coe196_energy-dem.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Well, come back, oh, listeners of cultures of energy, culture of energy and that snorers, we're so happy to have you around. We happen to be around in a place called Berlin Berlin. It's a very nice place, is very echoey place. It's very quiet for the most part, except when you try and put a microphone in a room with large ceilings and wooden floors. But it's very it's very pretty that way.

Speaker2: [00:00:48] Yeah, we love these high ceilings, ceilinged rooms. But for the Echo Innes, they create so apologies in advance of the next several weeks may contain a tad more echo than you're used to, sonically speaking, the cultures of energy podcasts. But it is great to be here so many how we have to deal with the news of the day impeachment inquiry. Like, how are you feeling? Are you feeling vindicated or are you feeling angry? Or are you feeling totally bored and disinterested? Give us an effective read. Let us sound your

Speaker1: [00:01:19] Insulting to say I'm more interested in what happens with Brexit. That's kind of a low blow. No, no. I mean, I think it's important like they had to take a stand at some point, and this seemed like the most easiest and obvious thing to do. I haven't looked at the transcript. I've just been hearing these Republicans saying, Look, you know, this is just a bunch of who shot John. This is ridiculous. Like Leslie Lindsey Graham. Yeah, that motherfucker. Like he, you know, he's like, this would be ridiculous, ludicrous to impeach over this. But she looked at the transcript. So it sounds like it's pretty damning, although they're, you know, hotheaded about the fact that he was talking about different things.

Speaker2: [00:02:01] And once they didn't impeach over children in cages, I don't know. To me, it's just, yeah, I mean, everyone's like, it's so damning. It's so damning. Trump is so scared, and I'm like, I don't think anything scares a pathological narcissist at all. I mean, he's living in his own world already, and I can't imagine that this is even going to make the top 10 of the terrible things he did during his presidency.

Speaker1: [00:02:24] So, you know, this is like a really easy, obvious one. Yeah, I guess anyone can understand, like clear intimidation or a threat of reprisal or withholding of funds to a foreign leader in order to get dirt on your opponents like so it's such a simple minded move.

Speaker2: [00:02:42] Right. But I mean, it is probably something he's doing on every other phone call. I mean, you're right, he was caught. So I mean, in the sense that there's a smoking gun more than usual, I guess that's something.

Speaker1: [00:02:51] Do they take transcripts of all his conversations?

Speaker2: [00:02:54] They must. Well, this is the thing, and this is what the right wing has jumped on immediately. It's not a transcript. It's notes from the memories of the people who were there in the room. So it's reads like a transcript. But people are going to dispute, Oh, you know, people don't talk like this, really. And this is just why don't they

Speaker1: [00:03:11] Just like, you know, it seems like if you were president of the United States, they should record every phone call you have with for business reasons. I mean, your personal calls are your thing, but it seems like if you are talking to foreign leaders this, you record all of that.

Speaker2: [00:03:23] It would make sense. I don't know if they do, they probably do, and we don't know it. But anyway, let's be honest, it's not going to go anywhere. The Republicans aren't going to budge on this. I don't know what to say about that. So to my mind, in a lot of ways, I think Brexit is the more interesting issue and that there actually seems to be some kind of political debate on this and positions that are not entirely hard lined and interesting brinksmanship maneuvers between the Labor Party and the Tories. And so, yeah, I think I'm watching. I'm going to be watching Brexit.

Speaker1: [00:03:55] Interesting, like, he's kind of a goofball, I guess.

Speaker2: [00:03:58] I don't know people. People say he's awful. He's like the

Speaker1: [00:04:02] Oh, I think he's I think he is horrible, but he's kind of ridiculous too.

Speaker2: [00:04:06] Yeah, from a hair perspective, particularly. Yes. Yeah. All right. So we've covered politics. What else is going on? That's your political digest for those of you who haven't been following the news the past couple of days. We have I'll just say what we're going to do. Somebody is thinking, what else is going on? We have a really interesting conversation today with three scholars who are putting together a handbook of energy democracy, which I think is a really interesting project. So we're talking to Andrea Parker. We're talking to Danielle Andres and we are talking to Tara Peterson. All three of whom are at a writing retreat right now, putting together this handbook, and it's meant to be a handbook that spans both the kind of scholarly world of research on resurgent energy, democratic movements and actions. And we're talking about everything from kind of municipal education campaigns to pipeline protests to people who are trying to create their own microgrids, all of that good stuff and kind of good energy citizenship. And then also people who are actually on the ground involved in these movements, grassroots and so energy democracy. Let's hope it comes soon.

Speaker1: [00:05:20] Yeah, word. We need to have more of that. Yes, I know what I'm going to do, I'm going to do a shout out to the workshop conference seminar event.

Speaker2: [00:05:28] Oh yeah, totally.

