coe194_folch.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast. You're here with your co-hosts. Yep, that's right. I'm going to name them because you probably know him by now.

Speaker2: [00:00:32] You sure knew that you could be a new person. Didn't you say that we got a bunch of a whole bunch of new downloads or an interesting burst in downloads a couple of days ago?

Speaker1: [00:00:41] We have kind of a seasonal there's kind of an academic calendar feel to this because there are people who teach this podcast in courses. And so I notice when we come back from the summer, which is usually a relatively quiet time, we get a big burst of new traffic in the fall. So welcome new listeners.

Speaker2: [00:00:56] There might be new listeners.

Speaker1: [00:00:57] We'd love to have you here. Yes. Now we're going to do our best to entertain you. And this is a new segment that is called Let's talk about the early 1990s, and I'm going somewhere with this. Ok? The questions to so many how my co-host is. What do you remember as being the most? Well, let me put this way.

Speaker2: [00:01:17] Well, let me just say listeners, I have not been prepped for this question. I'm totally out of the blue. So she wants a brief. If I, if I answer, well, give me all the credit. And if I answer poorly, well, it's because that wasn't fairly prepped or I'm just no

Speaker1: [00:01:32] Good at it. I'm always underprepared to just say everyone knows. So you remember this channel called MTV that apparently is out of work? And do you remember that much of MTV's 1980s existence was actually showing videos? And then there was this moment, and it seemed to happen sometime in the early 1990s, when MTV stopped showing videos and started to become basically a youth oriented cable channel.

Speaker2: [00:01:58] All sorts of things. I think the big breakout thing was real world, real world.

Speaker1: [00:02:02] Exactly, which is still going

Speaker2: [00:02:04] On, I think. Is it really? Oh yeah. So that's where I mean, I don't know. Does MTV get credit for launching reality TV? They might. It's because I did transition. They had these little programs and then real world became so major as their main.

Speaker1: [00:02:19] It should get credit for a few things, including launching the career of a certain Jon Stewart. The original Jon Stewart show is on MTV.

Speaker2: [00:02:26] That's cool. Oh yeah, I remember being in high school and thinking like my dream job would be to be a Vijay Vijay.

Speaker1: [00:02:32] Oh yeah. Video Jockey.

Speaker2: [00:02:34] Yeah, sounds so dorky now, but it's true that I had a friend who had MTV because I don't know if you remember it was a cable subscription thing. It was. So we didn't have it at my house because we had the impoverished like three channels that you could get with your antenna. But my friend did have MTV, and whenever I got to go over to her house, it was like such a decadent experience, almost equivalent to how children now feel watching YouTube. It was like so indulgent to be able to go and watch these music

Speaker1: [00:03:04] Videos and not to have to watch Angela Lansbury

Speaker2: [00:03:07] Not yet

Speaker1: [00:03:08] On her latest CBS

Speaker2: [00:03:09] Drama. And also, I think having no commercials and it was just video after video and it was like the perfect nexus of visual stimulation and then getting to hear these cool bands and also getting to see them perform. It was it was just like such a juicy, amazing afterschool treat.

Speaker1: [00:03:26] But here's my question to you. Yeah. Do you from this early days and I'm going to say I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the early nineteen nineties, I'm saying from like 1990 to ninety four point ninety five, we're probably not a time in your life when you were like sitting around watching a whole lot of TV. What do you remember from the MTV programming like? Was there anything on MTV in those days that really connected with you or that you connected with it?

Speaker2: [00:03:49] Ok, I feel like this is a trick question.

Speaker1: [00:03:50] No, it's not. It is going somewhere. It's not.

Speaker2: [00:03:52] I don't. We've had this conversation before. I don't think I watched any TV in ninety four. Ninety five got

Speaker1: [00:03:57] You.

Speaker2: [00:04:00] I mean, I really I really don't like I remember what I was doing that and it was a lot of fun, but it wasn't TV. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:04:05] Ok, so do you remember? I just want to throw out some shows from those days and see if you

Speaker2: [00:04:10] Remember, if I remember

Speaker1: [00:04:12] Them. Do you remember something called liquid TV? No liquid television, I guess. Name it was. It was like a little tiny animated variety show. It was kind of like a forerunner of what Adult Swim became in some ways. But but that was a different, a different channel. Do you remember Aeon Flux? No, you don't remember.

Speaker2: [00:04:34] And another cool name. I'm telling you, dude, I really I didn't even have a TV. I'm sure I didn't.

Speaker1: [00:04:43] I'm just going to read this. This segment is now me reading the names of things that you say No, no, no, no, that's OK.

Speaker2: [00:04:49] And our listeners can follow along on the Wikipedia page themselves.

Speaker1: [00:04:53] We're making great radio today. Do you remember the state? No. Ok.

Speaker2: [00:04:58] Yeah, you remember these things.

Speaker1: [00:05:00] I do remember some of them and the ones that I remember. I'm just going to tell people what I remember. I remember this state, but that's because I went to college with one of the guys in the state, and so I was kind of invested in humblebrag. Ok, well, all right. I played basketball with Mike Showalter a few times. There's my humble

Speaker2: [00:05:15] Brag and that we've we've talked about this before. That is the son of Elaine Showalter. It is. Yeah, who's? I read as an undergrad and loved I read it like a hundred times exaggeration, I read it probably three times, which is a lot for an academic book. It was called sexual anarchy.

Speaker1: [00:05:30] Wow. So that's that, and Mike turned out to be a pretty talented comedian in his own right, although he's kind of flown under the radar and done a lot of kind of cool, edgy outsider projects over the years. But I think overall, Mike Showalter is shrewd. Ok. So I was doing

Speaker2: [00:05:44] Pretty well with MTV.

Speaker1: [00:05:46] You knew what? You knew what MTV was.

Speaker2: [00:05:48] I went back in the video time. Yeah. And and also real world because I do remember some of the real world stuff because everyone I was living in San Francisco at the time and everyone was talking about it because one of the characters in the original series, maybe in the original was that season was this guy called Puck, who was like a real asshole, and he was a bike messenger and he was a bike. I think the original real world was set in San Francisco. Yeah, and and everyone hated Puck because he was such an ass. And like people in the bike messenger community knew him and some of them hated them and some of them, they loved him, like, he's so funny. So there was this whole like sort of hipster debate going on across the city about real world and about puck and about the other characters and whether they were authentic and all this stuff. It was kind of a it was a regional thing at the time. So that's my main coordinates for the television program of MTV.

