Energy transitions and the global land rush: Ultimate drivers and persistent consequences

Toward feminist energy systems: Why adding women and solar panels is not enough✰

Verso

No Comemos Baterías * SftP Magazine

Oil, Gas and Climate: An Analysis of Oil and Gas Industry Plans for Expansion and Compatibility with Global Emission Limits - Center for International Environmental Law

Confronting the Myth of Carbon-Free Fossil Fuels: Why Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution (Jul 2021) - Center for International Environmental Law

<aside> 💡 I would like to direct our attention to the differences between the conclusions and proposed solutions presented by several readings.

While CIEL’s “Oil, Gas and Climate” and “The Myth of Carbon-Free Fossil Fuels, CCS” outline the detrimental effects of oil and gas industries and the highly ineffective CCS technologies, their proposed solutions still depend on the same neoliberal systems that created the climate crisis in the first place. They encourage government intervention, recommend that investors stop financing the oil and gas industries, and look to cheaper renewable energy sources. “Such policies should focus instead on…implementing proven climate mitigation strategies on an urgent, comprehensive basis, reflecting their fundamental importance for this and all future generations.”

Bonneuil and Fressoz succinctly write in “Thermocene, A Political History of CO2” that “There was not a movement from wood to coal, then from coal to oil, then from oil to nuclear. The history of energy is not one of transitions, but rather of successive additions of new sources of primary energy.” Even the pursuit of renewable energy as a technological fix proves not to be the silver bullet that it claims. “The consumer-based economy for green technologies like lithium batteries merely shifts who and where is exploited; it does not end exploitation of people or the environment. Behind the green-washing of capitalism is the same war on nature and subsistence-based peoples’ sustainable ways of life that has been ongoing for the last 500 years,” writes Brito-Millan et al in “We don't Eat Batteries, Lithium and Solidarity Science vs False Climate Solutions”.

In the same Brito-Millan et al reading and in Bell, et al’s “Towards Feminist Energy Systems, Why Adding Women and Solar Panels is Not Enough”, they present more revolutionary ideas for an alternate future:

• “Public, democratic ownership of energy system” (Bell, et al)
• Restructuring a new economy in high-consuming privileged areas that’s driven by concepts of care and community instead of labor (e.g. UBI, shorter work weeks, “a higher valuation for so-called pink labor jobs: caring, service, and regenerative labor”)
• Control by communities involved in the lifecycle of energy, while also compensating those communities for the harms and losses they have and may continue to suffer.
• Bringing together Indigenous communities of the Global North and South and strengthening transnational Indigenous solidarity
• “Following the concept of Tools for Conviviality, where technology is limited to that which supports an enriching balance of individual autonomy and social connection between people as well as a harmonious relationship with the environment” (Brito-Millan et al)

How can we continue to foster Indigenous solidarity? Are there examples of tools for conviviality and community-driven energy systems that we could reference? How can we encourage more decolonial thought in academia?

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