Speaker1: [00:05:30] Extravaganza. Yeah. Tell us about your trip. University of Pennsylvania that was hosted by the Penn Program and Environmental Humanities, which is directed by none other than Bethany Wigan to a friend of the pod. Very good foul of the pod, who is a wonderful soul, and we got to hang out with her and we got to see a lot of wonderful films, and much of this was hosted by Ben Mendelsohn. Shout out to Ben, who is a post-doc there in the PPE, and he did a magnificent job of bringing together a bunch of experimental filmmakers and scholars and artists talks, and we got to engage with one another and talk about Anthropocene issues. What was the topic? Imaginations? The event was called Geo Social Encounters. I like that. So we had several conversations about geo sociology and what that might be. And all around it was a a great event.

Speaker2: [00:06:31] Cool. You got to go to the climate march in Philly. Oh, we got to go.

Speaker1: [00:06:33] Yeah, we got to go to the climate march in Philly.

Speaker2: [00:06:37] We did the climate march here in Berlin, which was one of the largest, I think, in the whole world. Two hundred seventy thousand strong.

Speaker1: [00:06:43] I heard 270. That's more than a year ago. Oh my god. Well, I did see some of the footage from Berlin. I don't think that we got nearly that many in Philadelphia. Sadly, I was really surprised, but they didn't let the kids out of school. They didn't give them permission. Yeah, we took the march and I was really happy that Ben and his co organizer, Rahul Mukherji, were so gracious and Bethany to whose students worked on the posters for us to take down to the the march. Yeah. It was very smart and thoughtful to bring everyone down to the march. Not that. Not that easy in the middle of an academic conference. It's like basically one really intensive day. We all got on the subway and we went down there and we had signs. We were fully equipped and armed, so it was great. So props and and shout out to Rahul and Ben and Bethany and Deb Thomas. All right. And everyone else who is there?

Speaker2: [00:07:40] Yeah. So in Berlin, it was good too. There were a lot of very angry children and teenagers out, which was good to see, and they were definitely had been let themselves out of school to go March. And that was that was good. Very impressive. I've never seen I don't think I've ever been part of a march that big. It went on and on and it was really hard at the ground level to even understand what was going on. So in the scale of it, but it was it was filled with life and concern. And then the German government followed up with a very tepid additional kind of climate action packet that no one was very satisfied by. And we're seeing now that as Angela Merkel has declared, she's not standing for re-election again. I think her her own personal impetus that she's put behind climate action is beginning to slow down the movement as a whole. So it is unfortunate that Germany, which has been a leader, seems to now be not. Exactly. I mean, it's never about here. It's never about climate denial. You know, is climate change happening? It's all about, you know, what should we do? Which of the, you know, multiple strategies are available, should we follow? And then it kind of ends up sort of in the same place of people arguing over the details of what?

Speaker1: [00:08:48] Yeah, the implementation strategies, which we, you know, we cover some of that in the pod today, too. Yes. You know, the other big news is what came out the IPCC report that came out two days ago, which is in some ways more important than this impeachment stuff would Trump. Oh, because once again, it's, you know, yet more bad news yet more sort of underestimation of how impactful these anthropogenic effects are. And so these ocean heat waves, which is a pretty newly studied phenomenon, they've just sort of discovered those in the last decade or so started to recognize them. And they're happening in different patches in the ocean like blobs of hot water, warm water that's noticeable to human touch. I mean, they're like four degrees Celsius warmer. So you actually if you put your hand into one of these ocean heat wave blobs, you could actually feel the difference on your skin. Wow, that's. And I mean, if you think about the effect that that's going to have on plant and animal life and just the whole sort of thermo chemical composition of the ocean is pretty horrifying. And then guess what? The glaciers are melting, ice sheets are melting and sea level rise is happening and the ocean is warming because it's absorbing. So much of the greenhouse gas gas says it's going to say the emissions of greenhouse gases and heating, and it's been a buffer in many ways to keep land temperatures relatively cooler. Right. But it can't. The ocean as massive an important hydrological body it is, can only do so much to absorb all the. Shit that we humans are throwing at it, so that in addition to the plastics, but this is really about heat, it's about heat events and how they're affecting the hydrogen crisis biospheres of the world. So I don't know, it's really it's a little harrowing. Every time you turn around, you find that there's yet more bad news on the horizon now. I was just Boyer's brought up a pie chart.

Speaker2: [00:10:44] I was just looking at the pie chart, which is from from that study that says nineteen ninety seven to twenty six average sea level rise globally is three millimeters per year. The next the following decade twenty seven to twenty sixteen. Sea level rise is four point thirty six millimeters per year. Just in my head, that looks like about a 45 percent increase, so that's pretty significant. And it's clear that although still the single largest chunk is thermal expansion, that's the water heating. We now see that glaciers and Greenland has doubled in terms of its contribution, and the Antarctic has almost octuplet, I guess octuplet, in terms of its contribution. So we see that it's really the Greenland and Antarctic melt that's making the difference right now. Just as you were saying, basically at this point, there's no point in even looking forward to good news. It's just all about anticipating the fact that because of science's inherent conservatism in terms of not wanting to put forth things that are not fully certain, we will find that in the coming years, we will see that the earlier estimates of sea level rise had been really low balled. So everyone get ready for year 20 to 30 feet.