Speaker1: [00:06:45] I'd love to do a version of this in which I ask you the names of shows. Then you tell me whether they really were MTV shows or not. Like 50 Cent the money in the power. That sounds cool. Yeah, it's real. That was a real one. And the Pauly D project, The Osbournes, I remember that was from the 2000s, the Osbournes.

Speaker2: [00:07:04] That sounds. I think I've seen that.

Speaker1: [00:07:05] Yeah. So that's probably when you were old enough to start watching TV again. Now I was thinking the Ben Stiller Show was a show that was important. The one I'm working up to and my question was really whether there's anyone who's not a, you know, 15 to, I guess, in my case, twenty four year old boy who any woman who would watch Beavis and Butthead.

Speaker2: [00:07:29] Oh, of course, I remember Beavis and Butthead.

Speaker1: [00:07:30] So you remember that?

Speaker2: [00:07:31] I was like, Yeah, that was kind of a cult thing. I didn't. Ok, I didn't watch it, but I knew people who did. And yet it was mostly guys. I guess it was. And I have like a big cultural resonance, like there were T-shirts and they weren't really memes because there weren't memes then. But it was like a meme, like they had stickers and little expressions that you would hear, and everyone sort of knew those irritating voices that they had.

Speaker1: [00:07:55] Yeah, right. It was this weird kind of glimpse into suburban nihilism that I think is much more recognizable now. But but he went on to make King of the Hill the guy Mike Judge, who did Beavis. And then and that one was a much bigger show. And then he does Silicon Valley. I think, too so. So he's had a career. Ok. And this is why this is a whole lot. This is a whole lot. Yeah, like, I like to keep you waiting. The whole thing is building up to when I was in Berlin, the first time we're about to go to Berlin, when I was in Berlin, the first time I went to a very hipster theater in the Kreuzberg district and watched Beavis and Butt-Head movie, which was actually kind of a hilarious place to watch this movie.

Speaker2: [00:08:37] Did the people get it?

Speaker1: [00:08:39] I don't know. It might have been like there was. It was more than one time I was in that theater and would be the only person there. Like, sometimes you'd be the only person watching like a midnight show in this little tiny theater,

Speaker2: [00:08:49] Just going for the Haribo treats.

Speaker1: [00:08:52] I might have been going for the harbor treats. I might have just been going to stave off, you know, existential loneliness. I don't know. But but in that movie, and this is this is it's taken us nine minutes, but this is where I was going with it. They go to the Hoover Dam.

Speaker2: [00:09:05] Oh, great. That's nice. And in what is a cartoon, though, right? It's all

Speaker1: [00:09:09] Cartoon. You know, the guy gives them the tour of the of the Hoover Dam, and then they say, So does anyone have any questions? Yeah. And he says, I've got a damn question for you. That's hilarious. I'd like some damn information.

Speaker2: [00:09:24] And then they kind of snicker to each other anyway. They laugh. Yeah, so it's funny. That's funny. It's 20 years later. It is so weird. It's like true comedy right there.

Speaker1: [00:09:34] Well, I did not have the nerve.

Speaker2: [00:09:36] Wait, is that's a pun.

Speaker1: [00:09:37] I don't know what it is. I did not have the nerve. I'm going to be honest to tell that to do that routine. For the benefit of this week's guest on the podcast, Christine Folge, who has written a wonderful book, but I didn't want to ask her any damn questions.

Speaker2: [00:09:52] Rah rah rah rah rah rah boom.

Speaker1: [00:09:55] Boom, boom.

Speaker2: [00:09:55] Ok, good. So you did end up asking her a lot of damn questions, and so did I.

Speaker1: [00:10:00] I did, and you did. And the book is terrific. It's called Hydra Politics. It's just out from Princeton University Press, and it is everything you ever wanted to know about the Typekit Dam, which is the largest dam in the world and the world's largest power plant, it turns out straddling the Parana River between Brazil. Whatever between Brazil and Paraguay. Yeah. And Christine, somebody

Speaker2: [00:10:24] Who is such an interesting place to we don't I mean, have you been? Well, no, I've never been. But I went to grad school with folks who did their research there, indigenous people. We've talked to Craig Hetherington, who's work in Paraguay, but I feel

Speaker1: [00:10:38] Like there's not. Didn't soy?

Speaker2: [00:10:40] Yes, there's not quite as much out there, so it's good to learn a little bit about the country, too. And Brazil is maybe a more well known entity in the popular imaginary. But we do learn a lot about the kind of sovereignty politics of electricity, the sovereignty, politics of water and the flow of water who has rights and jurisdiction over these forms of power. And it's a it's a really wonderful kind of overview and discussion of the tensions of energy in a place in South America where the predominant form of energy is actually renewable for. That's what people are using. And Christine writes that hydropower in in South America at least is inward looking because it needs to be used immediately on site at the source. You can't sort of export it like you can coal or petroleum. And so even these countries that have huge reserves like Venezuela or even Brazil with its offshore stuff, they export fossil fuel products. But they use to a great degree these renewable forms. So it's a really interesting tension to see. It's not a total reduction of emitting forms of energy, but it's a use of more renewable forms, although we didn't actually talk to Christine. I wanted to ask her this question. I guess we didn't quite get to it about whether there's a discussion about the true renewables of of big dams because they're pretty notorious for having a lot of emissions as well.

Speaker1: [00:12:09] Well, in that, I mean, there's a lot of concrete in them.

Speaker2: [00:12:12] Well, not only that, they also, you know, when they when they flood the reservoir, create the poundage. There's often, especially in tropical places, there's a lot of biotic material in the bottom that rots turns to methane and becomes quite toxic.

Speaker1: [00:12:26] And the other thing and I think she touches on this in the book and we touch on maybe a little bit in the conversation is that with climate change, you know, even the renewable city of some hydropower is in question because in drought periods, you're having, you know, your your reservoir is depleted and so you can't perhaps have this. And this is a real problem in the American Southwest. I'm thinking about that to get back to business, about having the Hoover Dam. You know, one down question we have to ask ourselves in in the Southwest is, you know, whether these sources of hydroelectricity that have been seemingly guaranteed for decades. I don't know if centuries, but decades for sure. Most of them, I think, went up during the Roosevelt administration.

Speaker2: [00:13:06] Well, do you think they got built? Yes. That was an FDR thing.

