Thursday 9th June 2016 

h.15,00 - 17,00 

Aula C3 Campus Luigi Einaudi 

Lungo Dora Siena 100/4 Torino

 

Organized during the EU Sustainable Energy week

In spite of electrification, digitalization, nuclear and renewable energy, IT and the WEB, is Crude Oil in the global economy and post-industrial society still the apeiron of our world?

 

Franco Ruzzenenti 

Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

 

There is a general and trivial understanding that oil is the most important energy source, yet, at the same time, the role of oil in our world is still underestimated, if not, sometimes, masked. On the track toward a carbon-free economy, can we keep considering oil just as another energy source and replaceable as long as production function and the relative price allows it? Oil shapes the present, global economy in many ways, ranging from material production to transports, from chemistry to agriculture, from the monetary system to the financial sector. And, of course, geopolitics. Our world is composed by oil derivatives, directly or indirectly. Oil is transfused into the production of most things, in so far that it resembles what for some ancient Greek philosophers was the apeiron. The unmoulded, unlimited, primal substance that yields the building material for the World. Oil, we must acknowledged, is not unlimited though. In this seminar we will look at three fundamental aspects of the oilification of economy and society: 

1) oil as an energy source,

2) oil as a financial asset,

3) oil as a metabolic regulator.