With global demand for energy poised to increase by more than half in the next three decades, the supply of safe, reliable, and reasonably priced gas and oil will continue to be of fundamental importance to modern economies. Central to this supply are the pipelines that transport this energy. And while the fundamental economics of the major pipeline networks are the same, the differences in their ownership, commercial development, and operation can provide insight into the workings of market institutions in various nations. Drawing on a century of the world’s experience with gas and oil pipelines, this book illustrates the importance of economics in explaining the evolution of pipeline politics in various countries. It demonstrates that institutional differences influence ownership and regulation, while rents and consumer pricing depend on the size and diversity of existing markets, the depth of regulatory institutions, and the historical structure of the pipeline businesses themselves. The history of pipelines is also rife with social conflict, and Makholm explains how and when institutions in a variety of countries have controlled pipeline behavior—either through economic regulation or government ownership—in the public interest.

When the controversy over the Siberian natural gas pipeline erupted in 1982, it was not the first time that the issue of East-West energy trade had brought the United States into conflict with its Western European allies. It was, however, the first time that the United States lacked the leverage necessary to change its allies' policies. In addition American political opposition more closely resembled the politics of the 1980 grain embargo than the anti-energy trade consensus of earlier decades. How are these changes to be explained? What have their consequences been for American economic coercive power against the Soviet Union? Bruce Jentleson addresses these and other crucial questions in this comprehensive and incisive study.

Fossil fuels are a valuable commodity at the forefront of national and international politics. Pipelines can create jobs and economic growth, not to mention delivering a commodity to people who need it. What happens when there is conflict about the land through which a pipeline travels? Such conflicts can lead to protests, stoppages, and even war. Readers of this comprehensive volume, which explores the topic from a multitude of angles, will learn how a simple pipeline can have enormous geopolitical ramifications.

In Material Politics, author Andrew Barry reveals that as we are beginning to attend to the importance of materials in political life, materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information about their performance, origins, and impact. Presents an original theoretical approach to political geography by revealing the paradoxical relationship between materials and politics Explores how political disputes have come to revolve not around objects in isolation, but objects that are entangled in ever growing quantities of information about their performance, origins, and impact Studies the example of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline – a fascinating experiment in transparency and corporate social responsibility – and its wide-spread negative political impact Capitalizes on the growing interdisciplinary interest, especially within geography and social theory, about the critical role of material artefacts in political life

Winner, 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences Despite Mumbai's position as India's financial, economic, and cultural capital, water is chronically unavailable for rich and poor alike. Mumbai's dry taps are puzzling, given that the city does not lack for either water or financial resources. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters, Lisa Björkman shows how an elite dream to transform Mumbai into a "world class" business center has wreaked havoc on the city’s water pipes. In rich ethnographic detail, Pipe Politics explores how the everyday work of getting water animates and inhabits a penumbra of infrastructural activity—of business, brokerage, secondary markets, and sociopolitical networks—whose workings are reconfiguring and rescaling political authority in the city. Mumbai’s increasingly illegible and volatile hydrologies, Björkman argues, are lending infrastructures increasing political salience just as actual control over pipes and flows becomes contingent on dispersed and intimate assemblages of knowledge, power, and material authority. These new arenas of contestation reveal the illusory and precarious nature of the project to remake Mumbai in the image of Shanghai or Singapore and gesture instead toward the highly contested futures and democratic possibilities of the actually existing city.

How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction. Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the “affective infrastructures” emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire—crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era’s immense environmental struggles. Pipeline Populism reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world.

An essential review of the history, benefits, limitations, failures, and politics of pipelines, with a core focus on potential harms to environmental and human health. The United States holds the world record of having the largest network of energy pipelines, with more than 2.4 million miles of pipeline transporting oil or natural gas. Russia, China, and Canada as well as many other countries also have extensive pipelines. How safe is this means of transport, and is there a potential harm to the environment and human health? In this text, professor Madelon L. Finkel presents an essential and clearly-stated review of the pros and cons of transporting oil and natural gas by pipeline. Finkel dispels myths, inaccuracies, and misconceptions and highlights the potential dangers that must be considered in any country's energy policy. Pipeline Politics: Assessing the Benefits and Harms of Energy Policy provides a broad and accessible analysis of pipelines, from their history and safety to their politics and risks. Finkel examines the benefits and costs of pipelines in parallel as well as issues of environmental justice; the fairness of treatment of the people affected; and the development, implementation, and enforcement of pipeline laws, regulations, and policies.

Oil and natural gas are now acknowledged to be the driving forces of international politics. What has not yet been fully explored is how their delivery affects global geopolitics. Pipelines, once built, create new diplomatic realities - some states are newly connected, others isolated. Some states benefit economically; others lose out. Often new energy supply routes fall across political fault-lines, as in the case of India and Pakistan. In the case of the former Soviet Union, the existing pipeline network reflects an old political reality, and causes tension between the newly independent states and their former Russian master. With energy demand soaring in industrialising Asia, and the resurgence of great power rivalry, the politics and practicalities of pipelines become central to a proper understanding of world affairs. In this groundbreaking and fully updated book, Rafael Kandiyoti takes us along the pipeline networks, from Kandahar to the Caspian basin, from Ceyhan to China, and shows us how they form the foundation of the new geopolitical order. In the process he demonstrates that the issue of energy supply revolves around not only hydrocarbon resources but also their delivery. This is an entirely new way to view the international politics of oil and natural gas, and is therefore crucial to any explanation of the tensions involving Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia, China and Europe.