Speaker1: [00:13:09] So, you know, now those are projects are, you know, nearing a century old. You know, will there be another century for them because of drought, like the widespread drought that's predicted? So it's a complicated matter, but I'm glad we have the chance to go so deeply into hydropower with a real expert on the topic. I don't think we've given hydropower quite its due on this podcast, despite nearing in on 200 episodes. So here we are. Like improving every single day. We're improving and seminars. Homework is to go back and watch, you know, the entire MTV catalog from the early nineteen nineties to fill in the cultural gap she's missed.

Speaker2: [00:13:44] When I when I retire from my 12 jobs, I think I will start doing

Speaker1: [00:13:47] That and the rest of us. Our job is to go to a bunch of raves like she did back then, so we can film that part of our lives.

Speaker2: [00:13:53] Yeah, yeah, that and then some. And you know, you know what? I was going to say, you know, I was going to say, is that actually, I need to because see you got you're interested in the kind of uncanny experience of having watched stuff in the early nineties. I had the uncanny experience of going to a small boutique store a few weeks ago when we were in Philadelphia. It's a nineties nostalgia store. There you go. So there's a there's like a young guy in there. He owns the store, runs it or whatever. It's like a pop up shop. He's got all this stuff. I was like, What is this store? It's got no name. There's just a bunch of shirts and stuff and like toys. I was like, What is this store?

Speaker1: [00:14:33] And he's like, Everyone looks like Kurt Cobain in there

Speaker2: [00:14:35] And he's like, I'm just like, I'm totally obsessed with everything. Early nineties. It's like, I'm really into these like little tiny bit late eighties, but really, really obsessed with early nineties. And so he collects all this early nineties stuff, sports stuff, band stuff and sells it. I don't know. It's like the obvious thing to say is like, Oh, my God made me feel so old. It kind of did a little bit because it was like an antique store for the early 90s. I mean, I don't know how else to tell it was a nostalgia store.

Speaker1: [00:15:07] Human existence is absurd at some fundamental level. That is hilarious, but not unlike what people of our generation were doing, appropriating hippie culture or seventies culture. Even, you know, let them have their appropriations. We. We have the real we know what

Speaker2: [00:15:22] You want to put it into the time scale of everyone's lives,

Speaker1: [00:15:25] That's all. You know what the early 90s were like and it wasn't that great people. Yeah. To see, you know, it's

Speaker2: [00:15:29] Nice that it's been romanticized.

Speaker1: [00:15:31] Yeah, romanticize. Maybe it's better as a romance than is a reality. Like some things on the planet are so many. How? Why don't you take us to the promised land?

Speaker2: [00:15:40] Ok, go Christine.

Speaker1: [00:16:01] So welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast, thrilled to be here and thrilled to be here with Christine Folge. The Amazing Christine Folge coming live and direct to us from Duke University.

Speaker3: [00:16:11] Christine, how are you doing? I'm great over here. It's air conditioned in my office and it's a sweltering day outside. How is it in Houston? Ok? Did you?

Speaker1: [00:16:19] Did you guys get swept by Dorian? I can't remember where you guys on the path or did you miss it?

Speaker3: [00:16:24] We were on the path, but Dorian stayed. What happened is that Dorian spent so much of its energy in the Bahamas that by the time it reached us, it actually did. The bands didn't really make it inland enough to cause much damage here. Last year we were in the middle of Florence and we had actual tornadoes in Durham, so we counted ourselves really, really lucky. But I think that the shore is the coast of North Carolina took another beating, and it didn't really have a lot of bandwidth with which to handle yet another storm.

Speaker1: [00:17:01] So, yeah, no, I know, and we feel for all all those folks there on your coast and of course, the folks down in the Bahamas who suffered so mightily during Dorian. Unfortunately, these storms are just keeping coming. But that's why we're turning to the topic of

Speaker2: [00:17:15] Hydro politics, hydro

Speaker1: [00:17:16] Politics

Speaker2: [00:17:17] Today, a different kind of hydro

Speaker1: [00:17:18] Politics and among the many responses that people are hoping will turn the tide on carbon emissions. But it's a complex story, as you tell us.

Speaker2: [00:17:25] Yes, so. Hi, Christine, it's really good to have you on the line, and I want to congratulate you on your new book that's just out. The last couple of weeks, right, is that it's fresh, fresh, fresh.

Speaker3: [00:17:36] This is super fresh, and this is the first opportunity I have to get to chat about this book after it's finished form. Ok, cool. What about

Speaker2: [00:17:47] This? Well, that's a treat for us too. Then, so let us. I mean, this will be in the liner notes, but let us say the name of the title of your brand new book, which is out with Princeton University Press. It's called Hydro Politics, the E Typekit Dam Sovereignty and the engineering of modern South America. I thought we could begin, Christine. There are some listeners who will not be familiar with the object, the really interesting and unique infrastructural object and set of socio political material relationships that is the type who dam. And so I was learning maybe you could give us a kind of a picture, a sort of Wikipedia sized picture of the dam, what it is, where it is and why. It's important because it's a pretty it's an interesting, interesting site and object of analysis.

Speaker3: [00:18:35] Yeah. So the dam is a large hydroelectric dam that straddles the Parana River border between Paraguay and Brazil. So the Potomac River is part of the River Plate Basin in South America. So that's that's the second most important river system in South America. Obviously, the most important is the Amazon, and these are related concepts. But so it's a it's a really, really big river. And this border between Paraguay and Brazil, it's a landlocked border. And if you've seen like the mission or if you've seen with young and hot Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro, you know exactly the area I'm talking about. This is also close to where the Sioux Falls is, et cetera. So it's sort of very forested sort of internal in the middle heart of South America river border that's also super close to Argentina's this tri border region. We might get to talking a little bit more about the dynamics of it a bit later. But on the border between Brazil and Paraguay in the nineteen seventies, the governments, the military, governments of Brazil and Paraguay built what is now the world's largest hydroelectric dam, and it's actually the world's largest power plant. And what that means is it produces more electricity than any other power plant anywhere on the planet.

