Welcome back everyone. We're so happy to have you here. This is the cultures of energy podcast coming to you almost live from the basement of Fondren Library on the campus of Rice University. We are set in a shout-out to the Digital Media Commons, not center, but comments. And also sending a shout out to Natalia and Jane, who are super helpful in getting all our technology together for this. And we also are going to recognize the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the human sciences, that sense for supporting the work we've been doing here and the fund we've been doing here. Are you going to introduce yourself? My name is some anyhow, and I'm the other half of the we don't want to bore. Welcome Dominic, welcome center. So today we have a wonderful podcast again with a very intellectual and accomplished person named Imre Zemin. Imre, Imre, good Fry. Yeah. And I said it just right is perfectly. But what I did not do right. I had some sort of catastrophic brain injury, I think during this podcast or I don't know, too many fuses, sort of sparking and going down at the same time, somewhere in my cerebrum, where instead of saying the city of Edmonton, I insisted on saying the state of Alberta. I'll let you listeners figure out when that happens. I just I don't know. I think my head was at the tar sands. It was just like deeply immersed and all that gunk. But it's all right. Last time it's okay to be amateur and yes, it's okay. So what what it was was you were comparing Houston to Alberta instead of Houston to Edmonton, and you gave it away? Well, people are going to have to listen for that was going to be like an Easter egg is much reduced. And the funny thing was, when I looked at your abstract gets it wrong. It sounds like, it sounds like it's like a headline, headline for the exactly caster screws up. Podcaster misinformed. It was. But it was funny because I was looking over your notes and you had it written down and like underscored, they're like Houston, Alberta. But let me say this though. Upon reflection, there is a way you can defend that comparison because actually Houston is, use a pause, right? Pregnant pause. Houston is, is like both Calgary and Edmonton in some ways, having been to both cities and Calgary is really the like the business capital of the oil industry and Alberta, as I understand it. And the funny thing is when you drive around downtown Calgary and if you just like blanked out for a second, you could think you were in Houston. And then why is that? Because all of the same energy companies are there and then eventually autonomy, they probably have the same architecture firm is building their big skyscrapers. And so it's like the same, like cluster of sort of energy firms and their architects that are in both cities. So they kind of, and they were built around the same time, probably right? During the during the oil boom years. And so yeah. So I think you could say you could say Houston in Calgary, Edmonton. And if you put Calgary and Edmonton together, Alberta, so sort of efficient way of saying right, That's true. Thank you for saving me there. Because that's its true. It's it's actually like an amalgamation. So probably in my mind, that's what I was doing. In fact, sort of reinventing the concept of the city-state, right? The atrocities, the right, but you know what the big, I think we'd have to say the one distinction that you would notice is that your average citizen in Calgary or Edmonton is probably a good 20 kilos lighter than your average citizen here? Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. That's right. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that there is really a distinction there to be said in terms of the body mouse yeah. North missile, not a surprise. I think Houston house like one of them. Obesity? Yes. Yeah. It's up there for sure. So anyway, so but to the interview, imre is a colleague and a friend for many years who along with his colleagues like Chenault Wilson at the University of Alberta, has put together this really inspiring petro Cultures Research Group. And really it started about the same time since dead. So I sort of think of them as the first two kind of energy humanities research groups in the world. And they've been doing some terrific stuff and have done a really good job of sort of getting, integrating themselves into sort of public political life and having these really high profile events and getting to. People from industry to talk to the right and rows in a Think Tank He's going to talk a little bit about now. I think, yeah, both of those things he mentions in the podcast. So there's, there's and then there's after oil, right? And there's the after oil school, which I'll also talk about. And after oil is now I mean, it's been a series of conversations that's been ongoing, but now there is a book form and it's called after oil surprise, surprise, and it is widely available in academia. It's under my name, it's under eras name. It's under a bunch of people's names because it's massively coauthored right there. So it's like 30 or Thursday, yours? Yeah. But anyway, it's free and available for anyone who wants to read a short pieces. So that's that qualified if you're out there digging for sudden some oil literature? Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's also a website to that information or recombinant tail. So as well as sort of there's an upcoming Petra cultures conference in Newfoundland thing coming up soon, but we'll probably be able to give more specific information about that in a future podcast closer to the date. So with that, shall we turnover to the interview? Let's hear from him regime. And so we're really pleased to have you here, Imre Zemin and we are really excited to talk to you more about some of the work that you've been doing at the University of Alberta and with colleagues from all over the world. And we wanted to point out too that there's a kind of uncanny doppelganger between Alberta as a city and Houston as a city which both appear to have been built at the same historical juncture. Both of them having this true feel of the metropolis. You can, I mean, you can start to see that the correspondence between what used to be the Enron building here, downtown Houston and some cognate buildings in downtown Alberta. So Edmonds and even in Edmonton, Alberta as a state Albert is that axis. So we have this, we have these nice cognates going on between Edmonton and Houston, which are, which are kind of fun to, to see live. Yes. Imre. So because you are, you are senses. Sibling project in the Great White North. And because we share so much DNA and so much inspiration, we are so happy that you are the first ever Skype interview on the cultures of energy podcast. It seems only appropriate. And we wanted to ask you if maybe you could start by telling everyone a bit about the petro cultures project, how it got started, why it got inserted, what got you interested in this? And maybe we can take it from there. Sure. So I arrived at the University of Alberta in 2009. I came there as a new research chair. Before that, I was at a university near Toronto called McMaster University. And what I have primarily been working on up until moving to Alberta was questions of globalization and specifically culture. In the era of globalization, shifts in culture from everything from cultural theory to, I guess cultural policy. And when I arrived at the University of Alberta, I guess I, I found it very difficult to avoid reflecting on the position of Edmonton, both geographically but also in the political economy of Canada. And I was reminded, strangely enough, being there that I had already started to write about oil and the environment in an earlier paper that I had written. And I just kind of kept going from there. And I was especially given support and encouragement to do this by other colleagues that I started to meet at the University of Alberta, especially college Sheena Wilson, who were also starting to work on broadly culture, society and oil. And we were all together wondering why there wasn't more of this kind of work being done in Canada, across the world and especially at the University of Alberta. Given the, given the cognate position of Edmonton to the oil sense that Houston has to the oil fields in Texas. So she and I, we decided that we would see who out there was doing the kind of work that we're interested in. And we first put together a research group called the Petrel Cultures Research Group, which launched a conference in 2012 that we advertised and we were stunned by the response. We had several 100 percent in or abstract sent in. And we had a really, really hard time choosing for amongst them. We were kind of thought we're fishing out there for a topic that no one was interested in. And it turned out that lots of people were poised to talk about energy in a new context. So it kind of goes from that point, from our September. For cultures Conference in 2012. We've kept going and kept doing more and more as the years across. Fantastic. So I know that another project that you've been shepherding and providing a lot of leadership for. But which again involves a lot of smart people from all over the world and different practitioners is the after oil project. And there's a component of that, that's the after oil school. But as I was thinking about after oil, I began to meditate on that title in that concept as a kind of pivot point for thinking through these questions. And so one of the questions we wanted to ask was, Why after oil? Why not post coal, for example? Or why not, you know, proto renewables or how, why do we have a post reflection here rather than a kinda prefix for something new? And so I want you to think a little better here you think out loud about why begin with an ending or an after about this particular material rather than some other way of engaging these questions. One response might be that I seem to be fixated at all the word after. Perfect clearly kid. And it really just only occurred to me a few weeks ago that the previous book that I wrote was called after globalization. Who, and I was like my really fix it on the word after. I think, I think after oil does different kinds of work, both conceptually for academic purposes or purposes of analytic and normative work in the human sciences. It also does different kind of work, a different kind of work than the other other titles you mentioned publicly, especially in Canada and in and in Alberta. The after oil project that you mentioned has two broad dimensions to it. So one is a reflection on the cultural and social elements of energy transition. And the other is an attempt by academics to E, a little bit more to take seriously, I guess, how they communicate their, their, their research and how they get it out to publics. So just to talk about that second part a little bit. I have found it frustrating working broadly in the, in the environmental studies, environmental humanities, that much of the environmental humanities. And i'm, I'm painting with a very broad brush here, but it seems that we're satisfied with writing monographs and articles intended for other academics. And I can't help but feel that time frame in which we're trying to articulate our ideas for quite large. Social and conceptual