coe145_solarity.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Welcome everybody to the Supreme Court edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast we are recording at the same time that there is this hearing going on where unfortunately I think we have a victim being interrogated by a group of ancient ghoulish white men, right?

Speaker2: [00:00:42] And one one female attorney, I guess they hired an attorney to come in and like pretend to be empathetic so that they wouldn't do it 100 percent repeat of the Anita Hill scene.

Speaker1: [00:00:53] It's all about those optics, right?

Speaker2: [00:00:55] So but yeah, I mean, as much as I love recording this intro, I kind of bummed that we're missing out on that. But I'm going to I kind of want to see wait, was her testimony? Was it televised? They were running

Speaker1: [00:01:07] It that, oh, they're going to it's all taped. They'll have it all to watch.

Speaker2: [00:01:10] I mean, maybe I don't really want to watch it, but I'm kind of have a have an interest in to see what she says exactly. I'm curious what I'm curious what she'll kind of point to and how she'll describe everything. And of course, their reaction. So it's just it's such creepy stuff. But you know, the thing that I think the good thing about it is that there has been more media attention to. Well, of course, we just had Bill Cosby who was sentenced to not enough time. But, you know, talk about like, you know, rapes and assault and drugging and attacking women like for decades and many of those cases being decades old. So there's question of memory and what gets recalled and what can be proven is it's a pretty interesting set of contingencies. Did you see in the New York Times they put they put Brett Kavanaugh's high school from high school, his calendar, the Shodan, his like, childish handwriting or whatever teenage boy handwriting that was, you know, going to the Game Beach Week and everything from, I think, 82 or something like that.

Speaker1: [00:02:13] Yeah, I mean, that side of it trying really hard to paint him as an altar boy and a

Speaker2: [00:02:17] Virgin Football player and a virgin. And, you know, but honestly, that Virgin admission it to my mind makes him all the more probably guilty because as I was saying to you, and maybe this is inappropriate, but like if he had been in a relationship with a woman and they were fooling around and or maybe even having sex in high school, then maybe he wouldn't have been as inclined to, like, attack these other women. I don't know

Speaker1: [00:02:42] Since we both lived through the 80s and kind of came of age in the 80s in a lot of ways, I think we both recognize exactly who Brett Kavanaugh is, as well as probably knew our share of Christine Blasey Ford.

Speaker2: [00:02:54] Yeah, I mean, I didn't go. I didn't go to that school like that was not my high school experience. This is like super elite prep school. Oh, yeah, with kids were like way too much money and probably way too much freedom. And we have we had lots of freedom and no supervision, but we didn't have money and excess like that.

Speaker1: [00:03:12] No, but I mean, the core of it is it's like too much misogyny. And, you know, and that's the part of it that is so resonant and what to say about it. It's so sad because, you know, as much as it is good that this is getting high profile attention, I have so little faith that it will move any of these senators on the Republican side of the aisle to vote against him. And that's what's so decisive.

Speaker2: [00:03:36] I mean, I don't know, maybe maybe a couple of female senators and maybe Jeff Flake, I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker3: [00:03:42] Maybe so. I mean,

Speaker1: [00:03:43] Ok, this is what I've been hearing on Twitter because I was following it on Twitter this morning. I wasn't watching it. I was trying to take a nap and kind of get ready for the day, but

Speaker2: [00:03:50] I was running

Speaker1: [00:03:51] Now. Well, sometimes you stay up late. Yeah. And it sounds like a that. She's doing an amazing job. There's lots and lots of people who are saying she's obviously heroic for taking this on and completely authentic and obviously should be believed, but is also a psychologist and is going into some of the details about how, in instances of trauma, the memory of the perpetrator and the memory of the victim, or do they just lodge differently. So for her, this can be a defining moment of her life and for perpetrating is forgotten that he probably, when he says he doesn't recall, he may actually not

Speaker2: [00:04:25] Recall, he may have been so drunk. And also, just like for him, it wasn't a big deal, and for her at least what her earlier testimony or her earlier statement said she was afraid that he might inadvertently kill her like he was on top of her and holding her mouth. And it wasn't just that she was afraid of being raped or assaulted. She was actually afraid for her life. Now, if you thought you were, if someone was going to accidentally kill you when you're like 15, 16 years old, you'd remember that right? Like that would be a vivid memory. But for him, yeah, he may not remember it at all, either because of the chemicals or just because he didn't really give a shit again. Cue misogyny, but you know, it may have just been another, you know, day in the life of old Brett Kavanaugh.

Speaker1: [00:05:13] I kind of think it was. Which makes it. I mean, if the if the only outcome of this were to say, let's investigate the rest of these accusations. More seriously, because there's also the one that came up, I think, just yesterday about him participating in gang rapes that also involved drugging people and again, you mentioned Bill Cosby. So how are we not stopping to investigate that seriously? And to my mind, there's no reason why this guy ever should have been considered for the Supreme Court in the first place. But especially now with all of these things going on, it's just kind of criminally negligent that this is not calling a halt to the whole process and just starting over. But of course, you know what they have. They have, like 10 other Brett Kavanaugh's that they're willing to let stand up and replace him. And that's again.

Speaker2: [00:05:57] Yeah. Yeah. Who might not have anyone who might not have anyone come forward and talk about things that they did in the past? Or maybe they didn't, you know, do anything as nefarious as Kavanaugh clearly appeared?

Speaker1: [00:06:11] But they did look at Neil Gorsuch. He may be squeaky clean, but believe me, he is no friend of women's rights. He's going to do everything he can to to hit the laundry list of the rights, you know, objective. So right? I don't know. And I think it's something that I've been thinking about that I feel isn't being discussed as much in terms of the kind of authoritarian populist turn in politics in this country and probably in Europe to this would apply is how much of it is just basically white patriarchy was willing to go along with liberalism as long as it wasn't conceivable to them that anyone other than white men would be in power and that it all kind of worked well. This idea of, you know, freedom and liberty and property rights. But what we've seen in the past, especially in the past 50 years but in the past couple of centuries, is growing presence in political power of non-white non men. Right. And I think that's reaching a boiling point now where basically what they're revealing is they're willing to kind of give up on liberalism to to secure their power. I mean, that's what the Republican Party essentially is doing has been doing for a while, but now it's really naked and obvious. They're just, you know, fuck democracy. We are, you know, going to. We're just we're going to we're in charge like fucking out. We were willing as long as you guys were willing to stay subservient, then fine. We would say we were a democracy. But no, that's not what this is.

