coe143_macdonald.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:25] Welcome cultures of energy, folk, and welcome to the next podcast, our next installment with the fantabulous Graham MacDonald, who is a professor of literature at University of Warwick. Right? Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:00:40] Are you and what did

Speaker1: [00:00:42] You do like non-British? But like wannabe British accents all the time, but I'm not going to. I'm not going to try out my garlic. I heard it pronounced as garlic, not garlic.

Speaker2: [00:00:52] I was trying to do a Scottish accent in the car, driving Bridget to school this morning, but it kept it, kept devolving into an Irish accent.

Speaker1: [00:00:58] Oh, isn't that funny? I think it's because we don't hear Scottish accents enough. Yeah. And but on this podcast, you are going to people you are going to. So it's so cool. I could just listen to Graham McDonald. Just talk endlessly. It's just like the sound, the tenor. It's just it's and the story, the content. Ok, the content, too. But also it's just fun to listen to some scotch.

Speaker2: [00:01:22] It's I think there is a certain romance to the different varieties of the English language, the different accents to it. I like to listen to a good Welsh accent, sometimes sometimes an Australian accent, you know, New Zealand accent. I'm fine.

Speaker1: [00:01:36] Oh yeah, that's a nice one. I don't think I can identify Welsh

Speaker2: [00:01:39] Exactly down the South African, but once I learned how that sound, I think I can

Speaker1: [00:01:43] Appreciate. The South African sounds kind of Dutchy, right? It's got like that cutesy German ish sound to it.

Speaker2: [00:01:49] I'm not sure. I know that I confused it with Scottish and Australian accents in various points in my life, but that's because my ear was untrained. Oh, I was uncouth.

Speaker1: [00:01:59] That's before you are cosmopolitan.

Speaker2: [00:02:01] No, I'm just I can just I'll have to do is hear people say one word like

Speaker1: [00:02:06] And you can immediately identify the county of their

Speaker2: [00:02:09] Origin. All they have to do is say the word raisin or

Speaker1: [00:02:12] Raisin or

Speaker2: [00:02:13] Bate. And then much like Sherlock Holmes, yeah, that was it. Priscilla does a list of words every week. Yes. And I was down to the end, and I try to incorporate them into funny sentences. And then my last my last sentence was head bait and raisins, and I was going to be about like, how do you? So I said, I don't believe. I don't believe in using raisins for bait.

Speaker1: [00:02:36] Me neither. Yeah, that's why we get along. Neither of us use raisins for bait.

Speaker2: [00:02:41] No, they don't really work for.

Speaker1: [00:02:42] I mean, what would you try and catch? You could catch a squirrel with one.

Speaker2: [00:02:44] Yeah, I think that's the thing about raisins. Raisins are not maybe a bird.

Speaker1: [00:02:49] Go get your bird.

Speaker2: [00:02:50] You remember growing up with the little wee boxes of raisins that would be put in our lunch or that you would sometimes get when you went to the the healthy minded Halloween houses, right? They would give you a little box of raisins. Son made some made, and I always thought I never understood why anyone would voluntarily choose those raisins. I mean, and even as life has gone on, other dried fruit are fine, but I just can't. The raisin has never excited me, so for me, it would be a very poor form of bait. And then that makes you think about, well, what would be baited by a raisin.

Speaker1: [00:03:22] Hmm. Well, I don't know. Obviously, not small children and Halloween costumes who are hankering for a small Snickers bar or better even a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

Speaker2: [00:03:33] Yeah. Or just some raisins covered with chocolate, because that's that's my weak point. I do like a raisin.

Speaker1: [00:03:38] That's raisin. That's yeah,

Speaker2: [00:03:40] I like Raisinets chocolate covered raisins. I have a real soft spot for. So that's another kind of paradox.

Speaker1: [00:03:44] And I do like the humble raisin. It's just that you don't believe in that 1970s jingoistic thing where they said nature's candy, that nature's candy.

Speaker2: [00:03:53] The other thing is all the reasons we're sick together into one kind of hyper object of raisins and them. And then you'd have to figure out how you're going to swallow that. And the older they were, the drier.

Speaker1: [00:04:03] Well, I think you're supposed to pick it apart or swallow it whole. I don't swallow a raisin wad,

Speaker2: [00:04:10] Whole raisin wad. That's that's the unit. A unit of multiple raisins is the wad. Yeah, I believe on that.

Speaker1: [00:04:17] Well, there are also always kind of desiccated too, because the little box, even though it was wax and, you know, folded clothes, it wasn't airtight. And so the raisins around the edges were always a little extra dried out. I mean, I know that a raisin is a dried grape anyway, but it was always a little extra dry coming out of those small boxes.

Speaker2: [00:04:37] Yeah, exactly. So among the many banalities we've shared with you on this podcast, that has to be like top five. Our conversation about raisins as bait, folks. Other things are happening.

Speaker1: [00:04:49] Yeah, like hurricanes. Do you want to give us the the update on the hurricane sitch?

Speaker2: [00:04:53] Well, we had a, you know, our usual faculty meeting, which wasn't too exciting. So I did take a moment during the faculty meeting to to zip over to CNN to see that they were starting to post videos of massive waves pounding the shore of the Carolinas and I guess, a pier getting destroyed. But I know this is only just beginning to any of our listeners who are in the Carolinas. We feel, you know, that sounds creepy. We feel for you. We feel for you. We feel

Speaker1: [00:05:21] Your we wish you

Speaker2: [00:05:21] Well. We are sending positive energy away because it was a year ago around this time that we had four days of ceaseless rain, and so we know exactly what that feels like, and they are projecting in some areas like 30 plus inches, which is a lot of rain. And in addition to high winds and everything else, I guess the one good thing is that it seems as if the hurricane slowed down a wee bit as it got closer to the coast. It was only only a Category two. So that's a little good news, but otherwise I think it's going to be pretty, pretty bad stuff. So fingers crossed.

Speaker1: [00:05:55] Ok, well, let us slow down the winds. So we have Graham on the podcast today. What do we talk about?

Speaker2: [00:06:02] Well, we're talking to Graham about his work, and we talk a lot about science fiction. Yeah, it was fun. Let's have a good conversation about science fiction and, you know, oil, especially in modern fiction more generally. So in kind of the I think what we were struggling with in the conversation was thinking about to what extent. I mean, we know that all fiction written today is petro fiction kind of by default because we live in a petro fuelled society and it petro culture runs deep and saturates everything. But we're kind of wondering about what's the capacity within this world we live in for alternative imaginaries? Yes, of fuel, of ways of life. And one of the things that's stayed with me from this conversation is where he says, I'm not sure whether we're yet capable of thinking about a non-carbon democracy and what that would look like. So that's a kind of powerful, powerful thing to think about.

Speaker1: [00:06:55] I think I thought of Herman Scheer when he mentioned that, but I don't know, you know, I mean, she kind of goes, he's interested in the solar economy, totally decarbonised and a very different form of participatory democracy. I would say I don't think he calls it participatory, but that's what he's getting at. But that's still yet in the imaginary form, not yet realized.