Speaker1: [00:11:57] And that's just not just sea level rise to it. It's going to be the more rapid collapse in the cryosphere and species extinctions and wildfires. So, I mean, I don't know. I hate to be a gloom and doom IRA, but it's like there really is no good news, right? When it comes to the climate impacts.

Speaker2: [00:12:13] Well, that's where you get to the point of like, OK, let's accept where we're at and let's make radical changes, right? That's that's where we are. I mean, we know that, but it's good to be reminded that that's the situation we're in.

Speaker1: [00:12:23] So now, you know, to go back to the impeachment here, what we should do. You know, our good friend friends John and Yoko Ganor, were just spending time with this new Ukrainian president like a week before this whole thing blew up.

Speaker2: [00:12:40] I know I really

Speaker1: [00:12:40] Want to find why we need to call them there in our time zone. We need to call them and say, What was that like and what did you know? What was he like and what did you talk about? I mean, it's before it all blew up, but they were hanging out with this

Speaker2: [00:12:51] Guy as well as they were hanging out with Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis to get invited to the same event, which sounds like it was much more of a kind of Hollywood spectacle than I thought it was. But well, we'll find out all that much more people and report back to you next week. But listen, next week we're going to let you know that we're doing something special next week. We are getting a week off more or less, and we have Leah Stokes, who's coming in to do a special guest episode discussion for her climate Twitter book club. So more information on that coming forth. And yeah, I mean, it's kind of fun. We haven't had a week off in about three years, so this will be a nice treat for us to let somebody else do the heavy lifting one leg for you folks at home. Stay entertained and informed because there's probably nobody better than Leah to tell you about climate matters. Anyway, we're finding out these days. So anyway, with that, we're going to turn to energy democracy, and Simone is going to give us something, something hopeful to take us out something or something angry, something angrily hopeful or hopefully angry. She's a staring and staring at me with her dead eyes.

Speaker1: [00:13:59] How about go Charlie, go Danielle and go Andrea?

Speaker2: [00:14:22] So welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast we are so thrilled to have with us today. Andrea Posh, Parker, Daniel Andrei's and Charlotte Peterson, who are with us to talk about their marvelous project on energy democracy. Thank you all three for joining us.

Speaker3: [00:14:39] Thank you.

Speaker1: [00:14:40] So as as dominant just mentioned, the three of you, among others, colleagues, activists and scholars have been working on this concept and the the problem and the potential, I'll say, of energy democracy. And so I thought it might be useful to kind of begin by talking about what energy democracy looks like in the present and potentially in the future. We can kind of unfold that as we go along. But you describe that energy democracy is, on the one hand, a kind of set of social movement principles or an advocacy or activist position, but that it's also an opening for scholarly intervention for research protocols and ways of kind of seeing the world differently through the intellectual lens of energy democracy. So I wanted to ask all three of you or a couple of you, whoever wants to respond to the question, if you could kind of walk us through what energy democracy looks like as a social movement and what it looks like as an intellectual project?

Speaker3: [00:15:38] I think as a social movement, if you think about it, there's a lot of similarities between the environmental justice movement and energy democracy in that people want to have more of a say over energy systems and be less beholden to kind of these systems where others are making the decisions for them to a degree that some of these decisions are affecting them in other ways. Climate change being a large driver, knowing that we have to switch our energy systems away from fossil fuels and moving towards alternatives, how do we go about doing that and how do we hold the energy sector accountable for making such a switch because it's not easy? Our energy grids are set up on these fossil fuel dependent systems. There are power people and places of power that want to maintain the system. So like, how do you go about making that transition and making it a just transition to these other types of sources so that we're not kind of maintaining these same power dynamics, but that people have a greater say in how these energy systems are being implemented? So that's kind of how I see it. You guys want to chime in. One point that I think is important is can be encapsulated in that term prosumer.

Speaker3: [00:16:58] It's an old term, but it helps me to remember that the energy democracy movement is not so much about having a whole bunch of people completely off grid, just in sort of a libertarian mode. Instead, it's people who are involved in the in the energy system. And the reason you use the word prosumer as a shorthand is because these are people who are producers and consumers at the same time and by producer, I don't mean that they're just somebody who puts a set of solar panels on their roof. Yes, that may be it. But there's also the notion of the production of knowledge about the system enters into that role of prosumer. It's it's much more than just putting up a wind turbine or putting up solar panels on the roof. And I think that's really important to help understand the the depth of the movement and to differentiate it from the escape idea that sometimes people have when they think about moving to more community or locally owned and controlled. I think it's about control and power are still social power. Political power are still really important issues, but it's about decentralizing and changing those configurations of power, not doing away with them. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:18:37] And it seems that in thinking through energy democracy as a sort of research program or set of projects that we can imagine, there's a kind of a collaborative element at work here, too, because you really do talk about it as something that requires multidisciplinary attention, that needs to be a sort of networked set of scholars who are kind of swapping ideas back and forth with one another. So is that is that part of how the Energy Democracy as research program or as an intellectual space came to you was through this kind of collective action that's that's involved in energy democracy as a political movement? Are those two intertwined, do you think?