shifts is a very, very narrow one. So I've always felt a need to try to communicate with publics as quickly as possible. But a kind of an initial and earlier step is to figure out exactly what it means to communicate the public's at this particular period in time. I don't think it's enough to just kind of have a website now with the information available. Or maybe I have some open meetings or lectures on campus that we invite publics to. They see that as a certain kind of genre of academic talk and they might not, might or might not come. So part of, part of what the project that we're doing is we're collaborating with organizations, professional organizations that have a better sense of how to communicate to publics and are equally interested in questions about energy and the environment. So in any case, in, there's a kind of a rhetorical force to after oil that does a lot of work in that communication of both an end about to approach and a coming into being of something else that we don't yet know. And as a result about which there needs to be a lot of work to be done. So if I was to name a post, I feel like I would already be suggesting that that period has come into existence in a way that maybe there's nothing left to do. There's no political work to be done. There's no conceptual work to be done. Just kind of a, a need to narrate it or to make sense of it or to explain it. It also doesn't really, this has particular rhetorical force in Canada as a result of the, the significance of the resource industries for the Canadian economy, but especially of oil and natural gas. So I think, I think where we're conscious of the I guess the implied questions, the implied not, you're not criticizing us, but you're kind of suggesting that there are certain kinds of directions that this research might go and might not as a result of using After I think we're conscious of that. But because of the multiple audiences and the multiple kind of a range of work we're hoping this project does. It just works better than other phrases that we might want to, we, we, we had thought about using up until now. That makes a lot of sense and there's an elegant simplicity to after it. Well, it's got no academic jargon involved with ADD. It's utterly translatable across so many mediums and anything. It's also, you know, it gives people the sort of imaginary to picture the world after oil. And that's an imaginary that we want to promote in the public consciousness over, over and over again. Speaking of politics in Canada, you probably are aware that fairly recently, Canada second bi-annual report on climate change came out. And if it sees greenhouse gas emissions reaching exorbitant number 768 mega tonnes by 2020 and 815 mega tonnes by 2030. And what this suggests is that Canada will not, will not meet its previous goals that were set under the Harper regime in Copenhagen back in 2009, if the country continues on this path. And most recently, candidates Environment Minister Catherine McKenna at the Paris climate talks was really pushing for countries to restrict global warming to only 1.5 degrees. However, what these numbers suggests is that Canada is going to have really work very hard and, and increase its reductions dramatically even to meet the most minimal targets. And then it's going to require extra measures in the oil and gas sector. And surprise, surprise the huge increase that's occurring and that's predicted to continue to occur is operating in the oil sounds. And so these are by far the greatest increase in emissions by production type as we look at these scales. And so I wanted to ask you about the kind of politics of oil, the politics of admission. And then perhaps also what is the allure of oil sands in Canada? We saw some of us, there's fairly new film out that's based on Naomi Klein's book. This Changes Everything. So this is a documentary and it talks quite a bit about indigenous people being impacted by the Alberta tar sands. So I just wanted to hear you think out loud about about the allure of the oil sands, the politics of oil and gas and petroleum. Canada. Yeah. The numbers are shocking. So the, the amount that the Canadian government has said that they would try to limit emissions to the figure is 600, 12 megatons, or in that range, let's say 620. So the amount of the overshoot is significant. Several 100 megatons for a relatively small country. And the, the new New Democratic Party government in Alberta, which is a left-of-center government that want to surprise election last year. They have, they've not fully come out with their environmental policy. But they have said that they were going to introduce limits on the size of growth of the oil sands. But it was surprising to many of us that they were still going to allow it to grow. So the current emissions are about 70 mega tons in the, the NDP government said that it would cap it at a 100 megatons. So at a 100 megatons, you would have about 16 or 17 percent of all of Canada's emissions. If it had two, if it was going by the, the international protocols, it, it's signed coming from a single site. And this immediately introduces all kinds of difficulties federally, which I can talk about in a minute. The allure is, is that it generates a lot of capital. A country like Canada has always relied relatively heavily on its resource economy to fuel its overall economy. It continues to do so. Even though I think many Canadians, especially the 85% of Canadians that live in cities, imagine that they live in high-tech, socially innovative, entrepreneurial. Internet era economies. There's, there's a lot of that in Canada too, but there's a large percentage of the