Speaker2: [00:07:15] And later on in the fall, we are going to get a conversation about solar punk going, Oh, cool. A still to be named mystery guest. But that is coming. So we will get into maybe more of that a bit later on. For now, any other thoughts you want to close out on before we turn things over to our favorite quinoa sandwich vending and Buckfast swilling Scotsman, by the way. Graham said he had drunk Buckfast since he was 15, so I'm just besmirching his name.

Speaker1: [00:07:43] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker2: [00:07:45] We have had so much more Buckfast in the past, let's say, month than Graham has had.

Speaker1: [00:07:50] Oh, we were making money last time.

Speaker2: [00:07:52] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker1: [00:07:53] Yeah. Yes. Fingers crossed that that no one gets too injured or too blown away in the Carolinas. And let us imagine the very windy, often domains of the Scottish Highlands and moss and grouse and rocky cliffs and shores.

Speaker2: [00:08:14] Do you mean grouse or gorse gorse?

Speaker1: [00:08:15] That's what I wanted to say. Grouse is a bird,

Speaker2: [00:08:17] It is a gorse. But I kind of feel like there might be grouse in Scotland, too. But gorse, of course, is the thing is the is that plant that's kind of northerly, but has the beautiful yellow flowers.

Speaker1: [00:08:26] It's really sharp. It's like Jesus level crown of thorns, sharp, like really, really big thorns. But we have a similar looking bush like a large bush called it's called Scotch Scotch brush. Yeah, Scotch brush that has those beautiful yellow flowers, too. But it's not sharp. But no, it's called gorse gorse.

Speaker2: [00:08:48] So thanks for listening, everyone. We'll be back at you next week. And meanwhile, I hope you enjoy our conversation about Scotland and sci fi and petro fiction and so much more.

Speaker1: [00:09:00] Go great. Well, I'm going to say welcome, Graham MacDonald, so good to have you on the line.

Speaker3: [00:09:24] Thank you. Great to be here. Among the superstar DJs of energy, humanity.

Speaker1: [00:09:29] That's us.

Speaker2: [00:09:30] Hey, speaking of that, we have a new sponsor today. It's Buckfast, tonic wines, Buckfast, tonic wines. You know, it's not just about stabbing your mate anymore, it's about the health benefits of a large dose of caffeine and ethanol mixed together, right?

Speaker3: [00:09:49] We're getting back to Euston in Scotland after all the money that you gave us in the 60s for setting up the North Sea oil. We thought we'd give you our own particular tonic liquid back.

Speaker2: [00:10:01] Someday we're going to get to see an actual bottle of Buckfast. But then we're going to save that for our next visit to Glasgow. It was an enchanting event. Congratulations, sir, on your successful steering of the marvellous petrol culture's 2018 event. I know you had a bit of help, but it felt to me as though you were the one responsible for keeping good cheer and keeping everyone kind of focused on not only the intellectual side of things, but on the social and environmental sides of things in the broadest sense. And it was a superb event, so we just wanted to thank you for that.

Speaker3: [00:10:35] I was not the one responsible for the couscous sandwiches. Ok, that was not me.

Speaker1: [00:10:43] You did not do that

Speaker3: [00:10:46] Thing to say, but I just like to put that on record right now. No, I had actually, we had a very able core organizers and are very much co organizers. And Janet Stewart, my friend and colleague from the University of Durham, and Rhys Williams, who as was my former PhD student and is now an excellent energy humanity scholar in his own right, and he is at the University of Glasgow. So, yeah, but it really it really kicked off by Jonah and I attending the third conference in Twenty Sixteen and Newfoundland, and at the end of it sort of standing up on Signal Hill, looking across the Atlantic and thinking, Hmm, maybe it's maybe it's our turn. Maybe it's time to take it across the water. And we weren't frustrated at all at the last one because it was like all the events I've done. It was snowballing and size and range. But also you have been in Canada and we knew that there was a kind of a sizable constituency of people who are obviously working in a number of different fields. And we're also interested in the work that had been done and started by the folks at Alberta and then Montreal and then Newfoundland, and they couldn't make it across for various reasons.

Speaker3: [00:12:02] And of course, the discipline itself, as you guys are well aware, has just expanded and expanded. It's really exploded. So it was really great to just see how many people would come if we if we had it in Glasgow. And the reason we had it in Glasgow was because the three of us were all at some point attached to it and are still attached to the university. And we thought it would be a great place to have it, you know, for for reasons we might want to get into to do with Scotland's particular position as an oily and maybe post-oil nation. And then we rebuilt it and we were terrified actually about a adhere to that prior to the call for papers closing because we will be pretty happy with about 80 bodies that were going to come over if we got 80, that had been fine and have been good for us, leaving a good, sizable conference and then they just poured in from everywhere we heard in the end. Two hundred and thirty five on average per day registered delegates from about twenty five different countries. Wow. Wow, that was really fantastic. Actually, it's impressive.

Speaker1: [00:13:04] So Graham, what do you think like in terms of big picture? Why is it that Petro cultures is growing in popularity? Why is it important? What is it that scholars and others are finding in the petro cultural imaginary that continues to excite and draw people in? And from your perspective?

Speaker3: [00:13:24] Well, I mean, it's it's a question I think of. Obviously, all the work that's been done in environmental humanities. It's interesting to want to work out whether or not energy, humanities, petrol cultures are all kind of folded into that. That's a larger project to do with energy, environmentalism, environmental, humanities, or whether or not there are kind of like autonomous things in their own right with a number of different connections backwards and forwards. But I think that there's such an enormous galvanizing, disciplinary, disruptive thing that's going on across all of our disciplines to do, of course, with the question of what comes after oil sounds as simple as that. Yeah, and how we're actually figuring that out is actually pretty challenging. I mean, one of one of the hardest things, but and one of the most frustrating but also challenging things paradoxically for me and. But the latest petrol cultures conference was just kind of figuring out what to attend. I mean, we really tried to get people not to stick to their own disciplinary silos. So if you liked, you could have really went to your conference.

Speaker3: [00:14:32] It's just the way it worked. But we tried to force people, not force people. We try to entice people to move out of, say, the science fiction silos and head to a session on energy democracy or a session on lithium batteries in Bolivia to go to a session on Bogalay. As I believe the new restoration technologies called That's Code and just move backwards and forwards and try to figure out exactly how it all melded together and help their own work. And I guess if we're going to be environmental activists about it, the real thing is people have a real sense that what they do as academics has to involve a future after oil somehow, and how they're going to do that is not decided upon. But certainly, it seems to me that the first measures we have to get involved with are getting together and figuring out how we all approach it. Even if it's chucking a whole bunch of different approaches and perspectives at the larger problem of one point five degrees of us, we might want to call it being dramatic.