Speaker2: [00:07:32] Yeah, this is probably why The Handmaid's Tale was such a big hit, too, because it was very timely in that sense, because that is like a retreat from liberalism, that whole society, that paradigm. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:07:45] So we're cycling because we know

Speaker2: [00:07:48] We're cycling, right?

Speaker1: [00:07:49] That's your cycling is an authoritarian measure.

Speaker2: [00:07:52] That's a really do you really got stuck on that thing?

Speaker1: [00:07:55] No one,

Speaker2: [00:07:56] Even else even. Well, that's that's OK. I guess there were some recycling barrels or a part of that evil regime that authoritarian?

Speaker1: [00:08:04] Well, it was one of the ways it kind of sold itself as being caring and considerate. Was that say about the environment? I say,

Speaker2: [00:08:10] Yeah, OK, I won't go. That's that now. Cos again, we've heard that

Speaker1: [00:08:14] Rant, and I think I've said about all we can say about the Supreme Court. Unless you have your

Speaker2: [00:08:18] Reflections, you know, I was just, I don't I'm not going to reflect on this right now because I don't think it's appropriate in this kind of serious moment. Wow, she's testifying right now, but I have to say that you start thinking about high school things, especially because I've been listening to podcasts and there's been so much reportage that for the first time, for first time in a long time, I'm like, Oh, you know, trying to remember back to things during high school, like, what do I remember? What is vivid? What know what sorts of things happened? What do I remember with my friends? Or, you know, things that didn't happen? And it's interesting to kind of go back through the memory banks, and I don't have anything in my tapes that have anything like the Brett Kavanaugh story, either for myself or any of my close friends that I can remember. But the other interesting thing coming out of this is the ubiquity of sexual assault of some kind. Maybe not, you know, rape, maybe not a violent rape, but sexual assault of some kind is just, I think, the norm for girls growing up in this country and others. And it's sort of like, you know, you should expect it to happen.

Speaker2: [00:09:33] And then how do you kind of prepare for, you know, to to avoid it, if you can? But having a nine year old girl child, I feel like, you know, pretty soon, like tomorrow or something, that conversation has to happen. But yet you don't want to create fear around boys. And yet caution is unfortunately. Kind of call it like attacks upon women, right? Attacks upon girls that have to sort of try and work around this stuff. Yeah. Or whatever. Deal with it. Confront it. It shouldn't. It shouldn't be girls problem. It should be boys problem. Because most of it, it seems to me, has to do with the kind of crisis in masculinity and an inability to find a place. In the world or a kind of cracked masculinity from past, it just hasn't kind of caught up to the more egalitarian norms that we purport to hold these days. And boys, just, I don't know, maybe it's gotten a little bit better. Maybe they have better ways to be that back when we were teenagers, like, kind of. Yeah, the Brett Kavanaugh style of like machismo was pretty, pretty prevalent

Speaker1: [00:10:48] And pretty unquestioned, too. I mean, that's the thing is like the kind of masculinity like if you go back and watch the movies from the 80s, like the kind of masculinity that he's epitomizing, you know, this idea of, oh, ha ha ha, he just, you know, what was it that the Breakfast Club, where the jock guy just gives his girlfriend to the nerd to sleep with right as a payment? God, everyone thought that was a touching moment in the 80s. I mean, you got the other kind of reorient a little bit. It's not to say that the assault isn't happening now because obviously it is. I mean, that's all very real, but in a way that it was almost like not taboo. You know what I mean?

Speaker2: [00:11:24] I mean, just I had forgotten that that is like, I mean, it's shocking to think of it now that that

Speaker1: [00:11:31] And that that was just like good old fashioned bonding. No.

Speaker2: [00:11:34] And no one batted in on, you know, that he would literally like take his property of his right cute girlfriend and hand her body over to the nerd.

Speaker1: [00:11:44] Yeah, and that would seem to be this great moment. Oh, he's so kind. Like, what a good.

Speaker3: [00:11:48] What a good guy. You got a good guy.

Speaker2: [00:11:49] And she was wasted.

Speaker3: [00:11:50] Yeah, and she was completely wasted. Wasted.

Speaker1: [00:11:53] And at the end of it, she's like, Oh yeah, we had this experience, you know? And it was OK. It was strange, but it was OK. I mean, you know, not to mention the racism, not to mention the fag jokes. I mean, it all was part, you know, of a of a cloth. But I mean, again, if you want to find any kind of hope in the cloud, the fact is that all of this shit is getting called out now and people are getting noisy about all those types of discrimination and marginalization is, I think, a good thing. And maybe it is a sign that in in a way, the kind of violent backlash right now of these folks trying to cling to power is so strong because they know it's changing and they see that their time is coming right?

Speaker2: [00:12:35] I don't know if it's changing. Maybe not. We have. I heard a good I good heard a good name for the ranter in chief the day before yesterday, someone and we had a kind of a little kind of a talk lunch session with BLM Houston. And this one guy called him Agent Orange, which I thought was brilliant and I hadn't heard. Maybe that's already out there. I hadn't heard that before, but I thought it was brilliant. Anyhow, yeah, but see, he's in charge. Let's not forget. No, I mean, it's like things are changing, and they're not because he was he got elected.

Speaker1: [00:13:06] No, I know, I know. But. Yeah, I mean, again, that's totally true. And that says something. But maybe it also says something that he is the most reviled president of all time. Well, that's true, you know, so I don't know. That's also true. So hopefully, hopefully, hopefully. Anyway, so let's hope that we have some good news on this front, though again, my my I.

Speaker2: [00:13:26] Ok. I love to be surprised, but I don't think so.

Speaker1: [00:13:29] I'm with you on this one. I'm with you on this. But in this case, I think we're both on the pessimist side. That's why Simone is wearing camo tights today and a pink top that's kind of captures it right

Speaker2: [00:13:39] Because I'm going to kick some senatorial ass in my hand, like in my camo leggings.

Speaker1: [00:13:44] One of the best things I read. I'm going to be

Speaker2: [00:13:46] Like for that boot to the head, guys. Come on.

