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SUMMARY:History of S&amp\;T need an oil bath: oil\, scarcity and technosci
 ence in the 1970s - Cyrus Mody (Maastricht University)
DTSTART:20190228T153000Z
DTEND:20190228T170000Z
UID:TALK112828@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Agnes Bolinska
DESCRIPTION:Oil is everywhere in the history of science and technology\, y
 et nowhere. In almost all of our disciplines' subfields one can find stray
  and often puzzling references to oil firms' contributions\, yet few of th
 ese have been examined carefully\, much less connected together. There is 
 a long history of such 'oil spillovers'\, but they become more pronounced 
 as one approaches the 1970s and the emerging technologies about which gove
 rnments and investors were most optimistic in that era: nuclear (fission a
 nd fusion) and solar power\, biotechnology\, microelectronics\, and scenar
 io planning/resource forecasting. I argue that oil firms' investments in a
 ll of these technologies were a response to the resource scarcity debates 
 of the early 1970s. That's perhaps unsurprising\, but the involvement of '
 oilmen' in the environmentalist organizations propelling that debate is no
 t well known. Oil firms' motivations for intervening in environmental deba
 tes are generally assumed to be cynical\, but I offer evidence that their 
 calculations were more complex\, at least before the collapse in the price
  of oil in the early 1980s.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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