Sassen and Dotan (2011, 832–33) argue that there is a need to conduct more research on “the geography of the environmental damages [a city] produces,” and to raise consciousness of this damage “by making visible the multiple components of those geographies.” Heeding their call, this paper makes visible how the ongoing expansion of Bangkok’s urban fabric and the everyday production of new consumer lifestyles are producing damages far outside the city, tracing the circulation of electricity production and consumption from the city’s ubiquitous shopping malls to emerging hydropower projects in Laos. It argues that the circulation of electricity flows along uneven channels, is shifting injury and environmental harm across international borders, and is perpetuating inequality and environmental injustice in the Lower Mekong. To demonstrate this claim, I analyze the political ecology of the electricity sector at numerous scales and locations—the urban scale in Bangkok, the country scale of Thailand and then Laos, and the local community scale in
Laos—and discuss how various material and social processes and actors at these different scales form this circuit. I argue that this kind of cross-border analysis, tracing circuits of consumption and production, is necessary for understanding the asymmetries and injuries produced through extractive networks. However, these circuits are not just important for demonstrating the inequalities wrapped up in socio-technical systems; they are also critical for helping us map the ways that everyday practices can precipitate environmental change far away from their local surroundings.