Speaker2: [00:15:34] Yeah, yeah, or not being so dramatic with Hurricane Florence barreling its way towards the United States as we speak. I wanted to ask you, Graham, maybe to tell us a little bit about how you first got interested. I mean, we met you through the petrochemicals network and through, of course, our common friend, Emerson Man, some years back. But I was interested to to hear a little bit more about how you got interested in in oil and whether it had anything to do with, you know, kind of growing up in Scotland in this really rich and diverse energy landscape, but it kind of threshold of transition? Or was this something completely unrelated?

Speaker3: [00:16:07] Well, I mean, someone asked me that question and I thought, Yeah, well, that's a good question. What is it? Do you do you basically go back to the subjective right and the biographical and think, Well, what was it about me that was surrounding me that really made this thing conscious? Or, you know, at some point, what what was going to draw out in your studies? Because effectively, I mean, about maybe seven or eight years ago, I was working on a book on Scottish writing actually and world literature, and it was frustrating me that I just couldn't. There was something kind of largely missing from it in terms of an environmental track because we do quite pretty well in terms of environmental writers and, you know, of landscape, that kind of thing. Nature writing and so on. And then in Scotland itself, the constitutional question has been burning away for some time, and it started to gather speed and roundabout about it, in fact, was wrapped up. And the question of, I mean, any kind of constitutional question to do with see the nature of the break up of the British state or independence involves inevitably how you're going to power the country that you're in or other policy that might be in the next 20 or 30 years. And the fact is, in the UK, energy and its relationship to political independence has been prominent since the discovery of North Sea oil and in the nineteen seventies and in fact, maybe even arguably before that in terms of the kind of post imperial decline of Britain itself.

Speaker3: [00:17:31] So say all that saying all that what really got me going was the destruction of a factory down the road from where my mother and father left and a weak place called Danny, which is a former coal town. And it's about ten thousand people about twenty seventeen miles north of Glasgow, where I grew up. And behind that factory, which was the essence in the 19th century, there suddenly was revealed a thing that we always knew was there, but we didn't often go to all that much about five miles away. And that was the Grangemouth oil refinery. So the major oil refinery in the UK, where most of the oil that goes from the North Sea is refined and that was maybe five six miles away from me. As a kid, we used to look upon it as a kind of fairy tone, but we never saw it because it was just never really all that kind of visible to us and nobody ever really wanted to go there, even though a whole bunch of people live there. But it was the place where people got really good jobs. That was another thing. If you had, it was just kind of common parlance when I was a kid, someone's father.

Speaker3: [00:18:29] And it was usually the father had a job and Grangemouth quote unquote meant they were making a lot of money and they were in oil as it were. And then the other thing was that some of your friends, when you were a kid, their fathers, and again, that was usually the fathers. We'd go missing right from the mid seventies onwards and they would go missing for two weeks and then they would come back and they were off, obviously off working offshore. So even in the lowlands where I left north of Glasgow, it was very palpable in some respect. And even though some of the kind of like a metaphoric and epistemological ideas about petrol culture being a field that brings oil into visibility as very clear and it's it's a legitimate thing to see. For me, it was never really all that invisible. As such, it was kind of palpable and people's disappearances on the way that it was kind of like kept. Away from us. But you never found it, curiously, when I went to university, you never found it anywhere in the material that I was reading literature and social anthropology as a joint degree. And it was never, ever it was never apparent in any kind of explicit shape or form. And this is this is kind of what fascinates me because here was this huge thing.

Speaker3: [00:19:37] That's really extraordinary thing which arguably had created the terms for for the Thatcherite political project, which we lived through and which in many respects had actually led to the deindustrialization that brought the factory down. That could allow me to see the refinery behind it. And there was just didn't appear in any of the kind of cultural text and any kind of shit, any explicit fashion. Anyway, put it that way in the UK. And then I read actually Chris Harvey's The Scottish historian's history of North Sea Oil. That's not very many of them, curiously enough. Maybe it's because it's a relatively modern phenomenon. Anyway, he wrote. This great book called Fool's Gold, which was published in Nineteen Ninety Six, and there was a slender chapter on it called Oil Culture. And his argument was pretty much the same. It was saying, Well, you know, how come this huge thing just doesn't seem to find its way into any of the kind of cultural texts of the UK in general, but it really fringes itself into the material of Northeast Scotland. And then once you start to look as in all the disciplines, once you really start to look with a kind of with energy eyes as it were, you start to see that in fact, as they're not necessarily always explicit, but in Leeton or unconscious forms.

Speaker3: [00:20:48] And it was my favourite Scottish novel, which is a book called Lanark by the Glaswegian writer Alistair Gray, which is a science fiction novel and a realist novel boned up into one. And it's about the search for renewable energy, and I never clocked that at all. When I first read it now, it's incredibly apparent it's very much a petrol text. Mm hmm. So I got into it with that, and then I thought to myself, OK, let's try to gather some texts, maybe to put together a graduate course. This is maybe about 2011. Twenty twelve, I can't remember. And I put together this course called petrol fiction, and I got about seven or eight texts from around the world, which were from oil sites, also Saudi Arabian texts, a Scottish one, a Trinidadian text, an American one and so on, and started teaching it. And a friend of mine and the University of Warwick English Department said to me, Hey, look at this call for people. There's this thing going on in Alberta and it's a conference you might be interested. And then I looked up Mosimane's work and I emailed them and he was very he was very graceful and said, Oh yeah, we do this too. Maybe you want to come to this conference and then boom,

Speaker1: [00:21:58] The rest was history. I love the poem. I want to go back. I want to go back to the premise that in some ways got you really digging into the question of Petro fiction, Graham. And that is the apparent invisibility or spectral nature of oil among, you know, within literature and and other fictional texts. And one of the pieces you've written reflects on Amitav Ghosh's kind of famous declaration that there had been no great American oil novel, right? He did that back in the early nineteen nineties, and you go back and review that question again. Not to antagonize him, I don't think, but to really pose the question as to whether we might say that. And I'm going to I'm going to quote you here. You say all modern writing is premised on both the promise and the hidden costs and benefits of hydrocarbon culture. So if this proposition seems unwieldy, preposterous, even it is still worth thinking how oil sheer predominance within modernity means that it is everywhere in literature and yet nowhere refined enough yet to be brought to the surface of every text. And by the way, I love the the play on refined there, of course. Shout out to that moment. But I wonder if you

Speaker2: [00:23:13] Know your way around a metaphor? Great.

Speaker3: [00:23:14] Yeah, yeah. Well, we're probably one of the resources there in terms of metaphors.

Speaker1: [00:23:21] Oh, and he got another one in there. Ok. Re slash sources realty. So so tell us. Tell, expand, expand. Tell us a little bit more about how you see the the the glossy shine of petroleum across all fictional forms and narrative techniques, or many of them anyhow.

