Crude Reality
Crude Reality

Author: Brian C. Black

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-09-30

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1538142481

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This concise, accessible introduction to the history of oil tells the story of how petroleum has shaped human life since it was first discovered oozing inconspicuously from the soil. For a century, human dependence on petroleum caused little discomfort as we enjoyed the heyday of cheap crude—a glorious episode of energy gluttony that was destined to end. Today, we see the disastrous results in environmental degradation, political instability, and world economic disparity in the waning years of a petroleum-powered civilization—lessons rooted in the finite nature of oil. Considering the nature of oil itself as well as humans’ remarkable relationship with it, Brian C. Black spotlights our modern conundrum and then explores the challenges of our future without oil. It is this essential context, he argues, that will prepare us for our energy transition. Bringing his global perspective and wide-ranging technical knowledge, Black has written an essential contribution to environmental history and the rapidly emerging field of energy history in this sweeping, forward-looking survey.

Crude Reality
Crude Reality

Author: Brian C. Black

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2012-03-22

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1442216115

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This concise, accessible introduction to the history of oil tells the story of how petroleum shaped human life since it was first discovered leaking inconspicuously from the soil. Leading environmental history specialist Brian C. Black connects the subsequent exploitation of petroleum to patterns in world history while tracing the intricate links between energy and people after 1850. Today, we see the disastrous results of environmental degradation, political instability, and world economic disparity in the waning years of a petroleum-powered civilization—lessons rooted in the finite nature of oil. This “crude reality” becomes tragic when we measure our overwhelming reliance on this geological ooze. Black brings to this book a global perspective and a wide-ranging technical knowledge presented specifically for general readers, making its scope much broader than any of the other surveys. Written by a major scholar on the history of petroleum, it is an essential contribution to environmental history and the rapidly emerging field of energy history.

The Oil Wars Myth
The Oil Wars Myth

Author: Emily L. Meierding

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1501748947

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Do countries fight wars for oil? Given the resource's exceptional military and economic importance, most people assume that states will do anything to obtain it. Challenging this conventional wisdom, The Oil Wars Myth reveals that countries do not launch major conflicts to acquire petroleum resources. Emily Meierding argues that the costs of foreign invasion, territorial occupation, international retaliation, and damage to oil company relations deter even the most powerful countries from initiating "classic oil wars." Examining a century of interstate violence, she demonstrates that, at most, countries have engaged in mild sparring to advance their petroleum ambitions. The Oil Wars Myth elaborates on these findings by reassessing the presumed oil motives for many of the twentieth century's most prominent international conflicts: World War II, the two American Gulf wars, the Iran–Iraq War, the Falklands/Malvinas War, and the Chaco War. These case studies show that countries have consistently refrained from fighting for oil. Meierding also explains why oil war assumptions are so common, despite the lack of supporting evidence. Since classic oil wars exist at the intersection of need and greed—two popular explanations for resource grabs—they are unusually easy to believe in. The Oil Wars Myth will engage and inform anyone interested in oil, war, and the narratives that connect them.

Oil [2 volumes]
Oil [2 volumes]

Author: Xiaobing Li

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2014-10-14

Total Pages: 824

ISBN-13: 1610692721

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Despite ongoing efforts to find alternatives, oil is still one of the most critical—and valuable—commodities on earth. This two-volume set provides extensive background information on key topics relating to oil, profiles countries that are major producers and consumers of oil, and examines relevant political issues. Aside from air and water, oil is perhaps the most valuable natural resource. Oil supplies the tremendous energy needs of the modern world. What exactly is "oil," where does it come from, how does it get consumed, and who is using it? This encyclopedia provides clear answers to these questions and more, offering students entries on the fundamentals of the oil industry and profiles of the countries that play a major role in oil production and consumption. Volume 1 presents topical entries on critical concepts, key terms, major oil spills and disasters, and important organizations and individuals relating to the oil industry. Entries define terms such as "barrel" and "reserve," cover incidents such as the BP oil spill, and explain the significance of organizations such as OPEC. The second volume spotlights specific countries that are major producers, consumers, exporters, and importers of oil, from the United States to Russia to Saudi Arabia to Venezuela. Each profile shows readers the importance of oil in that country through a brief background history, data on its oil usage or production, information about major trading partners, and an explanation of political issues.

History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine in India
History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine in India

Author: Suvobrata Sarkar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1000485005

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This volume studies the concept and relevance of HISTEM (History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine) in shaping the histories of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Tracing its evolution from the establishment of the East India Company through to the early decades after the Independence of India, it highlights the ways in which the discipline has changed over the years and examines the various influences that have shaped it. Drawing on extensive case studies, the book offers valuable insights into diverse themes such as the East–West encounter, appropriation of new knowledge, science in translation and communication, electricity and urbanization, the colonial context of engineering education, science of hydrology, oil and imperialism, epidemic and empire, vernacular medicine, gender and medicine, as well as environment and sustainable development in the colonial and postcolonial milieu. An indispensable text on South Asia’s experience of modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian studies, modern Indian history, sociology, history of science, cultural studies, colonialism, as well as studies on Science, Technology, and Society (STS).