Speaker3: [00:20:03] And so this sort of sleepy little border and the middle of South America is actually at this world scale in terms of energy production. But because this dam is on an international border, the electricity it produces isn't just electricity in one economy, it's electricity in two economies, and it's electricity in two asymmetrical economies. And because it's this international object, the electricity is also international relations. And because the histories of Paraguay and Brazil are really fraught, there's a really big war in the 19th century, which is absolutely germane to this dam. So for Paraguay, its memory of a really difficult war, and so all of this international relations, international politics, memory of the nation hopes for the future get brought into the turbines, which spin out electricity and. That's just a little bit of an introduction, and when I say it's the world's largest dam, there's it's got an installed capacity, so I'm going to be technical and wonky for a second. It's got an installed capacity of fourteen thousand megawatts. It's got 20 turbines that each have an installed capacity of seven hundred megawatts. Ten of the turbines are Paraguay and 10 are our Brazilian. And if you're like, but wait, I've heard about a really big dam in China, and yet there are really big dams in China, and there's a really, really big one named Three Gorges that has an installed capacity of twenty two thousand five hundred megawatts.

Speaker3: [00:21:31] So fourteen thousand versus twenty two thousand five hundred, you're like, well, the Chinese one is clearly bigger, but the Paraguayan Brazilian dam actually produces more electricity than the Chinese dam to. That's way, way bigger. Right? Yeah. So so this electricity. And just to sort of wrap up this electricity is enough to provide a third of the state of California's needs. Mm hmm. Whoa. So and a quarter of the state of Texas. And so what that means is that this electricity is really important because of the scale, but partly because it's so tiny you can't actually consume most of its half of the electricity. So it basically sells the majority of its electricity to Brazil and electricity. This year, it supplies about 17 or 18 percent of the electricity on Brazil's market. So it's it's not a minor contributor to to Brazil's energy matrix whatsoever. And so this sort of is a setting for a lot of conflicts, but also a lot of dramas, and that's what the book is about. Yeah, it is.

Speaker1: [00:22:33] It's great. You really you really get into into detail into those dramas and conflicts, and it's really makes for fascinating reading before we get into the details and especially the issues of sovereignty that this peculiar arrangement between Brazil and Paraguay has created. I wanted to just ask you about something that you talk about in the introduction to the book, which I think is an observation that people really ought to take to heart, which is that what's meant by conventional energy or like what are kind of hegemonic forms of energy are in most parts of the world. When you say that you think fossil fuels, you think coal, you think oil, you think natural gas, it's true in Europe and Africa and Asia, North America, the Middle East. But the outlier to that trend, as you point out, is South America, because most of the electricity produced in South America is from renewable energy sources and and chiefly hydroelectric dams. So as you point out, renewable sources are not alternative sources in the region. They are the dominant form. And I wanted to ask if you could say a little bit about that history and sort of why it took that shape. And then maybe also what implications it may have, if any, for politics like just general kind of politics and political culture

Speaker3: [00:23:45] In the region. Yeah, I think that that question is it's really central to the book, and it's something that I I stumbled on at the end of writing my dissertation, and I didn't understand really how important this would be. So I think that one of the things that this podcast does is it's for multiple audiences. But I also think it's in part for audiences of people who are thinking about the process of writing books. So I'm also revealing a little bit about that process here. And so in the United States, we get two thirds of the electricity we consume by burning fossil fuels. And what that means is that our political concepts of how energy works in political economy is predicated upon hydrocarbons. That is very different from the situation in South America, where the electricity that fuels industry not just fuels domestic use, although that's super residential use, although that's super important as well. But the one that powers industry comes from predominantly hydro. So two thirds of the electricity consumed in South America is from hydro, and these are Department U.S. Department of Energy numbers. So they're not like hippie anthropologist numbers right there like that.

Speaker2: [00:25:01] Can you copyright that, Chris? I love that in the anthropology quantification here.

Speaker3: [00:25:07] Exactly. So, so OK. So that's interesting. Well, also the countries that predominantly rely upon hydropower for electricity are fossil fuel exporters. So this deepens the puzzle. So it's not a question of, well, there. There weren't fossil fuels in South America. So so they turned to hydropower. No. In fact, it's a question of even though Brazil has significant fossil fuel deposits. Venezuela has significant fossil fuel deposits. So does Bolivia. So does Colombia. So Argentina, these countries have opted for hydropower. And then the question becomes why? Why do these countries, while they export fossil fuels internally, consume hydroelectricity predominantly, although there are other renewables that are coming online as well? And the answer is in part. A question of history, so in in places like Argentina and Brazil, the infrastructure for ironically, for the tramway and for the The Telegraph that gets built in South America by companies from North America, by U.S. and Canadian concerns who were building these kinds of infrastructures in North America. And they were like, Hey, we want some other options. So they went to South America and Central America and started building tramways and telegraph lines, et cetera and the phone. And then to the next step that came with it was an electrification and the electrification of Brazil. So Brazil sort of a major leader in this. The electrification of Brazil came from Canadians in the late 19th century who had just finished installing a hydroelectric dam in Niagara, and they went to Brazil and basically did the same thing.

Speaker3: [00:26:52] So Brazil gets electrified by Canadians and by the Canadians who are making a choice for hydroelectricity to help power, to help power transport and to help power communications and the sort of extended across the continent. This choice for hydroelectricity. The other challenge was that at the time that South America was being electrified, coal deposits really high quality coal deposits hadn't been identified. And and the North Atlantic, the fossil fuel of choice in the North Atlantic at that point was predominantly coal. It wasn't. It wasn't petroleum. And so because of a lack of really great coal deposits, there was greater investment in hydroelectricity. And once you get this is also a question of dependency. So you got know how for how to build these things, you got some infrastructure that was high tension power lines transporting electricity from hydroelectric dams, and then it just snowballed. Now how this matters in terms of politics and economics, I think, is really important because it helps us understand the development of the 20th century in South America. But it also points to problems and opportunities in the twenty first century because we need to talk about the difference between water and hydrocarbons.

Speaker3: [00:28:06] We need to talk about the difference between water and coal, natural gas and petroleum. And this is what I mean when I use the term hydro politics. I'm trying to point out the fact that materiality really matters. The materiality of water is foundational to the kind of economy and politics that can be built on an electrification based on water. And so water has really important material differences from predominantly. So I really want to talk about like coal and petroleum. First of all, water has other uses besides just energy extraction. And in fact, it has more important uses than energy extraction. We use it for agriculture, we use it for industrial processes, we use it for hygiene and we have to drink it. Second, for something like a hydroelectric dam, the temporality is important for hydroelectricity, which is that production and consumption have to be constantly synchronized. You can't store hydroelectricity. It has to be consumed at the moment it's generated, implying this constant coordination and constant communication between supply and demand. And because you can't store it, whereas you can store coal or you can store petroleum, you can't change the market for it really easily. You sort of have to know exactly where the market is going to be the moment you generate, and that leads to the question of space. So the specialization of hydroelectricity is different from the specialization of fossil fuel based electricity sources, because what you can do with fossil fuels is that if you don't like a market for it because you can store it, you can find new markets for it, but for electricity and for hydroelectricity.