Speaker3: [00:23:44] It's a sixty four billion dollar question, doesn't it? This is a real problematic. I mean, I'm writing this book and wrestling with this idea in the first chapter about whether or not we should just consign or whether or not we should just limit our purview to tax are very obviously about oil. So it takes all about fracking. Or maybe they're about even, you know, families come in to deal with oil tragedies or something like that or whether or not actually, we should just completely just go even deeper as it were and just think about all the things that are. Ramus upon hydrocarbon culture and see if we can trace that and any of the events or movements, even the most utterly banal moments that happen and the stories that we that we relate to each other that we read and so on and so forth. And I had this kind of plan. I had this plan to maybe just pick out any book. This is what I tell my students. I say, Look, you know, forget the text that we're looking at on this course. Just go to your shelf and pull out any kind of novel, bourgeois, novel, popular novel, whatever you want. A crime fiction, or even just maybe a soap or something on Netflix, whatever. Pack it. Have a look at it and try to find the oil in it. Yeah. And you know, I looked I spent a wee bit of time looking at just one paragraph from a donor novel that I read The Goldfinch.

Speaker3: [00:25:07] I don't know if you know it. Anyway, I read it on holiday and it was just someone crossing a street in Manhattan. And I thought to myself, Right, OK, how much? How much energy does it take for this person to cross that street in Manhattan and to just go into a sandwich shop and take out the plastic covered sandwiches and go back over the road again to their house and down and switch the light on and so on and so forth. Right? No. Fine. Ok. You can find all that out, I suppose, and there are modelers and engineers that will do all that for you. But what does it do to plots? What does it do? That's what I'm kind of fascinated in being a literary scholar. What does it mean in terms of how you move, how you move and shuttle characters around how things can occur and a credible enough fashion or incredible fashion premised on the amount of energy available consciously or unconsciously to a character at any point in time. And this is what kind of fascinates me. I mean, from the passage that you just read, though, so many imagine that wasn't about oil. Let's see. We started to look for for wind, you know? Yeah. For example, I don't know for electricity. I mean, you know, scholars have already done this. I get it. But the extent to which oil is massively across everything, this is what we're commonly told, the extent to which we're petrol conscious about the degree of saturation of oil across global societies, then can we see the same thing for for alternative energy forms that sort of that sort of interest me? And also because the early material, the early fantastic books and petrol fiction wonderful books like by Stephanie Elam Energy, for example, still a signal text, I thought to myself, OK, how much further can we go? And that's why the Ghosh article really got me.

Speaker3: [00:26:47] I mean, like, you know, so a lot of material has been understandably from North America. And what we're seeing now, I think, is because of work that's been done by scholars on North American culture, as we're seeing a much wider take up of that in different countries. Now whether or not that all leads to similar aesthetic forms because oil is found in all those different species or a lack of it, or whether or not there are going to site specific petrol fictions is the thing that really kind of fascinates me. But at some point, if it's this effort genuinely as the global energy source energy form, then it should be everywhere in some shape or form, aesthetically, politically, environmentally and so on. And that may be just a ridiculous challenge. It really worries me. The best question, by the way, to read on this is Bob Johnson, whose book whose book is coming out next month and sorry, next year. I think with Johns Hopkins Press, it's called mineral rights. All right. Yes. And he's really taken this idea, and it's going to be a fantastic book. I think,

Speaker1: [00:27:44] Yeah, and he's doing, is he focusing on coal or

Speaker3: [00:27:47] Other? Yeah, he does. He does. He does a whole series of different energy forms of coal and oil. Yeah. And heat and electricity. You know, secondary forms to it's really quite something the way cool.

Speaker1: [00:27:59] Well, we'll get him on the Pod two when it close.

Speaker2: [00:28:02] So I've got a I've got a question that I hope is provocative. I mean, I think I think reading your work and you're very careful, nuanced thinking about the entanglement of fuel and narrative and aesthetics and genre, I find really fascinating. And I, of course, agree that oil saturates us, et cetera. It's our culture. And so it's maybe not surprising to find it in our literature, but also you're very interested in this question of what might come in a post-oil world, as you said after oil. So what after oil aesthetics, genre narratives might look like, and I guess all of us who work in the humanities kind of hope that if we can, you know, we can reverse the basic superstructure arrangement that we've all, you know, known since Uncle Carl taught us so many decades back and say, maybe there's some way if we build better narratives and better aesthetics, we can actually influence the shifting of the ground below somehow. So I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about that. And you know one thing you say and again, while we're quoting you here, you say, Can we imagine modernism outside an oil electric context, realism without coal, romanticism without wind or water? And as we're trying to embrace, you know, the powers of wind and water again in. A ways it made me think, well, do we need a new romanticism? Is that the tactic we want to take?

Speaker3: [00:29:22] Yeah, that's a great question, isn't it? I mean, we're you know, can you get away with Rachel futures? And given that given the can you get rid of the whole chunk of oil driven or a carbon saturated history that we've just left through the last hundred years or so? Yeah. And can you say, OK, let's go back to let's look at the text, say, for example, that happened prior to it in the 1850s, right? And say, OK, look what they did. Here's here's a guy who went out to the cardinal shop 60 miles away on foot and came back four chapters later and said, Hey, I've got your sugar and so forth. It's not really work. Is it really about that kind of like William Morris returned to the soil saying, Well, I mean, I don't know. You know, whatever floats your boat, I suppose, but I just don't think it can work like that. I think we'll probably end up with this kind of interesting array of different, different forms, you know, premised on kind of modernity, if you like, because the experience of modernity, I think, is hard to it's hard to erase from what people people desire and people think. It's just about shifting and a concept of it, which might be this is way, way, way, way. Imaginaries might be useful because obviously there's a whole different bunch of them, especially in things like science fiction. But I like the question of after oil is sort of fascinating for any scholar of petrol fiction, for example, because of course, most narratives tend to take in the scope of a moment of pre oil during oil and after, which is sort of and the way that we kind of like, discuss and understand the world after there's a temporal thing sort of fascinates me.

Speaker3: [00:30:57] I mean, even in something like Upton Sinclair, which is, of course, the novel oil is the one that many people have written on, not a fantastic novel, but a really galvanizing one one that's really sparking with definite ideas. That's a novel where oil is not there prior to it. It comes in the shape of some exploration and then buying off of lands and so on. A very common story across the world petrol fiction. And then even during the period of oil, the the Muslim narrative deals with those preoccupied with. There's a sense of after because everybody knows is going to run over. So I'm so fascinated by the question of how this non-renewable city has always been there and some sort of shape or form. It might be. It might be. It might be something as politically difficult to convey to people as in Scotland. Still, even though we're relatively open eyed about what the future is going to bring. There are still a whole bunch of people who just refuse to give up on the idea of this being this emancipatory thing that will go on forever. But there's still always been some sort of sense of, well, it's non-renewable. It's going to end at some point. How do we really deal with that? And it might be granular and some narratives, but you can certainly you can certainly identify it. You can dig it out, whatever, whatever it may occur.