Understanding ExtrACTIVISM
Understanding ExtrACTIVISM

Author: Anna J. Willow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-27

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0429883897

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Understanding ExtrACTIVISM surveys how contemporary resource extractive industry works and considers the responses it inspires in local citizens and activists. Chapters cover a range of extractive industries operating around the world, including logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and oil and natural gas extraction. Taking an activist anthropological stance, Anna Willow examines how culture and power inform recent and ongoing disputes between projects’ proponents and opponents, beneficiaries and victims. Through a series of engaging case studies, she argues that diverse contemporary natural resource conflicts are underlain by a culturally constituted ‘extractivist’ mind-set and embedded in global patterns of political inequity. Offering a synthesizing framework for making sense of complex interconnections among environmental, social, and political dimensions of natural resource disputes, Willow reflects on why extractivism exists, why it matters, and what we might be able to do about it. The book is valuable reading for students and researchers in the environmental social sciences as well as for activists and practitioners.

The Quantum Nietzsche
The Quantum Nietzsche

Author: William Plank

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 0595209521

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Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th century German philosopher, conceived of the universe as a living thing and a partner with humanity. He was able to do this, especially by a complete rejection of Plato's philosophy. Similar ideas will not crop up until the major thinkers in quantum mechanics in the 20th century: John Bell and his laboratory apparatus demonstrating "Bell's Inequality," and in the "beables" and "beers" of David Bohm. By using the ideas of Nietzsche, one can see the uses and misuses of Greek philosophy, especially in the paintings of the Northern Renaissance vs the Italian Renaissance; in Rabelais and the Italian Renaissance; and in Romanticism in general. Nietzsche's work likewise provides a critical point of view to reevaluate the work of William Blake, Pieter Bruegel,Hegel, Luther, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, many of whom were reacting against Platonism without realizing it. Nietzsche puts man at home in the universe in a way no other philosopher has ever done, thus discounting the bleak views of Camus and Sartre and giving a completely new view of existentialism and Christianity. The author gives evidence that most thinkers have completely misunderstood Nietzsche or have not admitted their debt to him.

The Little Crystalline Seed
The Little Crystalline Seed

Author: Iddo Dickmann

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2019-06-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1438473990

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Shows how contemporary French philosophy adopted this literary paradigm and argues for its significance for addressing concerns in ethics, ontology, and aesthetics. Mise en abyme is a term developed from literary theory denoting a work that doubles itself within itself—a story placed within a story or a play within a play. The term flourished in experimental fiction in midcentury France, having not only a strong impact on contemporary literary theory but also on post-structuralist philosophy. The Little Crystalline Seed focuses on how thinkers invoke the concept of mise en abymein order to establish ontologies that deviate from that of Heidegger. Iddo Dickmann demonstrates how the concept served in modeling Jacques Derrida’s logic of supplementarity; Maurice Blanchot’s mechanism of désouvrement; Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of repetition; Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of “proximity,” and in further circuit: the philosophies of Bergson, Kant, Leibniz, Heidegger himself, and more. Exploring the interpretative and generative potential of the mise en abyme for continental thought, Dickmann reveals new points of resonance between various philosophical topics including, aesthetics, ethics, time, logic, mirroring, play, and signification. “The book is an excellent contribution to the understanding of several difficult ‘post-Heideggerian’ thinkers and to an understanding of the current state of continental philosophy. It makes a signal contribution to the understanding of Deleuze’s thought and admirably works out the vertiginous logics of various kinds of mise en abyme, which have remained all too obscure and confused in the extant literature.” — Andrzej Warminski, author of Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man

Number
Number

Author: Tobias Dantzig

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2007-01-30

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780452288119

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"Beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands."—Albert Einstein Number is an eloquent, accessible tour de force that reveals how the concept of number evolved from prehistoric times through the twentieth century. Renowned professor of mathematics Tobias Dantzig shows that the development of math—from the invention of counting to the discovery of infinity—is a profoundly human story that progressed by “trying and erring, by groping and stumbling.” He shows how commerce, war, and religion led to advances in math, and he recounts the stories of individuals whose breakthroughs expanded the concept of number and created the mathematics that we know today.

Interpreting Bodies
Interpreting Bodies

Author: Elena Castellani

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-12-08

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0691222045

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Bewildering features of modern physics, such as relativistic space-time structure and the peculiarities of so-called quantum statistics, challenge traditional ways of conceiving of objects in space and time. Interpreting Bodies brings together essays by leading philosophers and scientists to provide a unique overview of the implications of such physical theories for questions about the nature of objects. The collection combines classic articles by Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Hans Reichenbach, and Erwin Schrodinger with recent contributions, including several papers that have never before been published. The book focuses on the microphysical objects that are at the heart of quantum physics and addresses issues central to both the "foundational" and the philosophical debates about objects. Contributors explore three subjects in particular: how to identify a physical object as an individual, the notion of invariance with respect to determining what objects are or could be, and how to relate objective and measurable properties to a physical entity. The papers cover traditional philosophical topics, common-sense questions, and technical matters in a consistently clear and rigorous fashion, illuminating some of the most perplexing problems in modern physics and the philosophy of science. The contributors are Diederik Aerts, Max Born, Elena Castellani, Maria Luisa Dalla Chiara, Bas C. van Fraassen, Steven French, Gian Carlo Ghirardi, Roberto Giuntini, Werner Heisenberg, Decio Krause, David Lewis, Tim Maudlin, Peter Mittelstaedt, Giulio Peruzzi, Hans Reichenbach, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Teller, and Giuliano Toraldo di Francia.