Overview

The US shale boom and efforts by other countries to exploit their shale resources could reshape energy and environmental landscapes across the world. But how might those landscapes change? Will countries with significant physical reserves try to exploit them? Will they protect or harm local communities and the global climate? Will the benefits be shared or retained by powerful interests? And how will these decisions be made? The Shale Dilemma brings together experts working at the forefront of shale gas issues on four continents to explain how countries reach their decisions on shale development. Using a common analytical framework, the authors identify both local factors and transnational patterns in the decision-making process. Eight case studies reveal the trade-offs each country makes as it decides whether to pursue, delay, or block development. Those outcomes in turn reflect the nature of a country's political process and the power of interest groups on both sides of the issue. The contributors also ask whether the economic arguments made by the shale industry and its government supporters have overshadowed the concerns of local communities for information on the effects of shale operations, and for tax policies and regulations to ensure broad-based economic development and environmental protection. As an informative and even-handed account, The Shale Dilemma recommends practical steps to help countries reach better, more transparent, and more far-sighted decisions.

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9780822945130

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North America's gas shale revolution has been a global game changer. The key question is what happens next? This volume provides an indispensable guide to the future prospects for the global industry. A common framework is used to explore the 'shale dilemma' in countries with commercial production, where exploration is at an early stage and where it is banned. The analysis moves beyond established critiques to address the key issues of differential impact and equity and suggests how countries might make better decisions. --Michael Bradshaw, Professor of Global Energy, Warwick Business School, UK The Shale Dilemma brings together leading energy experts to take stock of the multifaceted reasons for why countries decide to (or not) develop their shale gas reserves. Drawing on the US experience, the impressive collection of case studies from across the globe capably examine debates surrounding energy security, economic development, climate change, and local participation in shale gas decision-making. -- Erika Weinthal, Lee Hill Snowdon Professor of Environmental Policy, Duke University

North America's shale gas revolution has been a global game changer. The key question is: what happens next? This volume provides an indispensable guide to the future prospects for the global industry. A common framework is used to explore the 'shale dilemma' in countries with commercial production, where exploration is at an early stage and where it is banned. The analysis moves beyond established critiques to address the key issues of differential impact and equity and suggests how countries might make better decisions. --Michael Bradshaw, Professor of Global Energy, Warwick Business School, UK The Shale Dilemma brings together leading energy experts to take stock of the multifaceted reasons for why countries decide to (or not) develop their shale gas reserves. Drawing on the US experience, the impressive collection of case studies from across the globe capably examines debates surrounding energy security, economic development, climate change, and local participation in shale gas decision making. -- Erika Weinthal, Lee Hill Snowdon Professor of Environmental Policy, Duke University North America's gas shale revolution has been a global game changer. The key question is what happens next? This volume provides an indispensable guide to the future prospects for the global industry. A common framework is used to explore the 'shale dilemma' in countries with commercial production, where exploration is at an early stage and where it is banned. The analysis moves beyond established critiques to address the key issues of differential impact and equity and suggests how countries might make better decisions. --Michael Bradshaw, Professor of Global Energy, Warwick Business School, UK

Rather than dwelling on Melville's doubts and ambivalences, as many literary critics do, Evans emphasizes his certainties. She contends that in Moby-Dick he is a literary realist in the classical--that is Platonic--sense, refusing the persistent dualism of mind and world in Western philosophy since Descartes and Locke. Melville shows how concepts are formed in human activity, and he verifies the ability of language, and especially of fiction, to connect the sensible with the ideal. In this bracing, consequential book, Evans alters our understanding of the relationships among literature, philosophy (especially Wittgenstein), and aesthetics. --Samuel Otter, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley I much admire how K.L Evans brings together philosophy and literary criticism in order to provide an exciting account of what Melville sought in realism. Learned, lucid, and passionate, this book claims that realism is a less a matter of accuracy and range of accurate sensuous detail than a way of realizing the force of how those facts and the discourses accompanying them give shape to imaginative spaces. Realism for the most ambitious writers makes vivid the conceptual frameworks cultures have produced around a concrete name--like the whale. Only Ahab, and the author emulating Ahab, fully see what the whale is by imagining its full implications for those who have tried to name it accurately. A thrilling account of Wittgenstein's Tractactus provides the conceptual substance for this view of naming by stressing how Wittgenstein's states of affairs are not descriptions but images for how language has developed stages for acknowledging what naming can involve. --Charles Altieri, professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

Shanti Gamper-Rabindran is associate professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. She was recently selected for the Bley Stein Visiting Professorship at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (AIES), a leading institute in environmental studies and research in the Middle East.

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