Speaker3: [00:19:19] Absolutely. I think that. Collaboration is really at the core of the research program and on two levels, one the level that you just spoke about, which is collaboration interdisciplinary. I think we all have backgrounds with environmental studies, environmental communication, where we recognize that many of these problems that we as a society are facing cannot be solved with one discipline alone. And so we've always kind of worked in those ways and felt that to tackle something like energy. We need to be collaborating across disciplines. Secondarily, I think that we also really highlight the collaboration potential between the energy democracy movement and academic. We describe this as an engaged research program, kind of drawing from some of the scholarship across disciplines about how academic work can be in conversation with what practitioners are doing on the ground, so to speak. And so I think in terms of that aspect of the research program, there's kind of a mutually constitutive relationship between the academic work and the social movement work where we, as academics are not just responding to what the energy democracy movement is doing and kind of thinking through theoretical resources forms of analysis that can kind of contribute to the ways that the energy democracy movement is forming and doing their work, but also that hopefully our research would then speak back to those that are on the ground doing this energy democracy work. And we're very careful to kind of say that engaged for us doesn't mean extractive. And so we don't want to be a research agenda that just kind of takes from the energy democracy movement and says, Hey, this is a really interesting movement. We're studying it. We're getting academic gain out of it. We really envision it as more of a collaborative, conversational mode of engagement between the research agenda and the social movement.

Speaker1: [00:21:33] That's great.

Speaker2: [00:21:34] That's great. Yeah, it's a very inspiring project, and it seems to me so on point for where where we are in the 21st century. I mean, one of the cleverest things that the 20th century energy system did was to find all the ways it could possibly manage to distance people from energy production and to make them think that energy use kind of didn't matter had no consequences, right? So they moved the power plants out of town, or they put them next to poor communities who didn't have the kind of political clout to resist. And meanwhile, we were encouraged to just continue growing our consumption of fuel, growing our consumption of electricity all across the 20th century. And now we're living in this moment where that kind of alienated relationship between people's everyday lives and energy is really coming back to haunt us. So this idea of reconnecting seems really powerful to me. And I just wanted to ask if any of you had particular projects in energy democracy that you found inspiring either ones that you've been involved in or ones that you've been studying, that you would like to kind of bring to the attention of our listeners.

Speaker3: [00:22:37] I'm just starting work on a project that's looking at energy democracy in relationship to an indigenous environmental organization called Honor the Earth, and there a group out of Minnesota and work with some of the indigenous nations near and around. They're both in the US and First Nations in Canada, and they're doing this really amazing work where they're kind of taking decision making about energy into their own hands while also asserting sovereignty, indigenous sovereignty. And so some of the strategies that they're using are they will find funding and they will go to indigenous nations and help them install solar and wind or whatever, whatever energy source is appropriate for that particular nation. They'll work with them to get that installed. Indigenous nations are kind of doubly impacted both by lack of energy access often, but also the impacts of climate change will affect indigenous communities disproportionately. So this move to just kind of bring bring energy production to indigenous nations, I think, is a really, really awesome example of energy democracy. Along with that, they are sending indigenous students to learn the skills of energy engineering and energy production so that they can bring that back to their own communities. And then just one other example that I think is really cool is that, for example, with with the Keystone XL. Issue and the indigenous water protectors found that they couldn't have access to decision making processes and public hearings, which is typical for a lot of public hearing processes that are that are more decide and not to defend. So they used Native American sovereignty to hold their own public hearings and gather input and have a say in that and then sent the results of that to to the decision makers. So I think those are really exciting examples of energy democracy practices. So that's I'm just starting to work on that, but that's something I'm really excited to keep working on under this research program.

Speaker1: [00:25:02] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, really, really important stuff. We've had a couple of shows on Standing Rock as well, maybe even three, I think.

Speaker2: [00:25:09] Do we want to give our other guests a chance to see if they want to weigh in on that? Yeah, sure.