Speaker1: [00:13:50] The best things I read on Twitter was a woman saying, I hope after today I never have to vote for a man again. Oh, good, that's yeah. There you go. Right? Need to clean house? Get these guys out. Anyway, so shall we get on to the episode today?

Speaker2: [00:14:03] The process, because we have a very good and spirited conversation today about solidarity, among other things, but mostly as a kind of solidarity concept. I think it's a think piece. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:14:17] Beyond solar energy, what are the kind of forms of culture and society that would involve solar? Yeah. Solar utopias, solar dystopia

Speaker2: [00:14:26] Dystopias too, right? Solar pessimism, solar punk.

Speaker1: [00:14:29] And we're talking with two of our friends and co-conspirators and petro cultural studies Imre Zeeman from now, the University of Waterloo and Darren Barney from McGill. Yeah, and they are organizing a fantastic event in Montreal. That's kind of our point of departure for the discussion in the spring. And yeah, so I mean,

Speaker3: [00:14:48] Yeah, it's a it's a great it's a great conversation

Speaker1: [00:14:50] And much more interesting and inspiring than when we were just talking about. So if you've made it thus far, I think you should listen on.

Speaker2: [00:14:57] Oh, definitely. I'd say yes to that. A big thumbs up here. This is my optimistic thumbs up and I say, Go Darren and go Imre and go celerity

Speaker1: [00:15:09] Christine Blasey Ford also.

Speaker2: [00:15:10] Oh right. Yes, go.

Speaker3: [00:15:30] Hi, everyone, welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we have to dare I say, titans of Petro cultural analysis on the line with us, also friends of the podcast and Rosenman from Waterloo. Congratulations on the new position, IMO, by the way, I don't think we've officially recognized that you were last on the podcast 140 episodes ago. Wow. Amazing. And then we are very pleased to have for the first time Darren Barney from McGill. So this is terrific to have both you gentlemen with us, and we have some exciting things to talk about today. Welcome.

Speaker4: [00:16:03] It's great to be here. Thanks.

Speaker5: [00:16:05] It's great to be back.

Speaker2: [00:16:08] Great to be back.

Speaker3: [00:16:09] So long you're selling that Emrah. I'm believing you from the.

Speaker2: [00:16:13] I still remember that conversation one hundred and forty episodes ago.

Speaker3: [00:16:17] That's right.

Speaker4: [00:16:18] That's a good one. I'm a longtime listener and big fan of the podcast, so I feel like I finally made it okay.

Speaker2: [00:16:26] Yeah, we're we're going to send you a shirt. Darren, as soon as we make one.

Speaker3: [00:16:30] Yeah, coming soon because we let.

Speaker4: [00:16:32] Sounds great.

Speaker2: [00:16:32] We love our fans and our participants. So so what we were going to talk about today to start off with was SolarCity, a conference and workshop and gathering of minds and bodies that's going to explore the themes of SolarCity in the context of something that's being called after oil, too. So I wonder if we shouldn't begin by talking about after oil, the first edition or the original concept of after oil and what that was about or what that is about? And then we can kind of Segway into SolarCity as a as a category for thinking about that post-oil moment. So whoever wants to take it away with after oil and what that's all about?

Speaker4: [00:17:14] Go ahead, Maria, because you were the the architect of the original after oil meeting.

Speaker5: [00:17:20] I'll talk about the historical what happened back in time, and that allowed Darren to talk about the more interesting thing on the horizon. I think so. After it was, it was an experiment in several things all at once. So I would say that it was an experiment in how one holds a meeting with one's colleagues. There were so many interesting people doing work in this field that I guess is now called energy humanities, that we really wanted to have an opportunity to bring them all together and have a discussion with them. But we didn't want that to just be a sharing of of papers that we could have just read all on. We could just read them online if we wanted to. It didn't really seem to make sense. So what my colleagues and I at the University of Alberta decided is that we would hold a workshop where we would invite a number of people from different communities that included academics, former politicians, artists and other people who are working on energy who weren't necessarily academics. We wanted to bring them together for three or four days. We told them to bring nothing at all with them except their great ideas, and we wanted them to kind of do some work together instead of kind of boring work with them.

Speaker5: [00:18:39] And what we did over a short number of days is that we collectively wrote a book called After Oil with about 40 People. A difficult actually, it turned out to actually be not a difficult endeavor to write with 40 people. We can talk about that perhaps later. We had a public event that attracted about 250 people to talk about the specificity of oil and what comes after in Alberta. And then afterward we put together this book, which again, was a kind of a the second part of this experiment, I think, which we didn't do it in conjunction with an academic press. We wanted to see those of us who wanted to see what the costs of doing a book in Twenty Fifteen Twenty Sixteen were and how we might distribute those differently. So we went about producing the book ourselves and have made it available for free online. We have a distribution agreement with the university press and then we also have it available for free in a physical format. We've been distributed quite widely through the people that worked on it, and so I think we're we're up to about more than four thousand copies that have been printed and distributed.

Speaker2: [00:19:53] That's great. Wow.

Speaker5: [00:19:55] So we're kind of getting the news about and I guess the third thing really was to make something akin to a manifesto for what it is that jointly all of us are interested in. When we say this phrase after oil or when we want to try to pay greater attention to energy in relationship to society in the 21st century. And I think on all three fronts it has proven to be, I think it proved I don't usually say this about things that I'm involved in, critical of myself, but I think it proved to be successful. So I'll just say one other thing before passing. On to Daryn, those who are involved in after oil, the first after oil came away from it with a real buzz about the opportunities for intellectual experimentation and communication with one's colleagues that can arise from a different structure and where they wanted to do something again really soon. So we we wanted to do after oil again, but it didn't seem to make any sense to do it really, really quickly. When one writes a kind of manifesto like book to do one every year seems to negate the original impulse of the first one. Right. So so I think we kind of were going to let the project lie until Darren came to us with an idea for how we might do this kind of experiment in bringing people together again. So I'll turn it over to Darren at this point, unless you have some questions.