Speaker3: [00:29:54] Locations of supply and locations of demand are permanently connected through high tension power lines. They're connected through this infrastructure that you can't just pick up and move. And so that means that hydroelectricity implies a level of integration that fossil fuels do not necessarily entail. So it implies an integration within a country or in the case of Paraguay and Brazil. It involves a regional integration or a binational integration, and that means that the electricity is so very clearly a question of politics. It's so clearly a question of in Paraguay and Brazil. It's it's a linguistic question, right? There are two languages that this electricity operates in. It's a question of of culture and social history. And so those are some fundamental differences between fossil fuels and water. Now what this what this means for the future is a question of what kind of politics will arise in a post fossil fuel world. And I think that is the that's a question that. Book hints at. And I think it's a really important question to tackle.

Speaker2: [00:31:02] Mm hmm. Yeah. And and I I really appreciate the way you're tackling it through the social material form of what you're calling hydro politics. And these hydro politics, as you mentioned, are a kind of political economy that arises through the industrialization and the electrification of water essentially right, the kind of infrastructural work that goes into making a dam and creating these high tension wires and creating that relationship. I'd love to hear you talk a bit more about how these two substances isn't really the right word. That's not the right word for electricity, but one of the arguments you make is that the electricity that the dam produces goes way beyond just being an energy source, and it goes way beyond just being a source of income or revenue. But it it becomes this kind of sociopolitical substance almost, and one that's deeply connected to questions of sovereignty. And so I'd love to to hear you talk a little bit about how electricity creates a form of sovereignty or a set of sovereign relationships that tack back and forth and how that might be different from the sovereignty or set of relationships of sovereignty that we see in water? Is there a way that we distinguish those two or do they? I mean, in the dam, they come together. But is there a way to sort of abstract them and separate them? Do you see different forms of sovereignty and finally get into my question? Do you see different forms of sovereignty arising out of the relationship that people have with electricity versus the kinds of sovereignty that people have in their relationship with water?

Speaker3: [00:32:38] I love this question.

Speaker2: [00:32:40] It took me. It took me 20 minutes to get to it, so I'm glad you like it.

Speaker3: [00:32:44] No, I really love this question because I'm because I think what it helps us do is it helps us destabilize what we mean when we say the word sovereignty. I think that at least within anthropology following nine eleven, we we started really focusing on sovereignty as a question of of politics, of the state operating on the human body and spaces and states of exception. And and this genealogy that is very connected to O'Gorman. And I think this stuff is really, really great. But the question that you're asking Simone is a question about how we understand sovereignty in terms of not just the human body, but non-human bodies. And the question of can can we think about different kinds of sovereignties and how how how is the sovereignty that goes around electricity, perhaps and hydroelectricity? How is that perhaps different from water? So let's start by thinking about some of the similarities. So water and electricity flow, and this makes them really hard to establish claims on in some way. Right? You can sort of you can establish a claim to land to dry land much more easily than you can establish a claim to water because water is constantly moving and electricity, by definition, is something that must flow. Otherwise, it's not electricity because electricity is not electrons, it's the movement of positive and negative. So it's super abstract. So part. I think part of the challenge is that if we move from land to water to electricity, they become increasingly difficult to plant a flag on. And yet, at least in the case of Paraguay and Brazil, the electricity because of the histories of the two countries.

Speaker3: [00:34:32] So Paraguay and Brazil, as as I mentioned, were involved in a war in the 19th century, which is really important in Paraguay's national imaginary. It's the war of the triple alliance where Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay combined to invade Paraguay and Paraguay lost this war. It's the bloodiest war in the Western Hemisphere, and it's constantly mentioned in Paraguay. It's impossible to overstate the significance of this war. And so Paraguay's relationship with Brazil is asymmetrical in terms of size, but also asymmetrical in terms of history. And so for Paraguay, it was really important to find ways to define its electricity. And what's weird about this is that electricity is not something that's it's not. I mean, it is naturally occurring, but but you have to have sort of extreme instances to usually have it occur, right? So prior, prior to the 19th century, basically you got electricity when you were like flying a kite and it got struck by lightning. There wasn't just something that people encountered all the time. And so one of the things that's important about how electric sovereignty happens or how hydroelectric sovereignty happens is that you get the invention of a kind of sovereignty at the same time as you. It's coterminous with the construction of infrastructure as opposed to land or water, which exist maybe separately of human intervention. You can't get. Electric sovereignty without human intervention in construction or the production of electricity itself. But for Paraguay, sovereignty vis a vis Brazil and vis a vis Argentina are ever present anxieties. And so in part, why, when when the plan was to build this dam, I just want to give like maybe an instance from the book that helps highlight how Paraguayans talk about sovereignty and how they resolve sovereignty tensions.

Speaker3: [00:36:24] So, so so Brazil gets electrified by Canadians, which means it gets its electric grid, gets built with with 60 Hertz infrastructure. So it's great at 60 Hertz. Paraguay gets electrified by Argentina, and Argentina got electrified through some German concerns. So Argentina is on the hertz that's more common in Europe, which is 50 hertz. And so what that means is that Paraguay and Brazil actually have different hertz. And so when you build a dam. The question is what? What frequency does it generate electricity? And so the original sketches for the dam, because all the electricity is going to go to Brazil had the all the turbines, including Paraguay's turbines, generating electricity at 60 hertz for Brazil. This caused a huge scandal in Paraguay. It caused such a huge scandal that people were tortured and exiled in protest around this. I mean, it's not minor. This wasn't like engineers being upset. This was students in the streets. It was a really, really big deal because Paraguayans were saying our electricity needs to be at the same hertz as our country because it turns out that frequency is a matter of patriotism. And so there were protests on the street from the early nineteen seventies through the late nineteen seventies. Business got involved because the large capitalist interests in Paraguay were operating on 50 hertz. And so you had leftist student groups allied with traditional industry all protesting the Paraguayan government because the Paraguayan government was seen as conceding too much to Brazil in the construction of this dam.

