field.

Responding to climate change and the global land crisis: REDD+, market transformation and low-emissions rural development

Climate change and rapidly escalating global demand for food, fuel, fibre and feed present seemingly contradictory challenges to humanity. Can greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land-use, more than one-fourth of the global total, decline as growth in land-based production accelerates? This review examines the status of two major international initiatives that are designed to address different aspects of this challenge. REDD+ is an emerging policy framework for providing incentives to tropical nations and states that reduce their GHG emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Market transformation, best represented by agricultural commodity roundtables, seeks to exclude unsustainable farmers from commodity markets through international social and environmental standards for farmers and processors. These global initiatives could potentially become synergistically integrated through (i) a shared approach for measuring and favouring high environmental and social performance of land use across entire jurisdictions and (ii) stronger links with the domestic policies, finance and laws in the jurisdictions where agricultural expansion is moving into forests. To achieve scale, the principles of REDD+ and sustainable farming systems must be embedded in domestic low-emission rural development models capable of garnering support across multiple constituencies. We illustrate this potential with the case of Mato Grosso State in the Brazilian Amazon.

More food, more forests, fewer emissions, better livelihoods: linking REDD+, sustainable supply chains and domestic policy in Brazil, Indonesia and Colombia

The triple, intertwined challenges of climate change, the conversion of tropical forests to crop lands and grazing pastures, and the shortage of new arable land demand urgent solutions. The main approaches for increasing food production while sparing forests and lowering carbon emissions include sustainable supply chain initiatives, domestic policies and finance, and REDD+. These approaches are advancing largely in isolation, separated by different scales of intervention, performance metrics and levers for shaping land user behavior. As a result of this disconnect, farmers are receiving few, if any, positive incentives to forgo legal forest clearing and to invest in more sustainable production systems. These three approaches could become mutually reinforcing through integrated, performance-based incentive systems operating across regions and scales, linked through a shared metric of jurisdiction-wide performance introduced here as the Jurisdictional Performance System.

Considering technology within the UN climate change negotiations

The treatment of technology within the UNFCCC negotiation process has moved from a relatively marginal subject to one of central importance, and is likely to be critical to ensuring a successful outcome at COP15. The development, deployment and transfer of low-carbon technologies, and overcoming related investment challenges, is, however, an issue considerably wider than the remit and scope of the UNFCCC. Hence there is a need to understand how cooperative action on technology under the Convention can be most effective. The existing UNFCCC technology framework would need to be significantly refined and augmented in order to appropriately address the scale and pace of the low-carbon technology implementation challenge. This paper considers the contours of an enhanced technology framework that could contribute to a future climate change agreement. In doing so, it synthesises aspects of the relevant literature and creates a link to the decision-making process of the UNFCCC. Disclaimer: The content and views expressed in this paper are not attributable to national or organisational positions in the climate negotiations or elsewhere. All of the authors contributed in their personal capacities. Corresponding Author: Morgan Bazilian, 29-31 Adelaide Rd., Dublin 02, Ireland; Phone: +353 1 678 2026; E-mail: Morgan.Bazilian@dcenr.gov.ie

Genealogies of Risk: Searching for Safety, 1930s-1970s

Health, safety, and environmental regulation in the United States are saturated with risk thinking. It was not always so, and it may not be so in the future. But today, the formal, quantitative approach to risk provides much of the basis for regulation in these fields, a development that seems quite natural, even necessary. This particular approach, while it drew on conceptual and technical developments that had been underway for decades, achieved prominence during a relatively short timeframe; roughly, between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s — a time of hard looks and regulatory reform. Prior to this time, formal conceptions of risk were rarely invoked in the effort to regulate the increasingly complex set of hazards associated with industrial society and quantitative risk assessment was considered too uncertain to serve as a basis for regulatory decision making. With few exceptions, safety, hazard, and endangerment provided the dominant framings, drawing on different conceptual and normative tendencies and leading to different regulatory outcomes. This Article investigates the emergence and development of formal approaches to risk in health, safety, and environmental law during the twentieth century. It focuses specifically on the concepts, tools, and practices that have underwritten risk thinking in these fields, developing a perspective on health, safety, and environmental regulation that seeks to historicize risk and situate the contemporary debate regarding the merits of risk versus precaution in its proper historical context. In doing so, the Article demonstrates how both approaches struggled to address the much more vast and complicated world of potential environmental harm brought into view as a result of substantial advances in analytical techniques during the 1960s and early 1970s, thereby revealing the contours of a more fundamental clash over environmental law’s distinctive problem of knowledge. The Article covers the formative period from the New Deal through the 1970s, showing how efforts to operationalize safety in the middle decades of the twentieth century led to many of the foundational concepts and techniques that would structure risk thinking in subsequent decades, highlighting the critical role of analytical advances in pushing toward a re-definition of safety as acceptable risk and a corresponding move toward quantitative risk assessment, and revealing how earlier precautionary impulses were ultimately subsumed under an emerging administrative law of risk.

