Fracking

Fracking, it turns out, is much more than a new oilfield technology, and much more than a local issue, for it stitches together the earth and the sky, the local and the global, the geological and the political, and the past and future. Fracking allows for many stories. This chapter focuses on three: fracking as a spatial and geophysical manifestation of “fossil capital” that may give the lie to the idea that “cheap nature” is near its end; fracking as a geo-technical assemblage that challenges how people write political economy and what they include in its accounts; and fracking as a site in which geological and political pasts and futures are produced and contested, including the violent histories and contested futures of settler colonialism. Fracking is thus driven by the demand for ever more energy by globalising capital, part of its “inner logic”.