Speaker3: [00:25:14] You know, honestly, we have some projects that we're wanting to start up, and I'm not going to give a lot of detail just because these are ideas in the works. But I think what we also want to kind of focus on is energy democracy in places that are that are harder hit by, I wouldn't call them natural disasters anymore. I would call them anthropogenic disasters, such as hurricanes hitting places that don't necessarily have the means or the control over their own energy systems. And so I think that's something that I'm that we've been kind of fooling around with because as we're seeing these hurricanes that are larger, they're nastier and they're hitting places that don't have the ability to quickly recover due to lack of federal funding for recovery, things like that. I think that how they are able to adapt, are they able to? Are they even able to develop resilient systems? And so I think that's something that we're kind of focusing on is these coastal or island communities that are taking the brunt of these storms. But at the same time are held hostage to these energy systems that are not allowing them to become more resilient to such such weather events. I want to just tag on to the same thing that Andrea was talking about because this may be our topic, but it seems to me that at this juncture, we have a great opportunity for research and practice to work together, because often it appears to me anyway in a couple of the cases that we're starting to look at, as though it's not because in and of themselves, people in a particular location are not quote able to recover from some disaster.

Speaker3: [00:27:24] Say, Let's stick with hurricanes. Ok. It's not again, it's not a natural necessarily issue. And I think what research can do is help lift that cloak off that pretends that they are naturally unable. And it just can open a lot of people's eyes to some of the causes of the inability. And some of those causes of the inability are the very same causes that Danielle was talking about with being excluded from the decision making processes. It's not necessarily. It's not about lack of understanding of the technology, it's not about lack of access to the technology directly. It's about lack of access to the decision making venues. And that's very carefully structured. And sometimes as a researcher, you can delve into that a little with a little and make a little more explicit statements than you can when you're actually on the ground and have to continue working and living in this situation. So I think we can help each other and work together in some of those. That's part of the reason they're so interesting because we we have an opportunity to actually help do something good. I know it sounds silly, and I also think that like Tala and I, with some other co-authors, wrote a piece awhile back in relation to Superstorm Sandy, and a lot of the mechanisms that we have in place do not allow us to build the system better.

Speaker3: [00:29:04] It allows us to, you know, funding allows us to build back what was there previously. And so we think, OK, this natural disaster, OK, anthropogenic disaster occurred. Let's try to make a. More resilient system, but we haven't figured out a way of actually making that happen. And so even in places like New York state, where there's definitely acknowledgement that climate change is happening to do something, there's still barriers to doing that. And so I think that's something else that we're kind of running up against is that we have to really work on restructuring our systems to accommodate for these needs instead of constantly being reactive because we need to adapt and our systems do need to change. A centralized grid is not working to our benefit considering what we're going to be tackling in the future. And so I think that these ideas are happening, but there's it's in pockets, it's occurring in specific places. And I think that's why a lot of people kind of when they think energy democracy, they're thinking at the local level versus scaling it up. And oftentimes we have to think of energy democracy in scaled up because of the systems that are involved or apply pressure to our abilities to change our energy infrastructure.

Speaker1: [00:30:44] Mm-hmm. I mean, this is a really important point that you're making that these energy infrastructures and the grooves of finance that allow for certain kinds of rebuilding and prohibit other kinds of building a new or deep grooves, right? I mean, these are like long histories of repetitious, bad planning and a lack of consequences that were visible to people or a refusal and denial about those consequences. So this is a really a key piece. I wanted to kind of come back to a bigger question, maybe even a philosophical question about public participation, because this is something that's really fundamental to energy democracy, as you're describing it. And as Dominic pointed out, you know, a few minutes ago, one of the things that the 20th century energy infrastructures created was the cloaking of these energy infrastructures to hide them, to put them outside the city walls, if you will, and to make invisible in many ways, the sources of that energy, whether it's electric or fuel and the consequences, of course, as well. So the consequences are coming home to roost, and we're seeing that with climate change and anthropogenic disasters everywhere. But I still wonder if there's not still an ambivalence or a kind of lack of interest on the part of the public to really dig in to these questions of energy on the ground as they're being produced.

Speaker1: [00:32:06] And I say this because, you know, I teach a class on the it's called the social life of clean energy. And you know, I asked my students on the first day whether they have any idea of where their electricity comes from, for example, and they never do. And there's, you know, a real they're not unengaged students, but they have no idea and in some ways, maybe not so much interest. So I wonder how we generate that interest in a kind of proactive way rather than in in the kind of responsive way that we see, you know, with the Standing Rock protests, which are super important. But it was a kind of a response to the deleterious effects of these infrastructures on indigenous land and affecting water systems. You know, how do we get people involved in a real way, in a passionate way about energy, not just in response, but proactively?

Speaker3: [00:32:56] That's an excellent question, and I don't know, because they feel like we do very much react. I mean, you know, just being able to plug in and then not and empower be there, right? And I also think it's we're not made aware of things like electricity until it's not working. And I think that when we have massive brownouts or blackouts due to some, you know, catastrophic weather event or something like that, that it really kind of hits home, that this system is not not always going to be there. And so I think maybe I'm jaded at this point, but I feel like we have very much our reactive in this way because I think it's something that it's almost like energy has become a new right. Think about like air and other things of because the lack of access to it means that we cannot function in our daily lives. And so if we look at it that way, I think that and if we treat energy as a right, then that also means that it should be evenly distributed across the population, that it should be there at all times. Things like that. So I think maybe treating it or looking at it that way causes us to maybe put. Spotlight on energy systems in the way that we put the spotlight on clean air or clean water of saying that this this is something that should be universal, and maybe that's a way of kind of forcing us to be to move from the reactive to the proactive in thinking about energy systems because it brings it to the forefront.

