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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.
Achieving net-zero is a complex process beset by many challenges. Writing about the Canadian context, Temitope Onifade, a legal scholar and instructor in climate law and policy at the University of British Columbia, explains the need to develop and apply a "low carbon justice" approach to the actions that Canada takes to reduce its carbon emissions. If it doesn't prioritize justice, Onifade argues, Canada will once again fail its most vulnerable populations.
Anthropologist Zeynep Oguz examines the entanglement of militarization and ecological destruction in the new natural gas frontier of the Eastern Mediterranean. Oguz argues that energy humanities perspectives can intervene in such cases by undermining the conventional worldviews upon which geopolitics, security, and extractivism rely to open up new forms of politics and possible futures.
The COVID-19 pandemic has grounded thousands of would-be travellers and forced the organizers of large conferences to rethink how to share knowledge and build professional networks. Energy Humanities researchers Anne Pasek, Emily Roehl, and Caleb Wellum argue that this turn of events is an opportunity to create more sustainable and equitable forms of knowledge exchange. In this white paper, they offer practical advice for conference organizers looking to experiment with low carbon e-conferencing.