On the Themed Collection, “The Formal and Real Subsumption of Nature”

The title of our (with Rachel Schurman) original Society & Natural Resources article, “Industrial Dyanamics and the Problem of Nature” (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001), signaled our overriding interest at the time in the industrialization of nature. In that article, we developed an analytical framework to investigate the ways in which the biophysical properties and processes of “nonhuman nature” are harnessed and subsumed to different logics of industrial production. We were less interested in exploring processes of commodification and the extension of markets per se, topics that were a focus of scholarly attention at the time and that continue to animate important work on so-called neoliberal natures (see, e.g., Heynen et al. 2007). Rather, we focused on production (the “hidden abode”) and the particular industrial dynamics that emerged out of the ways in which capital takes hold of and circulates through nonhuman nature. We recognized then, as we do now, that “every industry is ultimately ‘nature-based’” (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001, 567), but have never found that truism to be particularly useful as a point of departure for analysis. Instead we posited that there is something specific about those sectors in which firms are involved in a direct and immediate way in the appropriation and transformation of nonhuman nature. And we tried to identify general tendencies at work in those sectors where nature is confronted as a more-or-less given source of raw materials (i.e., formal subsumption) versus those where nature is (re)made to work harder, faster, and better (i.e., real subsumption). We recognize the limits of this framework as the basis for any sort of general theory of socioecological transformation; we never intended it to serve that function. Our objective was to theorize some of the ways in which capital seeks to take hold of nature and subordinate it to the dictates of industrial production. Our characterization of nature as “obstacle, opportunity, and surprise” in the original article (Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001, 560) was intended to capture the dynamics of this confrontation by avoiding an overemphasis on constraints or obstacles while giving nature a genuine role in the production process. To be sure, our approach was “firmcentric,” and several of the interventions in this special issue have reminded us of the diversity of ways in which nature enables specific strategies of capital accumulation, including in response to regulatory interventions (see, e.g., Cooper in this issue). But we

Deforestation and Emerging Greenhouse Gas Compliance Regimes: Toward a Global Environmental Law of Forests, Carbon, and Climate Governance

This chapter reviews the current status of and prospects for efforts to include emissions from deforestation (and international forest carbon activities in general) in emerging greenhouse gas compliance regimes at the international level; future iterations of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS); and in the United States. Three lessons emerge from this survey. First, in contrast to international climate policy debates during the 1990s and the early 2000s, deforestation has clearly emerged as a viable object of climate governance. Second, the policy architecture that is taking shape in the effort to bring reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) into climate governance is decidedly pluralistic, with important developments occurring at multiple levels and across multiple jurisdictions, illustrating the development of a “global environmental law” of forests, carbon, and climate governance. Third, the United States (at both national and sub-national levels) has emerged as an important driver of efforts to construct a workable governance structure for compliance-grade REDD programs by signaling that emerging GHG compliance systems in the U.S. (most notably, California) could include provisions recognizing REDD activities in tropical forest jurisdictions around the world.

Review of Sector and Regional Trends in U.S. Electricity Markets. Focus on Natural Gas. Natural Gas and the Evolving U.S. Power Sector Monograph Series. Number 1 of 3

This study explores dynamics related to natural gas use at the national, sectoral, and regional levels, with an emphasis on the power sector. It relies on a data set from SNL Financial to analyze recent trends in the U.S. power sector at the regional level. The research aims to provide decision and policy makers with objective and credible information, data, and analysis that informs their discussions of a rapidly changing energy system landscape. This study also summarizes regional changes in natural gas demand within the power sector. The transition from coal to natural gas is occurring rapidly along the entire eastern portion of the country, but is relatively stagnant in the central and western regions. This uneven shift is occurring due to differences in fuel price costs, renewable energy targets, infrastructure constraints, historical approach to regulation, and other factors across states.

Controlling Methane Emissions in the Natural Gas Sector. A Review of Federal and State Regulatory Frameworks Governing Production, Gathering, Processing, Transmission, and Distribution

This report provides an overview of the regulatory frameworks governing natural gas supply chain infrastructure siting, construction, operation, and maintenance. Information was drawn from a number of sources, including published analyses, government reports, in addition to relevant statutes, court decisions and regulatory language, as needed. The scope includes all onshore facilities that contribute to methane emissions from the natural gas sector, focusing on three areas of state and federal regulations: (1) natural gas pipeline infrastructure siting and transportation service (including gathering, transmission, and distribution pipelines), (2) natural gas pipeline safety, and (3) air emissions associated with the natural gas supply chain. In addition, the report identifies the incentives under current regulatory frameworks to invest in measures to reduce leakage, as well as the barriers facing investment in infrastructure improvement to reduce leakage. Policy recommendations regarding how federal or state authorities could regulate methane emissions are not provided; rather, existing frameworks are identified and some of the options for modifying existing regulations or adopting new regulations to reduce methane leakage are discussed.