Speaker3: [00:34:43] I think first off, I want to go back to one thing you said about the fact that we we really don't think as human beings and our society, we do not think about our energy. And I don't think this is just with individuals. For instance, even the most quote, environmentally engaged of students or the most socially engaged of students. One of the experiences that I know some of us have had is that people who also work with us in studying or doing research or in movements, environmental movements never have thought even now about the energy system as being relevant to those questions. Or if you participate, as I do in a lot of conservation kinds of organizations or organizations that are focused on conserving wild spaces, you have to still sell them on the idea that what we do with our energy matters and makes a difference. And these are organizations made of sophisticated, educated people who actually are interested now. Some of them all you have to do is the informing step because they're already on the same page. But I think that just I guess it demonstrates how strongly we have hidden energy systems from all of ourselves and we've allowed that to happen. And I think that opening opening that up is just crucial. It's so important. And I also want to say just bring up. I don't think that our reactivity is unique to energy. I think we need to kind of be careful about that and be aware that that's typically how we as a society operate.

Speaker3: [00:36:46] And maybe we are, you know, maybe it's more rhetorically sane for us to start exploring, OK, how do we work with a society that does things reactively? How can we, instead of trying to change that very deep tendency, can we work within it? And I think we can a little bit on the flip side to what Tala is saying. I do also think that we, as researchers are really well equipped not only to work with this kind of crisis reactive brain that society is really embedded in right now. But we're also empowered to kind of reject that and look at the mundane and the every. And so in some work that Tali and I did on some work we did on energy communication as an area of study, we really encourage scholars to stop focusing on energy only when a crisis happened. So only when a Hurricane Maria or a Superstorm Sandy and instead really focus on uncovering that invisibility that we've been talking about in how do we create research programs that really do focus on these mundane everyday interactions that we have with energy and and then we can bring that to the classroom. And it's not a short term, easy fix, but over time, as we really focus on those everyday interactions with energy, we can potentially start kind of changing some of the ways that we that we think about it.

Speaker2: [00:38:30] I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about the democracy part of this. I think it's really an interesting, complex issue. So on the one hand, you know, we have certain kinds of democratic institutions, as we've been saying, some of which might enable, you know, greater visibility of energy, greater concern, greater citizen engagement around energy, and some of those might disable those engagements. We certainly do have a tendency in the world that there are a lot of republics out there masquerading as democracies like the United States, for example, as we found out, you know, in which, you know, really radical democratic potential is always being held in check by these systems and hierarchies of elite privilege and certain groups being benefited at the expense of others. So I guess I'll just throw this out. Anyone who wants to respond, I mean, where do you see at the institutional level, the places of of hope or the places where we should concentrate in terms of trying to work towards broadening energy democracy? And where are the institutions that you think? We have to be really honest with ourselves that that need to change or or that we really need to kind of focus our critical attention on as scholars, as activists, as citizens in order to get where we need to go.

Speaker3: [00:39:49] I think one place we need to focus our attention if you're in the United States is the US daily. The Department of Energy has so much clout and the Department of Energy is thoroughly controlled by some of these incumbent actors and interests that have no reason to give up any of their power. And so I mean, and and I think one of the points that Andrea made, even if you take the approach, which I'm not opposed to. But even if you take the approach that OK, even if you're regional and national system isn't democratic, you can make your little village democratic. I think that's great. But your ability to develop a more just energy democracy at at the level of your little village is directly influenced and limited by the USDA. If you're in the United States, I know that's a fact. And anybody who thinks about it and starts paying attention will also be aware of that. So I think sometimes we have to focus our attention on changes at that larger level than national levels. And I think myself, I think that the what's been happening in Germany overall is a good illustration of how you can try to work the sort of a top down and a bottom up approach together. But it's also an illustration of the fact that there are continually going to be these incumbent actors who will try to step in and stop the changes. And they will be successful to a to a degree. But that doesn't mean you should stop working.

Speaker2: [00:41:42] Yeah. And I'll just say because we happen to be in Germany right now, and we took part in the climate strike last week in the March. And and you know, there also is a lot of criticism in Germany about their own kind of fading consensus, not on moving in the right direction, but on sort of accelerating the program and hitting their targets on time and so forth. But there is an interesting fellow named Hammacher, who was a Social Democrat here who really got the German energy turn, as they put it going. And he really believed that actually, renewables and decentralized energy could contribute to strengthening democracy because the lack of these large infrastructures that span, you know, states and countries which are controlled in a few places and people's supply everywhere can be cut off by decisions that are made in a few places. He felt that a decentralized energy system was was a really important infrastructure for democratic renewal. And I'm wondering if that's an idea that that you all have thought about too and whether that's something you might be seeing in practice in some of the cases you're looking at?