economy that comes from resources. Including just kind of like at a very, very base level, about seven or 8% of the overall economy is based on the oil sands alone. And that's, that's acquainted direct figures. So that's not talking about a lot of secondary industries and so on. So it's, it's, it's a hard, there's I guess two challenges. It's a hard thing to know. You're a political party and you have a very short timeframe in which to impress publics. It's hard to know how to make long-term decisions without impacting. This is the same around the world, but without making impacts on your publics that they will. They'll make sure you pay for at the poles. And there's some of that still taking place in Canada. The other is that there's just not any clear idea how to replace the, what, what they imagine the loss of economic wealth would be, were they to cap the oil sands? And I guess one other thing that I'll just throw in there, like I could talk endlessly about this as he might expect, perhaps that is a bit tricky thing in Canada, which I know is, is mirrored in the US perhaps, and perhaps nowhere else quite in this way, is that by virtue of our constitution, our resources are owned by provinces and not by the federal government. And so provinces have a mandate and provincial governments have a mandate to support their own provinces and the wealth of their provinces. And they don't really have a lot of reason to aid the overall economy or sorry, the overall health of the country. I mean they do and they don't. But here's the, here's where this becomes a problem. If you have a very wealthy province like Alberta that's generating a huge amount, especially per capita of greenhouse gases. It's hard to know why the other provinces would want to play ball. They would all have to be per capita emitting less than an hour burden. And they don't want to do that. So I guess the other thing is a lot of the benefit goes to help burdens and less so to the entire federal economy. And so it's kind of this game, our provinces against one another, which makes it very difficult to reach a federally mandated target. So this is fascinating and just a meta comment more for, more for our listeners than men for you, Emma is that somebody had to step out. She had another another obligation she had to get to. So she waved goodbye and and just, you know, I'm not going to be grandstanding here, so it's going to be me and him are there. But 70, you'll be back for our next conversation for sure. Let me let me follow up with this on a couple of points. First. It's also when we think about these like weird sort of ironic parallels between the place of Alberta in Canada and the place of Texas and the US, is that it seems like both of these states have an outsized political influence that directly sort of roots back to their energy supplies and energy industries in ways that I've heard. And maybe you want to comment about this, that sort of Alberta has, has exercise a certain type of governmental influence upon Canadian politics, sort of behind the scenes or subterraneously. That's the more apt metaphor that's made it really, in some ways difficult to sort of isolate where the, the, the power of energy ends and sort of political power begins, right? Which is from our point of view I think, and energy humanities, particularly fascinating. So that kind of a historical influence. Now that's an excellent. And just one more question. In the work that you have been doing. This inspiring work that the petra cultures group has been doing right in the heart of oil sands, Alberta. Have you found that through your various public events, through engaging not only other scholars but citizens and sort of other institutions and civil society. Do you feel as though you've been able to sort of make any unexpected allies or breakthroughs in terms of shifting opinions or getting people to giving people a forum where they can express things that they maybe haven't had before. Yeah. So let me I'll speak to the political influence, maybe second. Let me just so I don't forget the points that you erase. I actually think that the work of petro cultures, both things that I've done in R, that I've done with my colleagues together. I think actually it's had a cow. Fairly significant impact on some of the discussions that are taking place now in Alberta. I have to say that we've had a couple of large public events now. We just had a last month to add to that the list of after things. We had an after Paris public event League, which was attended by a large number of people, which was held in downtown Edmonton off campus. And we had an after what comes after oil event in August which attracted several 100 people. There's what I've been impressed by, I guess, both at those events and then my discussions with people in industry and increasingly with people in government. Is that some of the, I guess some of the hesitations or some of the disagreements that once might have once might have existed between the kind of work that you are I do. And I guess Let's say government and industry. And it really doesn't, really isn't there. If, if what we're talking about is the necessity of energy transition, the necessity of moving away from fossil fuel economy to a sustainable renewable, or an economy based on sustainable renewable forms of energy. I have to say that I have not yet found anyone in disagreement with this. I'm part of a excuse me, I'm part of a Public-private think tank at the moment called Energy Futures Lab. And it involves a large number of people from industry and also representatives of government, both local and provincial and federal. And they're