Speaker3: [00:37:57] And basically what happens is there was a secret meeting. It looks like it was a secret meeting intellectual brass, which is the Brazilian electricity company, and in Marathi, which is the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, they have this rule confab and made an announcement that they were going to change the plans. The the technical blueprints for the dam. And what they were going to do is they were going to divide the turbines and have half of the turbines operating at 50 hertz and half of the turbines operating at 60 hertz, which actually meant you had to construct entirely different turbines. So the mechanics of them are totally different. This isn't just like you put a different switch. It was actually like you had different sized turbines, different weights. They actually generate slightly different quantities of electricity because they're rotating differently. I mean, it's all very technical, but this was this was seen as a matter of sovereignty. And so Paraguay has its hertz, its turbines, its frequency and its electricity is is sovereign in that way. And then Brazil has a totally different frequency, totally different turbines, totally different hertz. And Brazil's territory is therefore very clear. So to your question, Simone, what are some differences in terms of thinking about sovereignty in electricity versus water? I think I think the question is infrastructure. Infrastructure is what makes sovereignty necessary, but also what makes sovereignty claims possible in terms of electricity.

Speaker2: [00:39:24] Yeah, I think that's a great insight. It's true. It's it's a kind of mediation. All tools that allow for people to imagine or to have sovereignty through electricity is through these infrastructural means and contraptions like turbines and and wires and high tension capacities and each of these things.

Speaker1: [00:39:47] So I wanted to ask just to kind of keep on this story of this really fascinating, I guess, kind of David and Goliath partnership, right? You got this huge, huge country and then a smaller, a very small country. And then, you know, the economies are of different size. They have this complicated kind of brutal history together, and they go in on this massive infrastructural project. And I think the many things that fascinated me about the book was the discussion of the debt payments and the tariffs, right? Which again, sounds technical, but it really is an important part of this kind of negotiation of sovereignty around the debt. In other words, who thinks they paid what to build this dam in the first place? Who is owed what you know in terms of repayments? And then the idea that, you know, through some shenanigans, the tariffs may have been set too low so that you know, you're getting the squeeze on the less powerful partner's side in terms of extraction of resources and are not giving them what they deserve in terms of selling the electricity. Because, as you pointed out, most of the electricity is being sold to Brazil, even if, like in some sense, half of it is Paraguay. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that story?

Speaker3: [00:40:52] Yes, absolutely. And I mean, I think you're super correct to point out that this is the stuff that is part. Absolutely. I actually personally think the electricity is what has the potential to transform both Paraguay and Brazil. But in terms of what people get really interested in, particularly in Paraguay and when the Brazilians learn about this stuff, they get super keen on it. It has to do with the money because it turns out that food doesn't just generate electricity, it generates money. And the money is super, super, super controversial. So I think we have to start with some basic the basic foundation of the dam in terms of its finances. The first thing is that by treaty, the dam operates in U.S. dollars, so Paraguay has its own currency. Brazil has its own currency book, but the dam, as part of a way to show its status as a space of exception outside and within both governments. So it's binational, so it has to respect the sovereignty of both countries. So it operates in a currency that is neutral. So the first thing is it's in dollars and

Speaker1: [00:41:54] You call them hydro

Speaker3: [00:41:55] Dollars, and I call them hydro dollars because I'm trying to think through how money works in the dam. So I'm trying to use the CPU and hydroelectricity as a foil for fossil fuels to help us understand where we are making, where we have these unmarked expectations around politics and economics that come from. The fact that actually the energy source that we're using is fossil fuels. And so so the counter that I want to make when I use the word hydro is the distinction from petro dollars. So petrodollars, it could be thought of as multiple things, right? It could be the the income that our country receives from selling petroleum. But it could also refer to what happens to the economy in general when all of a sudden there's a flood of dollars in an economy because of oil purchases, because fossil fuels operate in dollars sort of by default, not internationally, but hydro dollars are by treaty intention in Paraguay and Brazil. And so and so I want to think about how energy monies differ based on the actual materiality of the energy. So E-Type operates in hydro dollars. The next thing is it is not for profit organisation. It was built by two governments and particularly it's co-owned by the public utilities of Paraguay and Brazil.

Speaker3: [00:43:17] Although Brazil's public utility is now partially privatized and the current president of Brazil has plans to privatize it fully. But so. So it was built by the governments in order to develop both countries. So it's supposed to be absolutely not for profit, which means it's supposed to operate on equilibrium. That means that there is no excess and there should be no debt. But really, big dams like this get built because of debt. And so you you just cannot find out something this huge out of pocket, in part because of the risk, in part because dams takes so much time to build. And the thing about hydroelectricity is, like I said, you have to have a market exactly when it's being produced. But hydroelectric dams take a really long time to build, so you have to wait a long time before you actually start generating electricity. And there are very few institutions that have the capacity to invest so much money in something with no immediate return. So, so they're their debt financed and and this is really also important. So Typekit is supposed to be absolutely supposed to operate at cost and its debt financed. So what this means is that the tariff, which is the electricity price, is supposed to cover costs, and this is a treaty mandated formula that is at the center of a lot of debate between in Paraguay and Brazil today because of an upcoming negotiation in twenty twenty three.

Speaker3: [00:44:40] But so the basic tariff of food is supposed to cover its expenses, and those expenses are operations costs. So maintenance and salaries, it's supposed to cover fees to the governments to eat. The WHO is actually not allowed to be taxed by the government. So what they did is they invented fees in lieu of taxes. So operations costs these payments to the government and debt and the tariff is supposed to equal that. And the formula is you have the expenses which are operations, debt and fees to the government divided by the production of the electricity. And this is something that is determined every year in council meetings by the council, which is bi national, has Brazilians and Paraguayans, and they make decisions. Now what actually happens is a couple of things with the debt. The first thing is, has there ever been an infrastructural project that did not go longer and cost more than planned? I mean, I'm curious.

Speaker2: [00:45:39] That's a rhetorical question, Christine.

Speaker3: [00:45:42] You know, I don't know. No, I just I mean, it's possible in the history of humanity. It is possible. But like most infrastructural projects, it took longer to build and cost more than originally planned. So in nineteen seventy three, the original sketches the original. Feasibility studies put E-Type Blue as costing two billion dollars, including interest. Ok, so so that was the original price and the idea was in nineteen seventy three. They were like, and we're going to start generating electricity in eighty two or eighty three. So we think it's eighty two, but maybe we'll just stretch it to eighty three. Just to be safe. So we know we'll be able to start paying back our debt in 1983. So it's going to take 10 years. But what happened in the nineteen seventies was a few things. First of all, you have the oil crisis and what happened was that credit dried up globally. It was just harder to get loans for anything. And so it was basically it was harder to find credit. So what the owners of E-Type who did is they said, well, Pargo doesn't really have any collateral to bring to a negotiation. So the government of Brazil is going to have to actually secure all of the debt, including Paraguay's. Half that's in scare quotes, Paraguay's half. So the government of Brazil goes out and looks for credit, but has a hard time finding it. So what happens is the government of Brazil decides to loan money to the dam itself, and this is in the form of electro brass, which is the electricity company that is co-owner with Paraguay's electricity company of E-Types.