Speaker3: [00:32:10] And you could argue that happens from over in the 1850s onwards in the very first works of petrol fiction. People know they suck it out and it's going to end. So that's that's a fabulous thing to see. And then you have text that imagine or different genres, obviously. But I actually I don't fetishize one particular genre, actually. I think it's just a case of shock evidence anyway. You get particular genres that are obviously preoccupied by this. I mean, I just I just I just finished this incredible novel by Jules Verne called The Underground City, which is set in Loch Catron, which is the main water source of Glasgow and the 1860s where all the coal is already run out. And a guy found was fascinated by Scotland, and this is a romantic nor a romantic work of science fiction. He discovers a whole bunch of coal underground, the loch crazily enough, and the whole thing just starts up again. So there are all these fantasies of kind of returning or finding extra amounts after all of these kind of energy frontiers have collapsed. And in Scotland, that happens fairly early. And then, of course, there's a whole series of different after oil imaginaries that I mean, like, you know, there are endless amounts of them that occur through. So this idea, for example, that one genre is going to do it at May, it tends to lean too heavily on S.F. to a certain degree. But you can see why, because there's multiple genres of that to multiple subgenres of after oil fiction we might see. The problem is that quite a lot of them, even though they might come up with fantastical energy forms, tend to really just be codification of what oil did in the first place.

Speaker3: [00:33:42] Right? Yeah, that's the problem. So even the last Star Wars, for example, the last Star Wars movie, not the one, not the splinter one with the snow trained killers that was I can't remember the name of it, the one with Laura Dern, and it was premised on a tank on an empty. Really, plots were about a lot of these plots are about how far we can get with all these different space vehicles, and they're really just, I think they're just recording what it might be once the oil runs out as such. And there's a big argument going on, though, I think within the community about what the best way to play this is. Do we go for dystopia? Is Phil on impact? Dragging everybody into the disaster that would be if we don't prepare for the world after oil or do we build better or think about and discuss better the way that renewables utopias might be the thing to imagine, better now what that might be? I don't know. I mean, there already been a few of them already. And there's a new genre called solar punk, for example. But there's already been some factions, especially going to post-Soviet factions, which have really been a world after oil. And everything tends to go to pot, actually, which is a big issue, you know? So maybe, yeah, maybe we should. Maybe it's all about going back to Wordsworth and rediscovering our ability to walk better.

Speaker1: [00:34:54] Mm hmm. A retro retro futurist romanticism.

Speaker3: [00:34:58] Yeah. Jenny Carnarvon, who's a fantastic scholar of scaf. I'm sure you know his work. He's fantastic. He's he's a really great essay about retro futurism and the world after oil with science fiction. It's terrific.

Speaker1: [00:35:09] So, but Graham, you've been pretty into or pretty interested in science fiction as as as a pretty important genre, maybe not the only one that kind of already inhabits the question of energy. And you've kind of talked about it, the energy of S.F. because the technologies themselves and you have this great opening scene and one of your pieces where we're cast back again to the original Star Wars movie, where we see the I forget that

Speaker2: [00:35:34] Imperial Star

Speaker1: [00:35:35] Destroyer, the Imperial Star Destroyer say thank you co-host,

Speaker2: [00:35:40] But I could see you were in a struggle for that one. I thought I just

Speaker1: [00:35:43] Joked, Yeah, all right. Well, yeah, it was going to take me a minute, if ever. But but we all remember the scene where this gigantic like BMF of a ship comes cruising across the frame and you feel almost like it's squashing you in the theater like you're being smothered by this gigantic ship. And so that that very evocation of the massiveness of this technology and then, you know, it kind of causes us to question how is that ship hurtling through space? Like, how is it moving? And so Asaph, as you've written, kind of begs the question, if you will. And so I wanted to kind of hear you think out loud a little bit more about the possibilities there and about some of your thinking around apocalyptic fiction within sci fi and maybe the space opera, which is how you categorize Star Wars at least. And and then I and then I have another question I want to talk about Hollow Earth, which I think actually refers back to this book that you just back to the story of Jules Verne.

Speaker3: [00:36:39] So well, of course, there are multiple genres and subgenres of SF, and many scholars consistently remind me of that. And I was just kind of interested initially why there wasn't so much about energy. Yeah, the scholarship and the history of the scholarship. I mean, if you go back to, you know, short stories from the nineteen thirties, nineteen forties, all that kind of like the Pulp Age. I mean, it's just full of people obviously flying around everywhere and so on and so forth, and going to different vistas and galaxies, transforming themselves. All these kind of like different kind of possible things that happen and then possible things and the incredible things that happen. But the question of fuel didn't really seem to come up all that much. I mean, like, you know, like, I think I made a frivolous point in my essay about, you know, where's the where's the gas station and the Death Star? Yeah, yeah, that that really fascinates me. You know, you think, OK? And so maybe I should just go back through a whole series of different places and sites of refueling and science fiction, but it doesn't seem to me to bother them all that much. And largely because it was premised on moving all these huge amounts of different things and bodies and ships and infrastructures around. And that would seem to me to take quite quite a lot of fuel, write quite a lot of power sources. And of course, the interesting thing about Star Wars is it's a borderline fantasy, obviously, because of all the magic stuff that goes on. So people are flying around and people can obviously move objects with the power of the mind and so on.

Speaker3: [00:38:09] And you know, if we put aside that question of the of the porous border that people are trying to work out between the weird fantasy and safe and how that actually tells us quite a lot about mobility and energy, then we can put that to their side. But really, yeah, I mean, like, there's an argument going on about whether or not classify as it's called, everybody hates the term, but actually, I've come to rather like it again. I go through these phases, whether or not Cliffy has has done itself by maybe bringing to your attention a lot of the kind of issues about climate, but climate breakdown that needed to be done on a popular level. And maybe, no, we need something a wee bit more nuanced or banal. For example, a wee bit more kind of detailed in terms of the world building that comes that comes about and science fiction and a different kind of genre altogether. I'm not so sure about that. I mean, I still think there's quite a lot of different literary species and sites that haven't really kind of like written their climate story yet. We're seeing a lot of really fantastic new work that's coming out of Africa, for example, there's only just managing to be published in various journals and spaces here. People are very excited about that and whether or not we look to something like space opera as an impossible thing for off planet futures and the age of climate breakdown or not is a moot point.

Speaker3: [00:39:29] I mean, you know, Scotland has a really bizarre relationship to this because just about every one of our modern writers wrote or have published what we might call maybe realist or modernist or quote unquote bourgeois fiction, right? And they've also been science fiction writers. So Ian Banks is also empire sort of space operas. Alister Gray's book is half science fiction Glasgow dystopia and half bildungsroman of Glasgow. From the nineteen fifties to the nineteen seventies all the way through the rails to the nineteen thirties, we find people practising multiple genres. But what's really fascinating about that, to me, is the fact that this science fiction thing does really happen to Scotland. It happens runabout where I live and the 1970s because this huge machinery comes offshore and obviously it's all the onshore sites and everything Terra Farms and a more spectacular way. So all these rural sites up north are suddenly turned into these kind of like huge like fantasy spaces, and they're really just huge oil refineries. You know, half of the islands and some of the archipelago's up in Orkney Islands are totally terra formed. So that's kind of feeling of of of a world that seems entirely alien and utterly modern and strangely futuristic is actually a pretty banal, banal thing if you if you live where I live. Hmm. So that was that's kind of one answer to it, I guess. But there's another there's a whole other thing. There's no there's a whole other speculative collapse type section where everything actually is interestingly much slower. So people have obviously fascinated or been fascinated by things like Margaret Atwood's trilogy, or maybe Cormac McCarthy, the roads where those are kind of a much more devolved or pedestrian type collapse that people are trying to figure out how to regain life among the ruins, which has a kind of a lot of a positive effect to it in terms of rethinking what it might take in order to emerge on the other side of it, even though it's fairly dystopic.

