Sunday, August 6th
November 19, 2024
Imre Szeman's new book, "Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over Renewable Life," explores how dominant powers—from "meta-entrepreneurs" like Elon Musk and Bill Gates to nationalist governments and petro-populists—compete to define a "common sense" of renewable futures that preserves the very systems driving the climate crisis. In this unorthodox review of the book, communications scholar and theorist Tanner Mirrlees introduces the text through a series of thematically connected concepts and questions that chart his response to the book and offer entry points for prospective readers. Mirrlees presents "Futures of the Sun" as a text that it will be important and useful to think with in a perplexing moment of flux and uncertainty in global climate politics.
Nuclear energy is haunted by a legacy of fear and toxicity that fossil fuels seem to escape. In this piece, Jackson Ainsworth asks why. While nuclear disasters dominate cultural memory, fossil fuels—despite their clear environmental destruction—rarely provoke the same visceral reactions. Ainsworth dissects how media and history have cemented nuclear’s toxic image and challenges why fossil fuel pollution isn’t met with the same alarm. Why has toxicity discourse attached so strongly to nuclear power, but not to fossil fuels?
Recent reports reveal that Google's greenhouse gas emissions surged by 48% from 2019 to 2023, attributing the increase to the energy demands of AI technology. Despite promises of future decarbonization, AI currently consumes vast amounts of energy and water, with significant ecological impacts. Thomas Davis and Scott Stoneman critique AI's resource-intensive nature, emphasizing its role in perpetuating capitalist exploitation and environmental degradation. They argue for a critical examination of AI's material needs and its socio-economic impacts, urging a move towards more equitable and environmentally-conscious AI practices within a post-capitalist framework.
In a surprising turn, Canada’s oil and gas industry has gone silent following the passage of Bill C-59 on June 20, 2024. This new legislation, amending the Competition Act to penalize misleading environmental claims, has prompted major industry players like the Pathways Alliance and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to curtail their online presence. For a decade, Jordan B. Kinder, a scholar in media studies and environmental humanities, has studied the cultural politics of energy, infrastructure, media, and environment, coining the term "petroturfing" to describe the oil industry's fake grassroots advocacy. In his commentary on the oil industry's response to the bill, Kinder notes the benefits of the bill but also warns against putting too much stock in discursive struggles over the oil sands when what is needed is more immediate action.
Nélia Dias, Rodney Harrison, Dolly Jørgensen, Gertjan Plets, and Colin Sterling introduce Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage (PITCH) sector in the context of green transitions, a new Horizon Europe and UK Research and Innovation funded research project that brings together academic and cultural sector partners in six countries. The project aims to spur on the processes by which humanities and arts scholarship and public interventions can strengthen citizen engagement with the constantly changing nature of cultural heritage and its relationship to past and present petrocultures to lay the groundwork for rapid, society-wide European green transitions away from a reliance on fossil fuels.
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