all participating in this because they want to see and they want to model possibilities for that shift. Basically, the only possibility for a province like Alberta is to take its know-how about energy and to begin quite rapidly to move it towards other forms of energy without, without giving up on fossil fuels in the kind of short-term. So part of, I guess part of where I would say our influence comes, such as it is, is that there? As soon as I describe the basic thrust of what petrel cultures has been trying to articulate. Which is in a sentence that any energy transition will have to include not just policy, new performs a policy or new forms of technology, but we'll have to have social and cultural changes to support that transition or to enable it. People are on side young. So whether it's right now and I've been working a lot with the Faculty of Engineering and they're trying to create some kind of New Energy Futures Lab themselves. But they, they really do want our help and support in trying to see what it would mean to have a social component of that project. Because they, they get that. If Won't, they can have the most fantastic technology possible. And as long as people want to have access to a vehicle that they can take wherever they want, whenever they want. It won't do the work that we want to do. Oh, hey, I have to say, I feel like over time it is becoming easier to be part of the discussion. And what would the kind of contribution to the discussion is becoming a lot less unique. There's far fewer aha moments, but i'm, I really find that to be. I find that to be very encouraging and very positive. Because it means that we can start to have other kinds of discussions a lot more quickly. So without, without kind of talking on and on, the influence of Alberta as of the last as has always been bigger than its share of the population like it has about a little over a tenth of the population of Canada. And it wields a big stick because of its economic power. And under the previous government, which was very much, this was the government of Stephen Harper federally that was very much centered in Alberta, not just because that's the province that Harper and self represented in many of his ministers. But also because that kind of political ethos of that government. Actually originates from a group of economists that were, are based at the University of Calgary. And we're quite carefully and cleverly articulating a Canadian version of neoliberalism. They're called the Calgary School. And harper was very cognizant of these, these economists and, and they did have an influence as well and his government. So where I would say Alberta stance now is I think it's the fact that we don't have a government, a conservative government of Harper hasn't really changed the influence because there still is that power of, of, of the industry. And if anything, the decline in oil price and the repercussions for the overall key and economy have, have shown Canadians that Alberta matters and that kind of blends it more political power in some ways. But there's one particular thing I think that has given Alberta power more than one might have expected. Because of the circumstances of politics. In the late seventies, early eighties that the federal government have the former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau made a pitch to have a national energy policy. This would be in an attempt to spread some of the benefits of Alberta's energy windfall to other provinces to create a policy where you might be able to make federal decisions about how much CO2 emissions you have and so on and so forth. And it never, that policy was it it was never implemented because there was so much outcry from Alberta. It actually led to a two dose being, being voted out of office. It meant for 30 years that nobody voted anything but conservative in Alberta. And kind of lead in a, in a backwards way, I guess, or a, a to the election of Harper many decades later. I say, I say this only because what we really need now, again is a national energy policy, especially for to try to manage CO2 levels. And the fact that we have another Trudeau government means that it, I mean, this sounds so observe the, the, the chance of someone's son being in government and having to enact the same kind of policy matters in this case because he's unlikely to to go for it. He's unlikely to do it because of the way that the media and other politicians will immediately leap on the failure of the previous one. Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. I mean, you've just shared a lot and I just wanted to first of all, say what you what you say about the sort of response you've had and the fact that of the many people you've talked with, you haven't heard a lot of resistance to some of the sort of core ideas that we're talking about, about renewable energy transition as not just option, but as necessity is really encouraging. And I wish I could say That's been our experience in Houston. I don't think we're quite there yet, but I do think that increasingly it feels like we're reaching pivot point in terms of where the public debate has gone. But then for every step four, do you feel like there's often a step back and we had very discouraging news yesterday that the US Supreme Court put a stay on, on Obama's Clean Power Plan, which is being widely regarded as a victory for fossil fuel dependent states and industries that are not so fast. We're going to, we're going to wean ourselves off coal. And that isn't to say that it's dispiriting needs to be expected, but it is a view of the sort of the timeline that we're working with, if you will. It