Speaker3: [00:41:28] There's lots of different arguments. I mean, one last thing, one last thing I'll say here is that me and my partner have been watching as many people have the The Handmaid's Tale. Margaret Atwood's adapted for television. So the one with Elisabeth Moss, I'm sure you've seen bits of it. Yeah. And it struck me, of course, that, you know, here's a sci fi text that everyone obviously looked at, or a speculative text story that everyone read in a different period. I know with my energy, humanity head on. I look at that and I think, Wow, of course, that's, you know, there's so many different things in there that's that's of concern to our field, right? And even the question of reproductive lives of pregnancy, for example, itself becomes a kind of fascinating example of a dystopian speculative future where resources are strangely degraded. And, you know, women's bodies are used as a sort of primal energy force for less despotic government. And so that fascinates me because I've been reading again arguments about pregnancy as an energy form throughout science fiction of the 70s and 80s, you know, so we're all kind of comes back. There's lots of different kind of routes and pathways here.

Speaker1: [00:42:40] Yeah. And that that has that's part of Margaret Atwood's genealogy, right? That that kind of stuff of the 70s and 80s.

Speaker3: [00:42:48] Sure. Absolutely, yeah. And of course, she's she's obviously done a much more energy related and petrol culture related trilogy and my dad anthology where that really is about the collapse of or at least the collapse of quote unquote Western civilization and to something much more recognizable. And some of the imaginaries are from from climate change that we're seeing and have seen for the last 10 years or so. The last book itself is about oil. Oil still somehow remaining somewhere, but and obviously limited resources. It never goes away. Even if you look at some of the kind of dystopian and apocalyptic scenarios of quite a lot of post-oil fictions. Oil is still there in some shape or form. It's just it's just held by the most powerful despotic types, so it still doesn't really go away.

Speaker1: [00:43:33] I wanted to go back to this the question of the sort of hollow world or the evacuated center of the world imaginary. And it strikes. I mean, this is a trope that we've seen in S.F. and I'm thinking too, obviously, because you brought up Jules Verne of journey to the center of the Earth, you know, maybe, maybe the best known of the Hollow Earth, which he, of course, based on some of the scientific thinking of the time that there were actually holes at the poles of the planet in the North Pole and the South Pole that there really was a kind of evacuated center. And I wanted to juxtapose that to a remediation device or imaginary that is taking place in your. Her very own home country, and that is carbon sequestration, where oh yeah, where the principle seems to be as I understand it, you take places of hollowed out Earth like spent aquifers or just gaps in the the stratigraphy of the Earth's, you know, beneath the surface and you inject carbon into that space. So and I'm sure I'm doing bumbling to the proper description of it, but I think that's more or less how it works. So can you talk us through some of those juxtapositions that you might see or not see? Or maybe you see something in the rhetoric that appears in the daily newspaper about these kinds of future potentials for carbon sequestration in Scotland?

Speaker3: [00:44:58] Well, one of the big things is, well, there's just a couple of things. I mean, there's a there's a whole flow country. It's called Project that's going on in the North. And that's kind of unseen actually in quite a lot of ways, which is the restoration of peat bogs. And it's a pretty big project. And one of the issues that we are having with that is that as again, this constitutional difficulty, there was a huge CCS plant, for example, that was about to be built in the North and Peterhead after the Scottish Government refused to build any more nuclear power stations. This is also an energy story in Scotland is of the 70s and 80s as nuclear power, but we've refused to build any more of those. And there are tensions between the Scottish Government and the Parliament in Edinburgh and Westminster to do with sequestration. And it's a big, big, big, big problem in some respects towards the funding of renewables and so on and so forth. Because of course, I don't know if you know about the Westminster government. I've just sanctioned a huge nuclear power station to be built in Somerset in southern England. A lot of Chinese capital. So the idea of like suddenly of of putting stuff back in the Earth or making sure that nothing seeps out of it, which of course, has all these mythic and historical cultural changes is something that's kind of it has a constitutional tension right now. But there are a lot of people working on it, and there are a lot of synergies between cultural workers and creative workers who are out there trying to trying to represent this kind of bold project of of restoration and culture. And then there are also people who are upset about the fact that the sequestration projects are being defunded or shut down. What they're really trying to do is go for wind in a very, very big way. I probably have to explain, I don't know just a little bit about the context to your listeners. Yeah, I've always wanted to your listeners.

Speaker1: [00:46:53] Yeah, you say it very well.

Speaker3: [00:46:57] So, you know, there's been a nipost devolution period. So we have this thing called devolved government in Scotland, where since 1999, where the parliament in Edinburgh was restored or whatever you want to call it, there's been an uneasy relationship between Scotland and Westminster about energy and environment in that time. So certain policies are reserved as it's known to the British state. So Westminster makes the decisions on them and energy is one of those. But so all the all the offshore oil material, for example, and gas projects are and taxation of those and so on and so forth are really in lieu of the UK government and when, however, the devolved government does have quite a lot of powers over planning and environmental protection. So you get this occasional stuff that people tend to think is trawling of Edinburgh Bay to London when the when they make decisions about a moratorium, for example, on on onshore fracking and also no new nuclear in Scotland and so on and so forth. At the same time, after the last election, there was an enormous defunding of renewables from from Westminster. And that's not to say that Westminster themselves are actually relatively enlightened. I don't think in terms of their climate policies, they're just sometimes want to go on a different track. That's all I mean, one of the largest wind farms in the world, I think maybe Europe anyway, has just been opened off the Cumbrian coast in North England, for example. So the UK government has a multiforme kind of like approach to this, but it also does involve what we may understand to be quote-unquote dirty energy. It doesn't necessarily it's not utterly given up and all that.