Speaker3: [00:21:25] Well, I had just one question. Emira, you mentioned it's successful, and that's my sense of it, too. I'm curious whether, you know there has been any reaction beyond the kind of usual academic suspects to it. Have you found that people are? Maybe part of the ambition was to create a text that could be read more widely. Are you finding that it has been read more widely

Speaker5: [00:21:43] So in the limited sample that I guess I can use? I feel that it has been. I mean, very soon after we did this project, we saw reference to After Oil in the literary review of Canada, which I guess would be something close to the in our New York review of books. And in a discussion of of a of the necessary necessity for energy transition. And it's also shown up in in discussions and magazine articles, in popular magazine articles, in several different places. So I think it's out and about. I have this same curiosity as well when I talk informally to academics in different fields, and I talk to some non academics who are connected to energy generally in government. It's a text that they know about and have had. Some are they're familiar with, whether it's through the physical, having a physical copy of the book or it's from getting downloading it from the website.

Speaker2: [00:22:45] Well, that's that's a really good sign set of signs.

Speaker5: [00:22:49] Whenever I travel to any event whatsoever, I bring a handful of these books and they disappear even before I've had a chance to say a word in the lecture or that I'm going to give. So people are interested.

Speaker3: [00:23:00] That's great. Yeah, terrific. Terrific. Well, yes. So let's turn to Darren now and hear a little bit more about the concept for After Oil two

Speaker4: [00:23:09] As ever described after oil, the first after oil really came about as a kind of offshoot of the great work that's been done through the Petro Cultures Research Group, which of course has always had a kind of broad historical and interdisciplinary aspect to it. But my understanding of one of the motivations for after oil was initially was really to occupy a little bit of the speculative space that was kind of forward and future looking, that space that's typically taken up by all variety of scientific and economic discourses and forecasting. But to really try to find a role and a voice for humanities and critical social scientific kind of work in in thinking through the possible alternative energy futures, which to which we gave the name after oil. But one of the things that we found with the first after oil meeting was that much of our discussion nevertheless remained about oil, about the impasse that that oil cultures and petro cultures have reached, about the difficulties of imagining or initiating transition in the midst of hegemonic petro cultures. And so our after oil meeting really ended up kind of dominated by the big other of oil.

Speaker4: [00:24:39] So when we started to to think about the possibility of an after oil to emerge and having a conversation, I think in Montreal, as I recall, we're sort of thinking through that problem and how do we actually get the after oil gathering to move on to the speculative terrain of after oil? And what we what we settled on was that that it might be necessary to nominate provisionally one category for a possible alternative energy future just to kind of focus attention and to and to direct inquiry really in a speculative direction. And so we settled on solar for this. Not because we think solar is the single solution for our energy futures, but I mean, because we know, of course, as as energy scholars that that are possible. Energy futures are going to involve a multiplicity of locally appropriate and locally adopted energy configurations. But we kind of said, let's nominate, let's nominate solar just for the purpose of focusing attention. And because we thought we had a kind of intuition that they were going to be some, some interesting social, cultural and political questions around that category.

Speaker3: [00:26:08] Just a quick question. Sorry to interrupt, but was there anything else seriously in the running or did you guys move to SolarCity pretty quickly?

Speaker4: [00:26:14] Well, because we were in Quebec, we we we were thinking about hydro electricity for for quite a while, but we settled on. We settled on solar. I think just because we did have a kind of sense that there was interesting work being done, there was it did have a kind of geographical reach. I don't think we had a very extended discussion about wind, but it was it was in the running there for a while. But I think it was it was Imre really, who I think had been already doing some preliminary thinking about solar, and this carried the day for us. But right away, and I think this is really goes to the heart of things, is that in the spirit of after oil and in the spirit of petro cultures, we right away said the issue is not really solar as an energy source, because the founding premise, I would say, are one of the founding premises of the Petro Cultures Research Group is that there is almost no such thing as just an energy source. What there is is a set of social relationships instead of cultural, political and economic practices, all of which combine to create any given energy configuration. And so we we right away knew that we we weren't talking about solar as an energy source that might replace oil. But really, we were talking about SolarCity as a social, political and economic condition that can have a kind of set of diverse and even contradictory attributes. And that that that's really what we're interested in, in inquiring into when we're thinking speculatively about the possibilities of solar energy futures. And so we really settled on this category of SolarCity as a way to kind of indicate we're talking about a social condition, not just an energy source. And this this then produced this very funny little moment where we looked to see if there was such a word as so nice. And we we typed it into the search engine, of course. And what came back was the query Did you mean solidarity?

Speaker3: [00:28:19] We did, as a matter of fact.

Speaker4: [00:28:22] Yeah. So there was an incredible moment like Google really does know everything about me. Yes, I did need solidarity, but it was at that moment, it's at that moment that we knew that we were onto something. And so we have now kind of developed the hilarity again oriented towards the idea that what we're talking about here is a kind of social, economic, cultural condition, not just solar as an energy source. And that will now frame the activities of after school to which I can. I can talk more about image.

Speaker3: [00:28:55] Do you have anything to add on the back story to SolarCity before we press on?

Speaker5: [00:28:58] I have just one thing to say. I think Darren got everything down accurately, and that is that the thing that for me, solar was important in indexing was that solar also stands in as a kind of whenever whenever I've talked to about solar or hear about solar from publics or government, they always seem to see it as the ultimate techno scientific solution to our energy problems, but not just our energy problems, actually our social problems. So there's this sense, somehow, that the production of a solar economy or a solar society is ipso facto also the creation of an ultimately society that is ultimately socially just and part of what both there and I think were curious about is both the kind of a promise of solar or SolarCity, but also the fantasy that seems to have surrounded solar almost everywhere that one reads about it. It seems to be this place where precisely the kinds of issues that are being raised in relationship to energy, energy and the environment get resolved all at once by the techno technological creation that allows everything to go forward. So it's both this kind of place where there is some possibility on the horizon of something interesting and new, and perhaps perhaps there is a political shift. Shift in social justice in relationship to energy, that might be a possibility, it's at the same time precisely a negation of those kinds of opportunities for a different kind of society and a different kind of relationship to one another and the Earth as we're moving forward.