is, oh God, yeah, yeah. So but it's fascinating. This zoom deeper history of sort of our burden and Canadian politics. I mean, I think that's, that's, that's really fascinating and great for you to share it so that people can really understand the role that Alberta has. Not only its job, I would say it's geopolitical, it's not even just its influence on Canadian national politics practices through Harpers administration has really been one of those countries. I just hate to help to shape the global conversation or to hold back maybe the idea of pursuing some of these alternative strategies, just like the abit administration and Australia for example. Yeah. I think, I think one thing that I've been thinking about as of late, because I'm trying to write a paper about controversy over the various pipelines that are trying or are in the front page news here in Canada. That is, that is interesting about the Harper government. One of the, one of the many things is that I think that they saw entered the logic of having to distribute energy better. As just such a contentious captain, too, technical and technological matter that they really didn't see the disputes and debates over the Keystone XL pipeline coming. They just they were kind of a little bit depth to it. They didn't they didn't understand what the issues were. They didn't understand. They could understand environ environments to lists, disagreements. But I don't think they really understood how you could activate a border into making what to them saw, what they saw as a logical, again, technical apparatus, infrastructure expansion. How you can make that over into something that generated larger questions for publics. I think that the nuke, our new governments in Canada are much, much more attuned to this. And some of this is not questions of, of ideology as much as it is generational. And I say that because I, I mean, I've been noting with some of my colleagues that the way that members of the Trudeau government discuss issues. Like, let me be clear here. I think the Trudeau government is, is kind of a center government of a Democrat kind. So it's not like they're going to set the world on fire. But the discourse that the mostly 40 somethings that make up the government are using. Sounds like they were educated in universities in that postcolonial studies classes and in feminist theory class really, well. And I mean, what I'm saying is that they, they, they see the world in a, in a way that is closer to the way I think people in universities and maybe environmentalists do than the previous hard Harper government, which somehow came from a very different set of vectors, both both in terms of the generational one and I guess in terms of what they might have studied. So we have a, we have a prime minister now that has like tattoos. And it's just kinda like, yeah, you have a tattoos if you're in your early forties or mid 40s, it's kind of that type of thing. He has made a cabinet that is gender-balanced. And now for me, I'm now at this is, he's famously quoted as saying when he was asked why this was important, he said it's 2015. So it's it's there's a certain kind of what's interesting to me is what they take to be a common sense. And that I want to better understand in terms of how they're going to address environmental issues. Because at one level, a lot of, a lot of questions that were off the table for the previous government are on the table for this one. But they still are politicians and they still are managing publics and managing that kind of public response to them. They're not, they're not naive to those kinds of things. And I'm, I'm very curious as to how those things are going to balance out and coming back to pipelines at even are, are kind of Canadian version of The New York Times, which is the Globe and Mail, kind of the, the newspaper that one sites when one wants any kind of a kind of official recognition of something. In the same week they made, they wrote two different editorials, both speaking to the Prime Minister, both of which can be enacted at the same time and seem to find no contradiction in it. So on the one at the same time they said, now's the time for some body to stand up and really pay attention to the environment. That was on a Monday and on Friday they said, now's the time to build the energies pipeline. Because it's really, really important that we continue to have a functioning Natural Resources economy. And the prime minister should stand up for that. So I think, so what I, what I, what I want to say about that is that It's interesting that now that you can have a ongoing discussion about conflicts between these things. And that was not the case under Harper. So we're beginning to see in a way people are recognizing the slightly and I use the term loosely, that sort of schizophrenics politics of sort of on the one hand, saying we really need to do something about the environment. And on the other hand, we're really dependent on energy. That is, in fact, that's a pretty accurate description of where we're at. Can I ask you one follow-up question? And I think this might have some special bearing on Albert and politics. And because you mentioned pipelines, my sense is that that First Nations communities, indigenous communities, I've really been at the front lines of some of the, let's say, infrastructural politics here the politics have blockading pipelines and trying to address energy development, especially in the northern part of Alberta. And I'm just curious how you see on the one hand, both the work of Petra cultures vis-a-vis that type of activism. And then whether you think that with the news sort of