Carl Schmidt

This essay criticizes the shortsighted idea of limitlessness that is so deeply ingrained in western culture and proposes the idea that a nomos of energy should be grounded in transboundary ecological thinking. High-energy cultures, and especially petrocultures, typically assume that any source available ought to be eventually harvested and used. But this exploitation of natural resources (or what others may call “non-human entities/beings”) does not necessarily or solely depend on the fulfillment of basic needs. Quite often, extractivism is justified simply because such resources are available for human use, independently of some praiseworthy goal or significant purpose. In fact, sometimes new needs are created ad hoc to consume those resources, as it is indicated for example by the so-called “shale revolution” in the United States (i.e. because of the invention of fracking, there is a need for more pipelines to export fossil fuels abroad. The former aim of policy and its reference boundary, “energy security”, is accordingly replaced by the notion of “energy dominance”). I suggest that the notion of limit (from Lat. limes, ‘boundary, frontier, threshold’) is particularly useful to think about the dynamics of socio-spatial order pertaining to the energy transition. I argue that the effort to re-imagine the present and future energy transitions should include a reflection on the nomos of energy that accounts for ecological limits and thresholds. If we agree, with political theorist Carl Schmitt that the nomos of the land can be defined in terms of appropriation, distribution and production, we can also affirm that the nomos of energy relates to similar dimensions. Although the nomos of the earth and that of energy are interconnected, both ultimately depend on ecological boundaries that modern high-energy civilizations are continuously overshooting. But what happens when energy is harvested on the land as well as in the sea (off-shore wind, off-shore drilling, tidal energy)? What occurs to the political dimension of the nomos when frontiers are crossed and the interconnectedness of the electric grid and the internet constitute – materially as well as symbolically – a shared transboundary infrastructure? Because the future energy transitions will have to be just and ecologically sustainable, they will need to avoid scarcity, inequality and injustice toward both human and non-human beings at a transboundary level and without sacrificing national, cultural, tribal or linguistic identities. But here is where Schmitt’s narrow geopolitical thinking falls short and needs to be updated. Instead of a Großraum, I suggest that the new nomos of energy will be grounded in ecological thinking through the design and implementation of an energy transition that is responsible toward the non-human world and respectful of the limits of the ecosystems, not those of the frontiers.