Speaker3: [00:42:43] Yes. Yeah. Well, and I said I would say it has the potential. It's not a guarantee, though. I mean, as we're kind of changing, there's there's great potential because there's the possibility of insertion of new players, which changes the dynamic, shakes it up. But it's not a given. There can be situations where the same players are still trying to push out new stakeholders or new players from decision making because they don't want to relinquish that decision making power. But at the same time, as we're seeing these demonstrations of these new players, there's know new kind of conceptualization of how the energy grid should be structured. There is that potential, and I think that's kind of the hope and that we can monopolize on that potential. But I also want to say I don't think it's a guarantee we are seeing it, however, but it it's not a it's not a guarantee. There are no guarantees in this trying to hold off until you find the guaranteed approach is not the way to do it. I think experimentation maybe is the more of the key word and agree with that. And I was just going to add we were actually having this debate just yesterday because we're here working on our on our volume and thinking about, are these more local decentralized approaches, more democratic or do we need kind of fundamental larger democratic change on a national or state level and. So I don't yeah, I mean, I think that we don't know that one is necessarily better than the other, and when you're thinking about kind of radical democratic participatory engagement, you always have to in whatever context, you've always got to be vigilant about keeping that going and looking for places where stakeholders are being excluded or folks at the local or the national level are gaining too much power and then excluding voices.

Speaker3: [00:44:53] Mm hmm. I also think that one of the issues that's really important here. It's one that's basic to public participation in the interest of justice, a wide in a wide array of things and that is simply participation fatigue. People get tired of fighting the good fight, if you will. And this is one reason why developing networks where you can develop mutual support is really important because that fatigue is going to set in. And we've and we see that in some of these small energy cooperatives that are emerging or re municipal ization efforts we see over time. If the same people, if a small group of people continually has to bear the brunt of it by themselves, they simply get tired. So that's one reason why I think building a network and also working both at the local level and the national and even international level is crucial to help build in some. I'm using a terrible set of mixed metaphors, but kind of safety net for these new approaches. And then there's also the notion that it's really important for us. Again, I just think this is crucial for us to talk about it as energies. We're talking as though energy was a thing, a single thing. And it's not. I mean, they're not. Energies is encouraging. I guess this is why the terminology or the grammar that we use when we talk is really important.

Speaker1: [00:46:36] Mm hmm. Did you want to say more about the plural energies or OK?

Speaker3: [00:46:41] One of the one of the reasons that I think Energy's is important is because it's important for us to realize that sunlight and the way we can use it is very different from the oil that comes from hydrofracking. Ok? It's not when we put it all together. It helps us make the whole process invisible as one kind of. It's like making it into the black box where the people who are running it say, Trust me, it all works. You don't need to know how it works. But if we talk about it in the plural, we have different energies and it's easy for me to within our, especially in our, you know, neoliberal world today for me to say, OK, I own the poor space where this oil is stored or I can lease it from you and buy it or whatever. And so therefore it belongs to my company. It's harder to do that if you're talking about sunlight or wind power. So it's important in my mind to specify that we have energies and that's I think I don't think it's just the localization that's important in some of these helping some of these helping energy democracy to move forward. I also think that focusing the attention on sunshine is an important way to help people think differently instead of thinking of just the energy system as the property of X person. It's easier if you talk about the sunshine to also introduce a new model for what it means, what energy means, and this goes along with talking about at a more mundane day to day level instead of just this crisis mode.

Speaker1: [00:48:42] Mm hmm. Yeah, I think this is this is really a key point. And again, this is sort of where how much share, I think is very interesting. Again, because the truth of sunlight and radiation from the Sun is that it is this it's the shortest supply chain possible, right? Right. It's a very it's a direct source and you've got no pipelines whatsoever. And so I think what you're getting at is really key and that is that the materiality of these energy sources is very important. The qualities of them as a force, as a physical entity that is different from fossil fuels and other petroleum products and. This is really a key, and the potential that we see in energy transitions really is an opportunity, and I think we tend to think of it as it. Maybe it's, you know, as you were saying, it's sort of been negative, you know, reactive, responsive nature of human beings or maybe just, you know, white western, settler colonial, you know, regimes of thought is to respond to negative outcomes. But but really, energy transition is an incredible opportunity for us to do our politics differently, too. And this is something that Dominic and I have been arguing for a few years now in terms of looking at renewable energies that instead of mapping our old political forms onto these new energy infrastructures and systems, why don't we use these energy systems and their potential as a way to rethink new forms of politics, new forms of relating new forms of getting along because the potential is there? And it's not a guarantee, as you say, but I think there really is a true potential.