Speaker3: [00:48:31] And that's not to say I, that Scotland or at least pockets of Scotland and the Scottish National Party Congresses, perhaps they have been in terms of of decarbonisation policies, have not also had to really wanted to have their cake and eat it as it were by having a 30 year project to decommission in the North Sea, but still extract at some point there. There's not a day that goes by in Scottish media life without some kind of story of a secret field somewhere that will still be found in the North Sea, even though they know more than I've ever known actually on a popular level that it has to end and it has to end. Now we have this interesting new thing called decommissioning, and this is a center for decommissioning. Just opened in Aberdeen University, that's just really a project. We don't really know what it means yet. We don't really know if it means decarbonisation, but it certainly means acknowledgement that oil is at its end, arguably something that was always there in the first place because they discovered that, you know, they didn't didn't get into it till the late 60s. So in a way, it was always because of the fact that it out elsewhere that we managed to actually find it. No decommissioning might mean as a lucrative global business in itself, you know, scrapping oil rigs, taking them off somewhere else, making sure that the money moved their own and various kind of pockets. What that means in terms of a culture of alternative energy, I don't quite know yet, but it's certainly the case that pockets of the radical independence movement, for example, are very much around the anti-fracking movement.

Speaker3: [00:49:57] They're also very much pro wind and so on and so forth. You would imagine that anyway. And then there's this other issue, of course, and I'm not a political scientist, but my political scientist pals tell me that Scotland, the Scottish Government is really it's allowed to be progressive in terms of its energy policies. I'm not. I'm not saying that they're not. There are not people who are not authentically into decarbonisation. They are they have a very radical transport and heat policy, for example, where all all vehicles by 2030 to, I think it is, are no longer allowed to be diesel or petrol run. And they have a lot of of like different kind of projects up and running already, which are kind of advanced and ahead of quite a lot of other territories and species. But there is this interesting phenomenon, I think, and you'll get it also. I think obviously in the US, where at substate level, a regional level, there are a lot of kind of like little partnerships and connections that can be made. So you get a lot of regions that are actually quite progressive in terms of their energy policies because, well, first of all, it makes the it makes the administration look good. If that doesn't sound too cynical, but at the same time, there's a good will and a short amount of political partnerships that can be made quite quickly and readily. And you know, setting the city level is quite an interesting thing. Erm, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been backwards and forwards to California, I believe. To the gut, to the governor there. I forgot his name.

Speaker1: [00:51:17] So Jerry Brown, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:51:19] Making these partnerships about what can happen between, you know, decarbonisation policies and government between these different states on different parts of the world. So that sort of fascinates me how much pressure that can actually place on the central administration in any particular state, whether or not it would happen, of course, in the US or not, I don't know. I'm no expert enough to know. But anyway, so some of them away from your point and I will stop very shortly. But I want to just go back very briefly to that, to the question that you started with, which is the whole Earth thing. So the onshore fracking thing, which is we have a moratorium on it here, there is a huge amount of shale actually just north of my mother's house. The one particular energy company called any of us who own the Grangemouth refinery have been desperate to get a hold off with the usual kind of narrative about energy independence. They've been desperate to get hold of this for about the last five or six years because it really has quite an enormous pocket. And the argument, of course, made by even those people who are into transition is that this will be a very handy onshore thing to have once the oil goes from the North Sea. No, that has been successfully fought away by various groups from Friends of the Earth Scotland to the government itself, and there is no official moratorium onshore. I'm not allowed to do offshore because of the constitutional issues.

Speaker3: [00:52:32] But what's interesting about that, I think from from my point of view, or at least from the point of view of arguments against it, was this larger kind of like representative notion that there was these monsters under the ground. You couldn't be bitten again. And that goes all the way back to an interesting set of cultural myths and, you know, from literature and theatre about the dragons that are under the ground. And it's not just it's not just Jules Verne. Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, who lived in Edinburgh, has a fantastic story called When the Day the Earth Screamed and that. So Professor Challenger, the guy that finds all the dinosaurs under the ocean. I it in a different place, but really an underground killer like our world who drills into the ground and a strange gas leaks up and through it as if it's screaming. So these things have been there for a long time from coal all the way through. You know, we've had we've tried it all the way up to the oil edge and the text I was talking about earlier on. The al-Suri texts all involve interesting underground chambers with dragons and having secret, bizarre, alienating forms of energy that seep up to the surface. So maybe just a tiny wee bit of all the literature that got into the classrooms at school? Yeah, they've gone back into the ground again.

Speaker1: [00:53:56] That's brilliant. I love that the dragons beneath and there their ghostly scream, their gaseous scream.

Speaker3: [00:54:03] Yeah, they scream this fabulous Arthur Conan Doyle. Yeah, that's good. Sherlock Holmes.

Speaker2: [00:54:09] Yeah, grandma. I also really enjoyed your article and I want to give people the citation. It's called. Improbability drives, and it's in the journal Paradox. From a couple of years back, and it is, I mean, I think you make a really compelling case there that there are ways in which science fiction is a kind of petro fiction par excellence, but that's not to single it out for criticism, rather to say it kind of epitomizes a certain kind of modernist desire that, as you've already pointed out, is very deeply held and hard to imagine that we can find our way past. And I think it's that kind of modernism is also why when you when you look at texts like the road, there's, you know, the idea of walking down a highway kind of is intrinsically terrifying, right? It just shouldn't be done. It's uncanny. Or, you know, with with The Handmaid's Tale. And I've already ranted on this in the podcast in the past this idea that somehow simple acts of recycling become part of the evil conspiracy, the cult. And is that sort of thing. And I'm wondering whether, you know, I'm sure you're very interested in in contemporary literature as well as, you know, literature from from previous eras. And I would imagine that it would be in very recent fiction that we might be looking for signs of change from younger generations of writers, perhaps who might who might actually be bending their imagination towards something like a positive sensibility surrounding decarbonisation. We've been also championing or in our own small way, trying to champion the idea of low carbon pleasure, right? You know that there's pleasure that you don't have to give up thrills and excitement in giving up fossil fuels, even though that sounds, you know, preposterous perhaps from the point of view of the 20th century. So I'm just curious if you've if you've seen anything or wanted to single out any text that you think might actually be doing some of that work? Or are we still are we still pretty much locked into the petro culture or imaginary?

Speaker3: [00:55:57] That's a great question. I mean, I'm sure there are. I'm sure there are. It's funny as note, because really people when I went to this decarbonization workshop, I was invited about two or three years ago to this workshop in Leiden by a bunch of people from various universities across Europe who had been interested in what different types of narratives could help us write rather than just. I'm not saying that apocalyptic narratives are not helpful. Not at all. I mean, you know, I think there are compelling. And they have obviously all these kind of pedagogical dramatic qualities that are significant and I think will remain so. But the question is, what actually does what is actually out there already from a whole bunch of different fiction that you're really given? You're asking a question about maybe I don't know if you are asking a question about utopianism. That's what that's what really. That's what I find complicated. It's not a whole bunch of fiction that's just already they are there as see where change is just completely banal. So actually, even if you look at things like Oryx and Crake actually to go back to that with, I hate to, I hate to go back. But no, actually, I don't, because I think that she's an extraordinarily rich writer and so on. But there are things like in passing people driving around in solar cars, and they're not they're not explained in any kind of way. Or, you know, like people have little wind turbines outside their house and they seem to operate fine off and they seem to be able to have electric shells.