Speaker3: [00:47:13] And so what happened is you got this weird little circle where instead of electric brass securing debt, electric press was offering debt to Paraguay. I'm sorry to eat that. So that's one thing. So credit dries up. But what also happens is that costs go up. So materials are more expensive. There's huge controversies in Paraguay about the hurts that nobody anticipated, and so everything starts getting more complicated and more expensive. And then there's the expected thievery and graft where there was just a lot of overcharging. And I don't like to use the word corruption because I think that's a social claim and not actually a description of any very much, but basically where there was my on the phone lost, so money was spent in ways that it was not supposed to be spent. So the cost of GPU goes up. The construction takes a lot longer and you have this weird little thing happening where part of the money that's being loaned to GPU is being loaned deepu by one of its owners. This is the setup for the nineteen eighties. So in the nineteen eighties, you know, originally the plans were that E-Type would start generating electricity in eighty two and it would be commercialized in eighty three.

Speaker3: [00:48:23] And so the loans had a grace period until eighty three. But turbine construction takes a lot longer, and so it starts generating electricity in eighty four and starts selling it in eighty five. Ok, so you've got a couple of years of loans that have gone out of their grace periods and interest rates starting to skyrocket or interest rates sort of causing compound interest and therefore the debt to rise. And then you get eighty five now. Eighty five is really important because that's the first time you're going to put a price on the electricity and you can figure out exactly what the electricity is supposed to cost to cover the expenses. So remember, the expenses are debt operations and fees to government. And in the Typekit Council meeting, they did all the math and they were like, All right, we need to set a price at fourteen dollars per kilowatt month in order to pay off this year's expenses. And when electric bass heard this, they looked at it and they said, Well, the Brazilian market can't handle that price. The Brazilian market is in shambles, and if we put it at fourteen dollars per kilowatt month, it's going to be too expensive. So what we want you to do is instead of charging 14, we want you to charge ten dollars per kilowatt month. And this created some difficulty. But since Brazil is the major market, they've got to set the price.

Speaker3: [00:49:42] So for that year, undercharged on its electricity, according to the treaty specifications for how to figure out the electricity price. And so what this meant was that for that year, it had some income, but its income couldn't cover its expenses. So it was paid its fees to the government. It paid its salaries and it paid part of its debt. But it didn't pay electric brass, all of its debt, and so electric brass debt started to grow because of underpayment. That was eighty five, but the council members were super, super hopeful that it'd be different for eighty six. But electric brass came back and said, no, it needs to be the same, and they did this from nineteen eighty five until the mid nineties. And so what happened from eighty five to ninety three? The debt quadrupled. So, right. So originally in seventy three people thought it was going to be $2 billion. That was naive and hopeful. But in the early eighties, it was like four billion and then it jumped to 16 billion and then it jumped to 60 billion. So this is and most of the growth of the debt was electric bass. So electric Greece's debt ended up being 60 billion, is the total that will have paid in. Twenty twenty three on its construction debt. Thirty two billion of that is Electra Brass. So this is a huge amount of money.

Speaker3: [00:51:05] And so this created a huge crisis in ninety three because Brazil's economy was still a little rocky and and there was sort of a problem with payment in ninety three. And it became so clearly a crisis that the two governments started a new negotiation around the debt in the mid-nineties. And so what they did is they met for three years and then what they basically did is electro brass lowered its interest rate. Etp finally raised its tariff to the minimum necessary to cover its debt. And and then there were new infrastructural plans that were also agreed upon. So, so it was sort of partially resolved in nineteen eighty six and it looked fine and the debt is being consistently paid off, and it looks like the debt will be paid off by twenty twenty three, which is what was stipulated in the original treaty. But in Paraguay, why people are really mad about this because everybody in Paraguay knew that there were some shenanigans happening in terms of the electricity price. They knew that part of what was happening was that electric brass was pressuring EDF to charge less than what would be necessary to meet its minimum obligation payment and that therefore electric brass would be making all this money. Or Brazil was up to something, and Paraguay was a little bit unclear as to as to what was happening, but they were quite suspicious.

Speaker1: [00:52:20] It really, you know, and you talk a little bit about Grey-Bruce work on debt here, and you really see how the messed up kind of social relationship with these two countries is getting quantified, both in terms of the the low tariffs which are really beneficial to Brazilian consumers, I'd imagine, as well as in the the debt that is owed to the Brazilian institution here being allowed to swell so that eventually they get a nice tithe of that too. It kind of all fits together. And I wanted to ask you, Christine, just on the ethnographic side of it, the human dimension part of it. I mean, you have this really fascinating conversations throughout the book that you have with, I suppose you would call them the technocrats, you know, the people who are managing the dam and who are negotiating all these matters around its debt and other things. And they're pretty interesting group of people. I mean, one of them is like quoting fuko to you. Another one is like citing Hannah Arendt, you know, it's like it's it must be an interesting space to be in. As an anthropologist, I just want to ask if you could talk a little bit about that, like what? What the fieldwork was like.

Speaker3: [00:53:19] Yeah. So I think a lot about Laura Nader's work here. So Laura Nader called on and has called not just past tense, has called on anthropologists to study up and to study things that are wonky. And so what that means is I love anthropology. I think anthropology is amazing in terms of how diverse our field sites are. But she pointed out, I mean, she was pointing this out in like the seventies that our field sites were notable in what they did not address. So we would not necessarily address issues of electricity. We address issues of religion, or we'd go to maybe communities that were marginalized, but we weren't necessarily in boardrooms. And this research project went into boardrooms, and this research project worked with people who write could quote and read trends or fuko and who understood what I was doing right, who understood what a PhD was. I think that that was both great, but also super daunting because there was they got the questions I was asking and they understood the ramifications of it. And it put me in this situation where I was like, You know, I'm very, very vulnerable or very exposed here, right? And so I think that that but I think that that's what happens when we work with people who are elites in some way. And so, so so they speak English, for example, they don't just speak Spanish or they speak English and German and Spanish, right? They're their polyglot. And they they get into really wonky conversations about megawatts and price per kilowatt month, like the currency of the realm gets to be this really technical information.