Speaker2: [00:30:41] Well, I think that I mean, one of the attractions, that technological attraction that I imagine is what these political figures or policymakers are thinking of is the absolute distributed ability of solar, especially in the form of panels and papering, right. There's something about the technology of solar that allows it to be in place in so many places, you know, on cars, for locomotion, on roofs, for electricity, you know, on parking lots, for again, electricity generation or creating air conditioning. So there's something magic about the panel, right? And its current form that I think must be attracted to these policymakers because it can sort of appear everywhere here at rice, they're working on solar paint, right? That it'll be this nanotechnology that allows essentially these tiny little conductors to create electricity within the paint itself. So there's something I think there's some magic there, some technological magic that's part of the fantasy. But as you said, it's not just the technology, it's really the imagination that goes along with it. And it's also the flip side is that that that imaginary of egalitarianism that might come through this massively distributed clean energy source also might not actually come to pass that it could take a different path that might not be the the solidarity and the justice that we imagine. And so I think that's a really important element to to think about alongside with the utopian possibilities of celebrity.

Speaker4: [00:32:17] Yes, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I would even add to that that even one step before we get to this massively contingent terrain of what a solar energized future might look like. We're also interested in in opening up space for thinking about the ways in which, you know, under the auspices of climate change and global warming, we are already and in the near term future, going to be living with the Sun in ways that are not necessarily captured by fantastic dreams of solar panels and solar panels provide the energy to sustain the lifestyles that we have now. Yeah, they are one possible SolarCity, and indeed it's it already exists for many people in many parts of the world is a is a celebrity in which the Sun is experienced as threatening as as a menace, as inducing unlivable conditions or conditions that make life very difficult. And so there is this kind of dark side to possible solar futures that are unfolding under the continued fossil fuel regime and the results that it has in terms of a warming climate in which the the presence of the Sun is not this kind of utopian, beneficent, universal, easily accessible energy source, but is in fact something that we have to guard against or something that we have to kind of harden our ways of living our buildings, our agriculture against.

Speaker4: [00:34:04] And so that's one possible solar future. And then, of course, as as Simone and I have already discussed, even if we think about SolarCity and the other way, that is to say different ways of harnessing the energy of the Sun to social and economic purposes, there's just a multiplicity of possibilities. There are multiple contingent outcomes that that won't necessarily conform to the utopian dreams of policymakers or engineers, and that signal that like, like all energy configurations, SolarCity is going to be a terrain of social contestation and struggle and imagination. And all of that is what's going to determine the outcomes of celebrity, not to anything that here is in the technologies themselves. And that's why I think we think that the kinds of inquiry that we do humanities inquiry, critical social science inquiry and practice are going to be crucial to intervening in some of those contingent possibilities.

Speaker3: [00:35:03] Yeah. And I'm really I'm really glad you're taking that tack on it. I think it sounds immensely generative. I've been long fascinated with the work of Herman Scheer, who's the German social theorist who had had himself, you know, placed great philosophical and critical weight upon celebrity as a, you know, as a as a logic of breakthrough and escape salvation from a fossil fuel economy. And just like Simone was saying his argument. Was really because of its ubiquity of the resource. It would kind of intrinsically or naturally somehow lead then to more local sovereignty, et cetera, et cetera. But of course, we know that that that's only one route forward and we're thinking of one of the artists we've been working with at Rice Cancer, the Egyptian graphic designer and muralist who's got this fabulous graphic novel project called The Solar Grid Now, which is a dystopian solar future in which the entire Earth is covered with giant solar arrays that are empowering, you know, the same kind of reckless industry that we have now, except on a still larger scale interplanetary scale. And I think that's exactly the kind of imaginations we need to be probing such that, you know, we don't end up imagining that some technology or some energy source is somehow intrinsically emancipatory, right?

Speaker5: [00:36:16] Yeah, that's that's right. I think that it does. It does appear in this way as emancipatory, even in left critical thinking. I'm thinking of the of David Schwartzman's articulation of solar communism, for instance, which he's been doing for about 20 years in

Speaker4: [00:36:34] Various

Speaker5: [00:36:34] Configurations. But it's essentially adding energy to the story of shifts from feudalism to capitalism to communism, and now saying that the last missing bit of that shift to communism was having this kind of discrete energy source that would produce a kind of energy democracy of a kind that we've been just talking about, and that would suddenly then allow everybody to be communist in a way that they hadn't been before. And this is the kind of thing that we're we think at least there has to be a discussion about it as opposed to a an acceptance, an acceptance of and it does seem like, I think to those listening to this podcast, it might seem that we're overemphasizing this sense that this that solar or other renewables have been linked to the possibilities of a more democratic society or a greater social justice. But if one looks at, say, Lester Brown's The Great Transition in his discussion of solar, the the chapter's actually called solar revolution, he very much ties the presence of solar to a very different kind of society. And I think that is the case in other places as well. I mean, certainly, I think one of the things that I heard said about the energy vendor in Germany, which is which is a great point to make, is that the issue in Germany and its transition? What's important about it isn't the amount of solar energy that might be in Germany, which is by no means the highest in the planet.

Speaker5: [00:38:14] Other countries, even in Europe, have a higher share of solar power on their grids. It's that there is a shift to an energy democracy where communities make their own energy and make their own decisions. That's possible to in in communities in Southeast Asia and India, where there's rural communities have had no energy sources are starting to have access to some solar panels. The question then becomes Who owns those? Where does that energy go? Is this something that they themselves are deciding? It kind of comes back again to to questions that we have about political sovereignty, political decision making, the capacity of communities to make their own decisions, which which one could ask in relation to anything and not just solar. So solar as the the thing that suddenly is going to make everything better is makes. I think both dare and I nervous. And what we want instead is a discussion about what comes next.

Speaker3: [00:39:10] So did you want to add to that?

Speaker4: [00:39:12] Or maybe briefly? So what Imre has said, I think is true that we kind of approach this the kind of utopian dreams of SolarCity with with a very healthy degree of criticality for all the reasons that he discussed. But it's also the case that we do. We are going to be making space SolarCity for an exploration of actual concrete projects where locally determined solar energy projects have tended in the direction of kind of democratization and autonomy for communities that were kind of previously hemmed in and the kind of energy systems and economies that that kind of preceded their efforts in solar energy. So, for example, one of our one of our featured participants at SolarCity is going to be a a young woman named Melina Labov and Masimo who's a member of the Rubicon Cree First Nation here in Canada. She's an indigenous fellow with the David Suzuki Foundation, and she played a a kind of decisive role in something called the Pittcon Solar Project in northern Alberta. Which was the development of a renewable energy installation that allowed her community to wean themselves off diesel powered electricity generation in order to power some of their public facilities, health care centers, schools, et cetera, et cetera. So here is a case where you have a community that was part of its kind of disempowerment and even some of the negative environmental conditions that it has suffered. We're absolutely bound up in its implication in this carbon economy that it couldn't get out of and through a kind of infrastructural project organized around solar. Renewable energy has managed to kind of exert some political autonomy and organize its material life in more democratic ways. So there are actual potentials and possibilities here that we also want to to explore along the lines of saying, well, what are the conditions that that might tend in the direction of some of the more egalitarian, more ecologically sustainable and healthy celebrities than the ones that we fear?