state government in Alberta and the new national government in Ottawa that you're actually going to see. Maybe more attention to. That indigenous politics may become a more important part of national politics. That's an excellent thing to draw attention to dominate. Got I, I think that just to do some scene setting here, Aboriginal communities in Canada, I think have been really exerting their presence and their power over the past decade or two decades. And there are force in Canadian public life to a degree that is talk to a much greater degree than in the US. You know. Some of this has to do with the, the size of Aboriginal communities compared to the overall population. So it's maybe, it still seems like rela, very small, but it's insignificant compared to the US. I think in Canada is about 3%. In some provinces it's larger. I might be getting those numbers wrong, but it's, it's also the largest growing community. Fastest growing communities is in Aboriginal communities. There's also something that's important to know about the, the character of Aboriginal communities. In Canada. We, they're called First Nations. And they do have, as a result of some supreme court decisions and some amendments, very important amendments that were made to our constitution in the mid-80s. They have powerful sovereign rights over that their territories. And if anything, they are, they are very powerful arguments and claims that much of the of where people live in Canada are on actually first nations sovereign territories, okay? If any of your listeners attend a public event in Canada, especially one on a university campus. The speaker will almost always now first acknowledge the sovereign territory that they're on and do it quite specifically. So there's some kind of indication of a longer colonial history that's, that's become really powerfully part of public life. It's something I would have never imagined a decade or two ago. Given I just given where I grew up in and given how things develop. So anyway, that this claim to sovereign territory has meant that the passage of pipelines through first nation's territory is easily, not easily perhaps, but is challenged by First Nations and often successfully. Because a kind of right of, I forget now the term for it. But when a government allows, can kind of overrule property owners and allow for pipelines or for roads or for power power transmission lines to go through somebody's territory. That is something that's, that's a very complicated thing to do in the case of First Nations. And it's, it's something that is not in fact taken place. It, the companies have to make negotiations with First Nations communities separately. And just given the geography of where the pipelines have to go, they almost Cannot help but Cross First Nations territories. Whether they're going from Alberta to the West Coast, or they're going from Alberta to the East Coast, or they're going from Alberta to the US. So it has made them powerful actors in this drama. And the other piece of the puzzle, I suppose, is that some First Nations communities had been involved in resource extraction activities and have become, some of them have become wealthy or have generated more wealth as a result of it. And that too has allowed them to participate in a very different way in these kinds of negotiations because they know how the industry works. They have their professionals that are trained in the industry. There's lots of First Nations peoples that have MBAs and law degrees that will make sure that their communities are taken care of. So this has, this has, this has changed the, change the discussion. One final thing, just the other one. Just last week, the, the new federal government introduced Will, has that legislation has not been introduced, but they have said that there will have to be more extensive environmental assessments and more protracted negotiations with First Nations communities for any current pipelines proposed and any future ones. So it really does sound as though when we're thinking petro culture in Canada today, that First Nations are incredibly vibrant part of that mix. Absolutely. So let me, first of all, thank you for taking so much time and run. I think this is going to be the first of what I hope will be several conversations and maybe you can even, you can even be R or corresponding. Corresponding commentator from Canada isn't how things can eat it. But i, in the future, I'd love to cycle back to something we've touched on really briefly at the beginning. Maybe this is a great way to close out today's conversation. And that's a talk about it. You said, you know, the importance right now of, of people working in the humanities and the social sciences and the arts about sort of reaching beyond our comfort zone, trying new ways of communicating our research like podcasts for example. But, but beyond that, I was really curious to hear more about how, you know, what's inspiring you in those experiments. You, what are the, what are the sort of range of partnerships or new, new modes of, of, of communication that most excite you? Is it working with artists? Is it working with game designers? Is it is engaging writers, talking to the media, getting on TV, what does it, what is it that's really, you think is most, most exciting for you right now? That's an excellent question. Just, just to kind of go back, I guess. I can't be satisfied with this idea that we kind of implicitly have those of us in the environmental, into environmental studies that there will be a good trickle-down effect. Over time. Write that B will train some student with, some students will take our classes and