Speaker3: [00:55:03] I think one of the things that happened for me while I was on the field was I spent a lot of time with engineers and I had to actually learn like the physics of the dam in order to just be able to understand what they were talking to me about and in order to get a little bit more of their confidence or their trust. Because for them, for the engineers and for the energy managers of the dam, some of whom were technically engineers and some of whom were not this stuff, the technical stuff which can feel like super boring actually was really important. Even though I was an anthropologist, even though I wasn't like trying to build a dam, I was just trying to study it. It was important that we that that I understood and could speak the same language, right? So the translation question is not do I speak Spanish? The question is like, do I speak math? And so I think that that's part of the human dimension, I think. I gonna say it's really valuable to study elites, and particularly in terms of we have this larger question in academia about academia in the United States is a constant political question like what just happened in Alaska, where it's public education system was entirely gutted is not an aberration. This is a central question in our society right now. What is academia good for? And I think it's really important for anthropologists to take that question seriously. And I think one way to take that question seriously is to study people for whom it's really hard to get access to them.

Speaker1: [00:56:39] Yeah, I'm sure it was a long road to get there, but I think it's really marvelous and it's great how you're able to kind of balance, you know, the technical details of what's going on in a way that I think is really informative and clear along these like these really fascinating social and political dynamics and complexities. So kudos to you. I thought it was a great read.

Speaker2: [00:57:00] Yeah, yeah, it's super interesting. So, Christine, as a kind of outro and big picture question, you know, you've spent many years studying this very interesting and emblematic, maybe even paradigmatic case of cooperation, but also tension between primarily these two nation states around this infrastructure of energy, sovereignty, patrimony and and hydropower. And I wanted to ask you whether you see any lessons for the world community, if you will, as we go into yet another meeting of the parties in Glasgow. It looks like at the end of twenty twenty twenty six as we think about the ways in which the Paris climate accord has been useful and but perhaps not as implemented as it might have been as we see further disintegration between states and governing parties about how to pursue climate remediation. Did you find any lessons between these two countries and their treatment of power and energy and politics that might be useful in a larger, universal and global dimension?

Speaker3: [00:58:14] Absolutely. I think that the first point that I would point that I would address is that and this is sort of it's obvious, but sometimes it needs to be stated again. It's that the climate question is not a technical question of engineering. It is a technical question of social science. Nice. It's a technical question of politics, of culture, of history, sociology, just to name discipline, and that in order to tackle the climate crisis, the real problems are on that side. And yet one of the really interesting lessons about the dam is that sometimes you can solve social and political and cultural and historical problems through physical infrastructure. And so there is a real role for engineers who can figure out smart ways to outsmart political divisions or deep historical memory. And so it's really important to have at the table people from these different disciplines and who are deeply rooted in their disciplines and who take very seriously their disciplines and who know how to listen to people from other disciplines and realize that the answer is going to be in the interest decease. I think that that's the first takeaway. I see. I see this as part of what's happening in cop, but I think it needs to be taken to a different level, a different level of intensity. And I think that this then speaks to a lot of the work, for example, that you all are doing at rice and that rice is doing in general. Rice takes really seriously the math and the science of this, but it's also investing really heavily.

Speaker3: [00:59:50] And I think the work of both of you is emblematic of this, but also not exceptional. It is absolutely part of what Rice is doing in this. There's a deep commitment and it's across disciplines. It's across departments to putting people into conversations across disciplinary boundaries, around questions like climate crisis, ecological crisis, the Anthropocene, et cetera. I think I think it requires this deep institutional commitment. And so I love what cultures of energy is doing as a as a podcast. But I also love what Rice is doing in terms of this right. And I think that as we look at what's happening in COP26 and larger climate questions, we're going to need engineers who really listen to historians. And that means so. So the next step is this is a question. This is sort of like what lessons might be learned for us in U.S. universities and for us as anthropologists. It's going to be really important for us to learn different languages and to learn to talk. Two experts in other fields about how our research is not just fun and interesting, but actually helps unlock some of the tensions and some of the puzzles that they can't work out on on their spreadsheets or in their problem sets. So I think the interdisciplinarity of it is a real it's a real lesson learned. I think the other thing I would say is that I think that there is when I was doing this research, Latin America was undergoing this effervescence of progressive governments, and there is a sense that there were leftist governments that were and progressive governments that wanted to think internationally, that wanted to think about social justice and wanted to connect social justice to their economies, et cetera.

Speaker3: [01:01:43] And so there was a lot of hope that this was like, now this is the new direction. It was this post neoliberal, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's like two thousand seven, twenty eight thousand nine thousand ten, twenty eleven twenty twelve and we're in twenty nineteen. And we have seen that history does not have a direction that we can easily map. And we see a move for right of center governments who are excited about letting cattle ranchers burn the Amazon and other really important forests in South America. So the Amazon is on fire. But it's not just the Amazon that's on fire. Southern Brazil and Paraguay and Bolivia share a border where this is a beautiful swamp. And that is also on fire. And so I think the lesson to be learned in that is that a choice for renewable energy is not necessarily progressive and governments aren't necessarily making progress. It's not by default that governments will make progressive choices. There has to be real, intentional political commitments over time to make this work because there are a lot of interests political and economic in the world at play right now on the rise right now, which are not just climate change skeptical and I think that urgency. I think that urgency also underlies the upcoming cop conversations. That's great.

Speaker1: [01:03:03] Yeah, it's great. Thank you for making that point. I mean, we can't lose sight of the fact that, you know, the Bolsonaro regime is hydro powered, you know, to a great extent. And and that, you know, yeah, exactly that. One of the lessons of Latin America is it's not just enough who's giving you your electrons, so to speak. It's like it really matters what the political institutions are and the the ideologies and so forth, and the democratic or not commitments as we're seeing, you know, in Latin America and elsewhere. So yep. Well, well, thank you, Christine again for taking the time to talk with us about this marvelous book. The book Hydro Politics is just out from Princeton University Press. You should go pick up a copy of it, inform yourself. But thank you for the for the book, and we haven't had a chance to talk to you about about next next projects. But we'll pick that up next time, so we'll have a reason to keep the conversation going next time. What the next big thing is. But anyway, thank you again. So much for being with us today.

Speaker3: [01:03:54] Wonderful. Thank you so very much.

Speaker2: [01:03:56] Thanks, Christine. We'll see you soon, I think.