Speaker3: [00:41:35] Well, that was actually anticipating my next question, which was one of the really provocative things about after oil. One was the fact that it was staged in Alberta, in Edmonton, in the kind of epicenter of Canadian petrol culture. And you were asking this question after oil. Now that the scene, I guess, is moving to Quebec, how does celebrity figure into Quebec's past, present and future in a way that that may allow you to have some of that same resonance?

Speaker4: [00:42:00] Well, it's interesting because of, of course, Quebec has a long history of abundant hydroelectric resources, and so Quebec is always imagined itself to be a more progressive environmental and energy player than than other parts of the country. And so, in a way, the kind of impetus to develop solar infrastructures has not been as strongly felt in Quebec as it has. It has been in other places, simply because Quebec understands itself already to be a geography that's largely powered by renewable resources. Nevertheless, we also know that Quebec has been one of the provinces that's been at the forefront of activists, and here I'm talking about more on the ground politics than provincial government level politics. But it's kind of been at the forefront of political organization in opposition to the exploitation of tar sands. Resources has been also at the forefront of kind of developing solidarities between environmental activists and indigenous activists around energy issues. So there is actually quite a bit of solar action, especially in the Montreal area, in terms of research that's going on at the universities, activist groups that are involved in environmental politics and again, groups that are building these these links with indigenous communities that are looking at renewable infrastructures as a kind of material expression of their autonomy. So I think Montreal is a good place for SolarCity, particularly, I think, because in this case, it allows us to kind of make an intervention in this what I think is a kind of not entirely accurate Quebec imaginary that says that because we have hydroelectric power, we don't really have to worry about alternative energy futures.

Speaker3: [00:43:51] So do you want to tell us a little bit about kind of concretely what you have planned? I mean, I know that it's probably still in the planning phase, but but we need to get to the specs of kind of where it's happening and when and what are some of the kinds of events that are connected or workshops that are connected with the more academic part of it that might be open to the public?

Speaker4: [00:44:10] Sure. Do you want me to take this?

Speaker5: [00:44:12] Emira, yeah, please. You're the one that's the host,

Speaker4: [00:44:15] So I think you should be the one that's OK. So basically, this will be a three day event that will take place May twenty third to twenty fifth. Two thousand nineteen. It's going to be hosted at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which is our major partner for this event, and there will be several public facing events that will be part of it are we're going to have keynote speaker on the first night. This will be Nicole Star Kelsey, who's a professor of media, culture and communication at NYU. She's a kind of noted infrastructure scholar in communication studies. Her current work is focused around thermal media, and she's also a practicing farmer. And so she's going to be giving a talk on thermal energy, the sun and alternative agriculture as a kind of practice of celebrity. And that will be the opening keynote second public event will be a kind of moderated conversation. I'll be moderating a conversation with five scholars and activists who are active around questions of solar. Energy, we've kind of really put an emphasis for this part of the event on junior emerging scholars from a diversity of backgrounds and and geographies. So we'll have Nandita Badham, who's an SRO fellow from UC Irvine, who's working on the politics of sunlight and solar energy in India across a whole range of diverse settings will have Molina Lab Massimo, who I just described, who say an indigenous research fellow who's worked on solar infrastructures in indigenous communities in the Canadian North. Amanda Buttkiss, who's an art historian, she composed the solar entry in the recent volume fueling culture, and her current project is on vision and ecology in art for what she calls a world to come.

Speaker4: [00:46:23] So she'll be talking about the kind of aesthetics and visuals of celebrity we have. Shane Brennan, who recently completed a PhD in N.Y.U. on the mediation of sunlight into solar energy in New York, Detroit and the Mojave Desert, and he's the author of a really great recent article called Visionary Infrastructure in the Journal of Visual Culture. And finally, we'll have Elaina Bennett, who's a scientist, a professor of natural resource sciences here at McGill, where she leads something called the Seeds of Good Anthropocene Project, which is a massive project inventory and creating an inventory of small scale local sustainability and alternative energy projects around the world. So that will be the major event for the second night. Very cool. And then most of the event, though, will be taken up by the school part of After Oil, and this is where we will have about between 40 and 50 participants interdisciplinary from across the kind of academic and non-academic sectors who will take part in two days of kind of extensive study and collaboration around the themes of after oil. They'll be distributed into a number of smaller workshops where they will have they'll spend a day discussing materials and readings that they've been given in advance. And then on the second day of those workshops, they will engage in collaborative production of some material that will become part of the kind of publication profile of After Oil two.

Speaker4: [00:48:00] And that material is going to. And this is one way in which after oil to hopes to to differ from the first after oil school and that we're going to be we're going to be encouraging people to produce materials in a diversity of formats. So we might have podcasts. We have mini documentary that's likely to emerge from one of the groups. We probably will have some writing. Some of it might be fiction. For example, we have one of the workshops is going to be on solar punk science fiction, and so they might actually produce a piece of fiction. We have another group who's actually going to be moving into a maker space here in Montreal, working on producing some, possibly producing some solar panels themselves. So it's a whole range of types of work that will emerge out of those workshops over the two days. And the last thing that I'll say is that our hosts, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, has actually been quite forward-looking here in Montreal. Over the past several years. They've hosted several exhibitions, several installations, produced several publications around themes of architecture, urban design cities and renewable and sustainable energy. And they are going to be gathering materials from their archive and from their previous exhibition and curating those as a kind of accessible material archive for the participants and after oil to to kind of spend time with and consult as they're as they're doing their work over the two days.

