Frédéric Simon, “‘Freedom Gas’: US Opens LNG Floodgates to Europe,” EURACTIV, May 2, 2019 →.
One notable, albeit decidedly belated, exception is found in Maria Haensch, “Green Group Challenges Nord Stream 2 Permit in Germany,” Montel News, March 5, 2020 →. It's also curious that most of the available ecological criticism of Nord Stream 2 focuses mostly on the damage done by the pipeline to the Baltic seabed, rather than the problem of increased emissions as a result of the project.
See, for example the Rethink Nord Stream 2 Campaign →.
See, for instance, this document by Rethink Nord Stream 2 →.
In December 2019, a contract on gas transit between Russia and Ukraine was extended for five more years, which helped to avoid a full-blown “gas war” of the kind that happened in 2009, but still looks more like an attempt to extend the agony. See →.
The fact that a certain Ukrainian natural gas company, of all things that Trump messed with, found itself at the epicenter of the recent impeachment proceedings, speaks volumes of the unprecedented political importance of post-Soviet carbon infrastructure.
See →.
Arthur Nelson, “’Extreme’ Fossil Fuel Investment Have Surged Under Donald Trump, Report Reveals,” The Guardian, March 28, 2018 →.
See, for instance, David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (January 2002). Available at →.
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2011), 5.
Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 6.
See →.
In the original Russian: “одушевление оборудования.”
As quoted in the film Plenyat' Zadachey Nebyvaloy (Kievnauchfilm, 1982).
Victor Glushkov, “Pro ekonomicheskuyu kibernetiku. Doklad na zasedanii Prezidiuma AN USSR” (About economic cybernetics: Report at a meeting of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR), sound recording.
Oxana Timofeeva, “Ultra-Black: Towards a Materialist Theory of Oil,” e-flux journal, no. 84 (September 2017) →.
Alexander Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology, trans. George Gorelk (Intersystems Publications, 1980), 1. Thank you to David Muñoz Alcantara for inadvertently drawing my attention to this translational misunderstanding.
An essay refuting Reed’s hypothesis was cowritten by none other than Viktor Glushkov’s daughter, Vera Glushkova: V. D. Zakhmatov, V. V. Glushkova, and O. A. Kryazhich, “Vzryv, kotorogo … ne bylo!” (An explosion that … wasn’t!) →.
Ekaterina Labetskaya, Fedor Lukyanov, Alexey Slobodin, and Yuri Shpakov, “Truba v beskonechnost' Khronika samoy bol'shoy sdelki v rossiysko-germanskoy istorii” (Pipe to infinity: A chronicle of the largest deal in Russian-German history) →.
Labetskaya, Lukyanov, Slobodin, and Shpakov, “Truba v beskonechnost.'”
Labetskaya, Lukyanov, Slobodin, and Shpakov, “Truba v beskonechnost,’” emphasis mine.
When discussing carbon infrastructure, Aleksander Etkind claims that during the Cold War gas was as essential to state socialism as oil was to capitalism. Since it was much harder to stockpile gas than oil, gas was transported based on long-term guaranteed contracts, which, according to Etkind, made it an ideal resource for the planned economy. Furthermore, he writes that liquefied gas changed the political economy of gas: it could now be stored and sold according to need—that is, gas became a market commodity. Aleksander Etkind, Priroda zla: Syrie i gosudarstvo (Evil nature: Raw materials and the state) (Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye, 2019).
In the context of Russian political economy, data is quite literally the new gas: the superprofits acquired through fossil fuel exports make it possible for the Russian state to fund its massive disinformation campaigns around the globe, as well as high-profile hacking operations, troll armies, and proxy militias. Gas is exported to foreign consumers whose payments are then converted into malicious data, unleashed upon those consumers themselves.
Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Cybernetic Revolutions and Surplus Populations,” lecture delivered at The School of Kyiv, October 25, 2015, Q&A.
See →.