they'll learn some things and I'll pass it on to whoever. And then slowly, over many generations will change how we relate to the environment because we just don't have that kind of time. So I guess I have been trying within my within the limits of my own capacities and comfort zones, which are I think stretching out. I wouldn't have to do work with a number of different groups. What I mean, he said game designer, maybe that's one I should, I should look at LHC, have been doing have a possibility of doing something with UB Soft. But I can just, I can just mention a couple. So one of the new partners and after oil, this group research project we have, this is going to be a tele spark Science Center, which is a Science Center located in Calgary. And who is very, very eager to build in the kinds of ideas that we talk about a petro culture into some kind of participatory gain, display of kinds that, that kids encounter in science centers all the time into the science center. So I'm trying to I'm I've been kind of advising them and talking to them about what that might look like. And I'm very excited to see where that might go. I will also been starting to work with some of these are kind of new people that we're working with. Some groups like this. I guess they're an NGO called adjacent possibilities. What they do is they're based in Toronto. They, they have been putting artists and scientists, and scientists slash engineers together to solve a specific problem. So they're very interested in the kinds of things we're doing and after oil and they want to do that kind of participatory work. Then take visual artists, designers and say, if, if an issue is say about mobility here, let's put you together with the scientists. Go do whatever you want for six months, and then let's see what you come back with. And there's another group like that called I'm going to forget their names now, but they're called, I think, called constructive engagement NGO, which also is really interested in doing work with junior high school and high school students. So I guess one place I've been kind of expanding is into that the possibilities of doing things at the school level. I have a couple of new colleagues are not new colleagues. Colleagues who are new to the afterworld project, who are education professors. Some of whom have very large groups of high school students that they work with globally. And they're, they're interested in trying to adapt things about after oil into their programs. So that's, I guess some of that. And I guess in, in general, if just so people know the place where we've been really trying to do work over the long term is with museums and art galleries and art exhibition spaces. We're hoping to move towards some years in the future. What we've called a called a year after oil, which would see a series of exhibits at Exhibit, not just that galleries, but at exhibit spaces around the world that would focus in on ideas related to future energy possibilities. And they wouldn't do so. I think it's important to emphasize this to at least, at least it is for me. The point here isn't to kind of have to 2, for art that showcases the problem of current practices or that sort of highlights and shadows in a kind of rough, blunt pedagogical way. New things we should do. We're really interested in trying to make participatory, active projects that would get people to see how things all operate. We don't know yet what that is, but I really feel like there's ways to to reshape how one thinks about one's relationship to the environment. That is, that is the kind of thing we're aiming for. I, I remember going to a designer's exhibit in Mexico City and add one of the first it was a design exhibit that you interacted with and one of the first of the exhibits was simply very simple. It was set up staircases, all of which had staircases that were not built to standard size. And you're just invited to walk, try to walk up them. And it was impossible. And that kinda of like small little switch you could see right away like there's a kind of a standard model on which lots of the world has built around an dichotomy code that can be bad. But it's really important to kind of see it because otherwise you're just an habit. So it's that kind of work that we're trying to do sparking a kind of a shift in consciousness at some level. No, I agree with you and I'm posting it has to be good ART. Read it can, it can. Sometimes didactic art isn't very good art. Maybe gets its message across. But anyway, this is, it's really inspiring and all the good work you and your colleagues are doing. And for people who don't know about after oil and want to follow it is their website they can go to. Because there's a couple of websites I'd point. One is just after oil dot ca, okay. Another is petro cultures.com. And a final one I would really encourage people to check out is this think tank I've begun work on called energy features lab.com, I believe might be.org, but energy futures lab, it'll pull it up. One thing I would just maybe end with is that at energy at after oil dot ca. Visitors to the site can download an open-access book that about 30 of us co-wrote about energy transition yet, and it says and it'll be available in hard copy form. In the next couple of days. You'll get yours. Okay, Awesome. I'll be looking forward to that. Emma. Thanks again so much. So happy to have you here on the cultures of energy podcasts. Thanks for, for sharing these updates and we're going to be watching petro cultures closely from down here in the, by your country in Texas. Thanks so much for having me on and thanks for your generous questions. Okay. Terrific.