Speaker2: [00:49:24] Well, it sounds like a really bright collection of of sunny things, and I think it's going to be really exciting three days to to see these things experience these things, touch these things and listen to everything that people are working on. I really like the breadth that you've been thinking through for SolarCity because I was thinking to just, you know, going back to old Hermann Scheer again. One of the things that I really loved about his work is not just the distributed nature of the Sun in its disposition around the planet, but also that the Sun the sun's energy becomes incorporated into so many facets of life on the planet, right? So for him, solar energy is not just sunlight or sunshine, it's really the energy, the biotic energy that gets formulated in agriculture and plant life and animal life, as well as in wind where you have currents, thermal currents that are created and and create another set of forces through the wind. So I think, you know. Thinking SolarCity broadly, as you are and as it's developing, is totally on target with the way we need to be thinking through these these futures to happy and otherwise. But we've been talking quite a bit about SolarCity, so maybe we ought to switch gears just a bit and hear what what you all are working on individually, collectively. However, in in other dimensions of your energy, life,

Speaker3: [00:50:52] In your day jobs, you know what, you guys, what are you guys working on now? Let's start with Emira and see what's Emira up to these days.

Speaker5: [00:50:58] My day job just has me teaching a lot, and so I don't I don't actually get to think. I think the first thing that I'm very excited about still is related to the Celerity project, and that is an opportunity to write a an essay or maybe even a short book. I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but something with Darren that will set the layout, the groundwork for the Celerity project. So hopefully we would like to have something that the two of us have put together that is ready in time for the event. After all, to that, everybody who's coming will have read, and the intent of it, I think, is to get some of these discussions that we just had today in the podcast already out there so that people can start working right away. So we're going to write about celebrity. And this includes at least the things I would like to write about. I'd like to write about solar theory and what this might look like. I've spent a little bit of time thinking about this and and it really struck me that we don't have anything like a solar theory of energy. The only at the beginning point we have is George Baptize the accursed share, and it's it's doing really different kinds of things than I think we might want a solar theory to do.

Speaker5: [00:52:20] So I'd like to work with Darren on that. And I think there are some other points of beginning beginning points that I would be curious to work on. One is Olafur Ellison's The Weather Project, his big son that was in the Tate Modern in 2003. So it's kind of like solar art or solar aesthetics and also celebrity and indigeneity going back to Sundance's and so on. So I think there's some things that we need to do before we get to celebrity. And I'm excited to do that. Another thing that I'm just at the beginning of is a project on energy literacy, with some colleagues at University of British Columbia Faculty of Education that I hope to be doing next year. And this is really a it's a different kind of thing than I've ever done, but it's about trying to understand where youth are in relationship to their understanding of how they use energy and what energy is for. And we're specifically interested in youth, Canadian youth in suburbs.

Speaker4: [00:53:25] So.

Speaker3: [00:53:26] So it's a study of skateboarding culture, in other words, not entirely.

Speaker5: [00:53:31] There have been several studies in the last five years, but especially in the past couple of years that look at the degree to which Canada and North America as well, but Western Europe as well. Surprisingly, the majority of the new housing and the places where populations are moving continue to be in suburbs. Despite the knowledge that some of us have about the degree to which those suburbs are using up enormous amounts of energy much more than if one lives in a city core. So there's a kind of a discussion around energy and suburbs in Canada that we'd like to animate through this energy literacy project that we think is essential in terms of decisions made by city planners and city governments as to what's going to happen in the next 20 to 20 to 30 to 40 years. The expansion of of cities in Canada, the the level of suburban population expansion has been double that, of course, of cities, and that includes cities like Toronto and Montreal. So that's that's a project that I'm that I will start doing. And I'm also doing that in conjunction with an organization called the Canadian Centre Centre for Policy Alternatives. That is quite good about getting messages

Speaker4: [00:54:43] Across to government. Great. That sounds

Speaker3: [00:54:45] Amazing. Can't wait for that solar theory project. That sounds really, really exciting, guys. And I think you're right, there's a big gap there that could lead to some really exciting work, for sure. So I guess we'll turn things over to Darren.

Speaker4: [00:54:56] So along with the working on the SolarCity project with Imre, I'm also now moving into what I think for me is going to be a kind of major and culminating project of work I've been doing over the past several years on politics of petrochemical pipelines in Canada, which is, of course, a hot topic for many Canadian energy scholars. And I've been kind of making some interventions in that literature over the past couple of. Years, and I'm really now trying to think I'm finally reaching the point where I can make what is, I hope, going to be my big statement on all of this. So I'm initiating a project that I'm calling pipelines, politics and the ends of the Earth. That phrase, the ends of the Earth, comes from a remark that was actually made by a kind of conservative Canadian pundit who was expressing frustration at what appears to be the inability of the Canadian government to put in place conditions that will allow for petrochemical pipelines to be built with some degree of predictability and security and consistency. As we know in recent years that the building of new pipeline infrastructure has been a flashpoint for environmental and indigenous politics in Canada, with the result that many otherwise approved pipelines have have not been able to be built.

Speaker4: [00:56:25] And this journalist was expressing frustration at that and saying, I don't know what more we can do. We've gone to the ends of the Earth to satisfy and include these people, and still they don't seem to be satisfied. And so that for me, triggered this realization that the ends of the Earth is a much more complicated place for for politics than the conditions that were in place at the time that our political institutions were founded and conceived. And so this project is going to basically look at the hypothesis that the liberal democratic capitalist extractive state form in Canada is is collapsing under the weight of environmental stress and indigenous resurgence. That the material conditions that were in place or believed to be in place at the foundation of that state form no longer pertain and that in fact, what we're in the middle of experiencing now is a situation in which our characteristic modes of politics and our characteristic institutions of politics and representation are in fact ill suited to handling the kinds of political agency, the kinds of claims making and the kinds of multiple subjectivities that are actually emerging into the political landscape through the medium of struggles over infrastructure related to energy. Wow. And that's

Speaker2: [00:57:54] Fascinating. That sounds a little bit like you're calling for revolution, Darren.

Speaker4: [00:57:59] Well, Professor Professor Boyer's revolutionary infrastructure article looms large in this work. And did

Speaker2: [00:58:08] He pay you to say that,

Speaker3: [00:58:09] Darren? Yeah, thanks, Terry.

Speaker4: [00:58:11] It checks. Got it!