Speaker3: [00:57:20] But of course, the great conceit is the fact that this is just a bunch of privileged people that are allowed to have that. Mm hmm. And that's that's part of the issue, I think because of the way that the electric market operates, that there's a heavy amount of material that's still on the dark, dystopian stuff. I'm yet to be convinced that I've really seen a whole. I mean, people are going to show me here, probably, but because there will be a whole bunch of different examples. But it seems to me that material's much so freighted towards telling darker stories or largely incredible stories. And it might be that you might see, for example, tales from twenty one 40, for example, or twenty three hundred where life is so completely and utterly different and unrecognizable that transition seemed to have happened. But I don't know how much of that tells us about what it was that actually enabled the transition in the first place. And maybe, maybe I'm just being old fashioned, but maybe it really is about going back to not necessarily a pre oil era and cultural history, maybe also the era of oil and looking at all the different pockets of non oil activity indoors, right? And you know, I mean, questions of pleasure are interesting. I mean, they occur through most imaginaries.

Speaker3: [00:58:37] The question is how much they are devolved or taken away at any kind of forum from the amount of places that we've actually received and enjoyed via oil, from speed or plastic or electricity, or whatever it might be. That's where it gets harder and harder. So that to be able to say to people, you know, it's really cool to go on your bike and so on and so forth, and they'll go, Yeah, great. So really, it's really good to go in your bike. But how come, how is that? How is that the sole thing that becomes how does that become the only source, for example, of non-carbon pleasure? I'm kind of fascinated by all the possibilities there, obviously, but it's quite. Hard to write about, you know, I mean, that's that's that's that's that's what I think is a real challenge for writers who have, of course, themselves grown up and are still growing up in an age of carbon. I need to think about whether or not wind or solar is really there to help us. My colleague Rhys Williams has. I'm just I'm editing a volume right now on it's called Powering the Future. I'm just about finished it. It's on various different scenarios and science fiction about a post-oil future. Some of the, of course, the entries are the chapters from people are still obviously are beau post-oil dystopia, and some of them are also about new communities that have grown up through post oil necessities and solar punk seems to be one of those.

Speaker3: [00:59:58] His argument is that this doesn't just necessarily about the content of the fiction, it's actually also about the community of readers that grow up and are invested in it. And that's sort of interesting, right? So once you start to take books and genres to particular readership, how much does that then moleculars it into something that becomes a larger movement because it can't just be it can't just be about us. You're right. It can't just be about us going back to read Wordsworth and Shelley and say, Let's go back to traipsing around the mountains and thinking about how brilliant walking around. And as good as that might be, it might be about how we start to worship, see the technology of solidity or went in a completely different way. And also, one last thing I'd say here is that it's hard to find material other than space opera, for example, which is which is often. So as I said before, so much premised. I still think on hydrocarbon life worlds and mentalities, it's hard to find material that is extra extricated in some sort of sense as a future world from oil. Largely because I just I don't think people can really conceive for a non-carbon form of democratic politics or life might be. I just don't think they can do it in a proper way yet. I just don't. I hate to end on a dystopian form, but

Speaker2: [01:01:16] There we are. I think you've ended on a properly Hegelian moment. We can't we? The olive Minerva looks backward. We can't understand the world we're living in until we've lived it, and that makes sense to me. I think that's not dystopian. I think it means that we have to keep working hard as we saw painted on a mural in your hometown of Glasgow. Work as though you're in the earlier days of a better nation, right? So yes, I think we have to work as though we're in the early days of a better energy culture.

Speaker1: [01:01:45] A better

Speaker3: [01:01:46] World. Exactly right. Yeah. Power to you guys, because these are the guys that are bringing it to the masses, right?

Speaker2: [01:01:52] We are literally changing culture every week on this podcast.

Speaker3: [01:01:55] So dealing with Scottish people? Yeah, yeah. Let's cool things.

Speaker1: [01:02:04] You know, you know, Graham, I'm an anthropologist, and so I hate to exhort to size and fetishize you. But I kind of want you to like talking like straight up Scottish for a second.

Speaker2: [01:02:16] Yeah, just give us the full bore Scots.

Speaker1: [01:02:17] Yeah. Weather report or whatever

Speaker3: [01:02:20] Like it was. Well, it's been gay grief. The day somebody out there and about given it's Palin at doing so as women buckets.

Speaker1: [01:02:34] Oh, you know the perfect. I love it and

Speaker2: [01:02:36] I want to. I want you to know Graham. We we properly use the term one for the ditch. The other night, we our beginning of the year party and the last few stragglers were there just as we were the stragglers that your house, that one fine evening or your culture,

Speaker1: [01:02:49] Your number one for the ditch

Speaker2: [01:02:51] And the ditch. I poured out a little bit of scotch to everyone who has left, and I said, This is your one for the ditch. And everyone thought that was a terrific.

Speaker1: [01:02:58] And you know, we actually we do have a lot of ditches here in Houston. Yeah, you can easily drive into

Speaker2: [01:03:04] We've got all into you've got all sorts of ditches here to fall into. So in that sense, it's right. You're right at home.

Speaker3: [01:03:10] Yes. Yeah, it's funny because like one of the early factions in Scotland, there's obviously the film local hero Bill Forsyth film, which is very much about obviously, it's a lovely comedy about the coming of oil with Peter Capaldi, the future doctor who as a young oil executive. And of course, that begins in a Houston oil office, right? Actions between Houston and Scotland all the time because, of course, most most of the early capital from to build the infrastructure came from oil companies based in Houston. In the nineteen sixties, there was a huge amount of material just about four or five different men, mostly oil executive men who are backwards and forwards between here and Houston all the time in the 60s and early 70s to provide the money and various forms. So, so fascinates me that we've had that connection for a long time. And one other utterly random anecdote is that, of course, the whisky industry. You might not know this, but the whisky industry are actually really important drivers of decarbonisation because they've been they've been challenged, they've been challenged to decarbonise. And of course, that's one of our biggest export engines. He's right, and if they can do it, anybody can. It's not just about untreated whiskey. No, it's decarbonised drinks industries.

Speaker1: [01:04:22] Yeah. Oh, that's excellent. That's good. I wasn't aware of that.

Speaker2: [01:04:25] Add that to our list of approved low carbon pleasure forms. Gram, it's been wonderful to talk to you. We're going to keep. We're going to keep it going. Love to have you back on another time. Any time you have a spare bottle of Buckfast, a couple of quinoa sandwiches available. All of us. We'll come, yeah, we'll come over to Glasgow.

Speaker1: [01:04:43] We'll come over.

Speaker2: [01:04:44] Even better, yeah, we don't need a lot.

Speaker3: [01:04:45] So listen, it's my ambition to write a short story about sustainable, decarbonised future with where everyone is very happily eating their quinoa sandwiches.

Speaker1: [01:04:56] Perfect. I can already see the first page. The first line. Good. Thank you so much, Graham. It was a

Speaker3: [01:05:04] Pleasure. No, it was an absolute pleasure of people. Thanks very much. I hope you can edit me properly.

Speaker1: [01:05:10] Nefesh B'Nefesh.