Speaker1: [00:50:18] So maybe as a as a final question. Sure. Yeah, I wanted to get to this question of energy governance sites. And you write that, you know, of course, these energy governance sites involve a range of actors, democratic values and democratic functions. But I want you to think through with you what sites of energy governance are, what they look like, where they are, how they're distributed. How do you imagine those sites? Because it could be really quite extensive, right? Energy governance could be happening at so many different points along the graph or the scale. So I wanted to invite you to kind of share what in your imaginary, what are these these energy governance sites and what is their critical importance?

Speaker3: [00:51:02] Oh, are you stumped us with this? I think it's a silly question. I mean, we've we've been and again, as we're, you know, at a writing retreat right now, the three of us working on a handbook on energy democracy, we're really kind of battling with this, this idea, maybe battling the wrong metaphor to use, but really kind of trying to think about this of at at what scales of governance this do we act because I mean, if we think about it when the Trump administration took over and the Obama administration had pushed all of these climate, you know, climate legislation at the end of his term and then the the Trump administration came in and was trying to dismantle a lot of this. A lot of people were feeling like, OK, game over, and that's not actually true. What it just means is that somebody else has to pick up the slack. And we're discussing just the other day of, yes, it slows down the process. But action is still like levels of governance. If we think about what can happen at the state or what can happen the state in the United States, but in the subnational context, or what can happen at a more localized context, we have opportunities there so that as one level of governance for lack of a better word fails to address these issues. We do have the ability to not fully rectify but continue the effort forward at a different level. That said, when we think about where are the spaces where this actually needs to happen, it's still at the national and also international levels of governance. Well, in the United States right now, for example, we've got California suing the federal government, having to do with clean air standards. So there's an illustration of exactly what you were talking about, Andrea. I think and and I realize we're falling back on the existing structure, but I think it makes I think it's important to work simultaneously. You work with the existing structures, but you are also attempting to build new structures to even potentially replace some of these old structures, particularly those that are the most problematic.

Speaker2: [00:53:43] Right. And I think that this idea and maybe this is inspired by some of your own interest in energy, communication and your scholarly background, but the idea of creating a handbook? Does anyone want to speak to that? You know what? Some of the objectives are there and what you're hoping to accomplish with the handbook itself.

Speaker3: [00:54:03] Yeah, I'll let Danielle take this one. Yeah, I think that we really want to not take ownership over this idea of energy democracy as a research program. And like we were saying in the beginning, we're so sure that to tackle these issues, there needs to be vast, interdisciplinary kind of collaboration and thinking about it that a handbook for us was a way to start and continue conversations about what a research agenda in energy democracy can be, and to highlight the diverse and interesting research that we've been discovering through our kind of engagement with this idea of of energy democracy. And so we really want to put this handbook out there as a way to invite lots and lots and lots of scholars and practitioners and activists to think about this as a potential area for for more research. Obviously, we could have said we're going to write a book on energy democracy and we're going to put forward our perspective and our kind of theory of this. But I think we chose the handbook because we wanted a conversation. We wanted to really open, open an area of research and invite a lot of folks into that conversation. They also wanted to say that energy is not just a technical system, and I think that oftentimes it's treated as such.

Speaker3: [00:55:38] And so social scientists and members of the humanities have had to kind of push against the fact that it's not just a technical system, it is very much a social system and that we have the ability to look at it from multiple lenses and analyze that social aspect of energy. And so I think that we are truly attempting. To broaden the discussion and push against this kind of, you know, keeping it in the technocracy, if you would like also the opportunity that is presented by a handbook is that it's going to have usable chunks that a friend of mine who teaches in the engineering college might use a couple of chunks with the people he's working with, who are then going to go out and work for some of the utilities, and they will have that background that they didn't have before, and they'll take that in to their more technocratic or oriented organization. So for me, that's one of the appeals of doing this kind of work, as you can try anyway to make it something so that if people don't want to take all the time and effort to look through all these possibilities, there are chunks that they can pull out.

Speaker2: [00:57:05] That's great. And and we just want to thank you for doing all this work to create this handbook that obviously is going to be a great resource for so many people and probably a wonderful gathering point where people are going to get to find out about kindred spirit, so to speak, that they hadn't even heard about before. So I think it's, you know, even producing something like this is going to be a kind of a network builder and and hopefully create even more collaborations and so forth before. We're also not, you know, because we're polite going to ask you when it's going to be done or when it's coming out or anything like that. You'll get it done on your own good time and we'll be happy to wait for it. But we do want to thank you so much for the work you're doing and also for taking the time just to talk through the project and your interests with us. And it's been really a fascinating discussion.

Speaker3: [00:57:51] Well, thank you. This has been an absolute wonderful experience, and we're looking forward to your own participation in the handbook. And so thank you so much.