Speaker2: [00:58:13] Yeah, I did. He admits it,

Speaker4: [00:58:15] But it also, yeah, it does go to this to this idea that you know, what we're experiencing now is not just the kind of receding of these material conditions upon which previous political and state forms were founded, but also the emergence of a multiplicity of agents and agencies that are not adequately covered by existing conceptions of citizenship. The speaking voting agent, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a kind of strong current of new materialist and post humanist sensibility in this project as well. That's going to try to think about where we can look for clues about what forms politics at the ends of the Earth might take or might need to take.

Speaker3: [00:58:59] So it sounds fabulous. Yeah, that's great. Great project. So I think, you know, with that in mind, I'm seeing we're coming up on the hour here. Any any final words from either of you. Any calls to action or calls to engagement that you want to issue out. Obviously, we're going to encourage everyone listening to see if you can find your way to Montreal in May. Twenty third through twenty fifth for celerity, which sounds like a really, really fabulous and important event. But beyond that, anything else that you guys want to plug or announce

Speaker4: [00:59:29] While you're on? Darren? Well, I'm very happy to announce that just two days ago, the Senate of my university, McGill University, passed a resolution calling on the board of Governors at McGill to divest the university's endowment from fossil fuels.

Speaker2: [00:59:46] Oh, awesome. Congratulations.

Speaker4: [00:59:48] That's great. In my activist life, this is something that I've been working on here at McGill for the last couple of years, and that was a big day two days ago. There's still work to be done on that because we will now need to to convince one more level of decision makers that they should pay heed to the to the Senate's resolution. But I will say that that it was actually quite an interesting moment. I mean, we all work with it, our small, isolated institutional settings to try to accomplish things that we think are good to accomplish and when we're when we work around issues of energy and economy and. Infrastructure, it can often be demoralizing. We can often feel like we never win. And the obstacles and the impasses are too great, but every once in a while you have a moment where something unexpected happens and reveals to you that actually the future is a field of possibilities and contingencies rather than closed. And I think it's important to hold on to those moments and to kind of allow those kinds of moments and the affects that come from them to orient us to acting into our futures and kind of celebrate those small victories as as signals of what might be possible if we just keep at it.

Speaker3: [01:01:02] And it's a great inspiration to to scholars, you know, because I think this is one of the immediate forms of political engagement that anyone working at a university can get involved with is a divestment campaign. So it's a great inspiration and a great example.

Speaker4: [01:01:15] Darren, thank you.

Speaker5: [01:01:16] To echo Darren's point at petrol culture's 2014, which was held at McGill, the event started with a at that time senator, a member of the University Senate at McGill, effectively chiding the event. Attendees with like our I don't know the fact that we were maybe not grown ups with this idea that McGill should divest its holdings in fossil fuels. That was an event at which students were really, really active and trying to get the message out. And I guess I just want to say that four years later, with a lot of work going on at McGill there and has been able to pass along this good news. Work is proceeding to create divestment at Waterloo. There's still work to be done, but it's it's also on the go.

Speaker3: [01:02:05] Well, the de rice divest will probably be a day that's one of the hell freezes over type of our scenarios, but that doesn't mean we can't continue to infiltrate and sabotage from within. And sometimes a good little bit of sabotage is a worthwhile activity too.

Speaker4: [01:02:20] I'm always happy with the word sabotage is added to the conversation.

Speaker3: [01:02:27] Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. This is really exciting both what you're doing individually, politically as scholars, but also this great collaboration you're working on with celerity. We personally can't wait, and I have to say our ears perked up at the at the idea that there might be a podcast opportunity in there somewhere. We're not going to, you know, you don't have to promise anything right now, but I'm just saying, you know, we've got a we got a we know a thing or two about podcasting. I mean, in a in an amateur semi-professional sense sold. So that's that's just a plug. And then also, you know, Simone me a note. We always just ask all of our friends in Europe and Canada if Trump is re-elected, if you'll please get us jobs there so we can escape. But you don't have you don't have to commit to that on the podcast right now, but we will be sending you a detailed.

Speaker5: [01:03:21] I'll commit

Speaker3: [01:03:22] To it. Ok, great. Thank you.

Speaker2: [01:03:23] Thank you, IRA. We knew we could count on you.

Speaker4: [01:03:26] We'll have to fight over the memory.

Speaker2: [01:03:27] Oh, that's right. Ok? We take blood

Speaker3: [01:03:30] Oaths. Yeah. Well, you both have to. You two excellent cities we can't choose. There's no we did choose between Toronto and Montreal. They are. They are 1A and 1b of of great cities and in Canada. So but it was really great to talk with you both and can't wait to keep the conversation going in our friendly neighbor to the north.

Speaker2: [01:03:50] Yes. And we'll bring our sunny spirits and attitudes with us.

Speaker3: [01:03:54] Oh, but by the way, guys,

Speaker2: [01:03:55] I read a lot of sunny, sunny puns at this event.

Speaker3: [01:03:59] I read, Yes, I read yesterday. If either of you are planning on working in the marijuana industry, the Trump people are not. They're going to. If they can smell pot in your car driving across the border, they're going to give you trouble. So I'm just saying, you know, because you know, something else that uses a lot of solar energy is marijuana farming.

Speaker2: [01:04:15] So OK, because we're only going to be forming, we're going to be farming strawberry scented marijuana. So it's OK. Oh, but I'll just smell like an aircraft.

Speaker3: [01:04:23] My brother in law, who works for Constellation Wines, which is like a giant multinational winemaker, says they're investing $2 billion in Canadian weed.

Speaker5: [01:04:31] I should say that by the by the time of the event, well, it's already legal. No, it'll be legal soon, cannabis. So that's something else to know about coming to celebrity.

Speaker2: [01:04:41] Excellent point, Imre Well-put. Subtle, subtle.

Speaker4: [01:04:46] I'd be very happy if direct foreign investment in Canada moved out of the petrochemical sector and into the cannabis sector. So your brother in law? Way to go.

Speaker3: [01:04:56] Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:04:58] From night train to Canadian pot.

Speaker3: [01:05:00] There you go. That's the future of cheap buzzes. Ok, well, we'll leave it there and wish you both a very, very happy weekend.

Speaker4: [01:05:09] Great to talk to you. Thank you. Thanks very much.

Speaker2: [01:05:10] Bye.