Futures of the Sun

Episode Transcript
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Imre Szeman (00:03):
Who should own the infrastructure that generates
the energy?

Mark Simpson (00:08):
It's interesting to connect the idea of scale to
the idea of common sense and tothink about the way in which
common sense itself is a kind ofindex of scalability.

Okay. My name is Imra Zeman. I'm the director of
the new Institute forEnvironment, Conservation, and
Sustainability at the Universityof Toronto Scarborough, which is
one of the campuses of theUniversity of Toronto. I'm also
a professor in Department ofHuman Geography, which we can
maybe talk about, Mark, becauseI don't belong in that
department at all, really. I wasat the University of Alberta for

(00:42):
six years.
That's where I got to know my mycolleague, Mark Simpson, who'll
talk about himself momentarily.And while there, I helped to
shape something calledPetrocultures, which is an
international research groupprobably best known for holding
conferences, large conferencesevery other year. There's some

(01:03):
other things I'm involved in,but we'll talk about that later.

Great. And, I'm Mark Simpson. I'm a professor in
English and Film Studies, at theUniversity of Alberta, in
Edmonton, in the heart ofAlberta's petrostate. I work on
the politics of mobility. I workon material culture, and I work
on cultures of energy.
And, I'm a core member of thepetro cultures research group
that Imra mentioned, and also acofounder of something called

(01:28):
After Oil, which is a researchcollective. And both of these
things are going to come up, I'mpretty sure, in the conversation
that we continue to have. So,Imra, congratulations on the
upcoming release of Futures ofthe Sun. I'm so excited to talk
with you, about a host of thingsorbiting this publication. I
wanted to launch right in, toask you, sort of about, your

(01:49):
interests, as they converge inthis book.
Futures of the Sun is aboutenergy and our energy futures
and our energy pasts. How didyou become interested in
questions of energy?

The question I always get whenever I do these
kinds of, podcasts orinterviews, my answer should be
a personal one. So my answershould be that it's because my
father was in the oil industry.He was an immigrant from
Hungary, left during theHungarian Revolution, came to
Canada and found his way toAlberta and found his way into

(02:23):
the oil industry, an industrywhere you can make a lot of
money just by learning sometechnical skills. He wasn't able
to go to university because ofhis language skills. And I
should say that because thatwould indicate a tight
biographical connection to mysubject, and whenever I talk to

(02:44):
other people who are doingresearch on energy and oil they
usually say their parents wereinvolved in some way.
To my embarrassment, however, II kind of only realized this
about my father very belatedly.It's not that I didn't know
that, but, it didn't reallyoccur to me that that should
matter till I was in my 30s or40s. The real answer, there's

(03:08):
kind of two dimensions to it. Wecan talk about the,
psychological reasons for thatif you like, if we have time at
the very end of it. But butlet's leave that aside for now.
There's two reasons, I think. Soone of them is coming to the
University of Alberta in,02/2010. And in 02/2010, coming
back to Alberta, but not to theplace that I grew up, which was

(03:30):
Calgary. I noticed in Edmontonthat you could really see the
apparatus of the oil industry inthe city. It was visible.
And it caused me to reflectalmost immediately on why I
couldn't see that in my own homecity, why it was so invisible.
And that dynamic of visibilityand invisibility was was

(03:51):
something I wanted to understandright away. And I think the
other reason was that itpresented to me immediately a
recognition, which, again, Ican't believe I didn't have,
which is how important energywas to the way in which human
beings interacted, what theycould do, what the military

(04:12):
conflicts of the twentiethcentury and indeed the
nineteenth century and so on. Soit was kind of like this desire
to understand the forces thatwere shaping contemporary life.
And I was always in interestedin those and suddenly getting
the sense of that energy wasimportant to those.
I wanted to understand thatbetter.

So it's really interesting, the way that you
frame that answer about theseemingly obvious answer around
sort of familial connections.And then the other answers about
a kind of belated recognition,which I think is really
interesting in in relation toquestions about energy. I know
that the in the work that youand I both do with respect to
energy, we are really interestedin issues of time and the

(04:54):
strange sorts of time signaturesthat, energy creates for the
cultures in which we exist andthe societies in which we live.
Your anecdote makes me think of,you know, I don't know if I can
pinpoint when I becameinterested in energy except that
maybe it was throughconversations and and
experiences that I had as aresult of work that you had
started to do. But thebelatedness for me has to do

(05:17):
with the way in which I grew upright underneath, like,
literally in the shadow of theStrathcona oil refinery here in
sort of the Eastern edge ofEdmonton.
And I was always aware of it,but never aware of it. And so it
feels to me that the otherquestion that is really
interesting in relation to thismatter of the invisibility of
energy that you describe inCalgary is another dynamic of
that that sort of visionquestion, which is sometimes the

(05:41):
unseeability of it of energy. Sothat sometimes energy is
visible, sometimes it'sinvisible, sometimes it's seen,
and sometimes it's unseen. And Ithink that that unseenness is
also then really interestingwith respect to the kinds of
issues you alluded to in thesecond part of your answer
around what it enables and theforces that it enables that we
often don't see as connected toquestions of energy at all. So

(06:03):
futures of the sun isn't thefirst thing that you've written
about energy.
Your scholarship on the topicstretches back even earlier than
02/2010 when you came to the Uof A and maybe even further, but
at least to a 02/2007 essay thatI think of as formative, called
system failure, oil futurity andthe anticipation of disaster. So
I wonder if you could sort oftalk a bit about other kinds of

(06:24):
things you've done on thistopic. How do you see the
trajectory,

that connects your work on energy with
contributions that you've made,say, to, post colonial theory or
globalization theory or tocultural studies more broadly?
Well, I see them all of a piece.I have a collection of essays
that have the subtitle ofglobalization, culture, and

(06:50):
energy, and oil. And I tried tolink these up in the
introduction. I tried to seethem as a jump from one to
another to another.
And, I don't think a lot of,people were convinced. I did get
some comments about theintroduction as as somehow I was
trying to cheat and put togethersomething that didn't belong
together. Why they seemed to meto fit with one another was was

(07:12):
not necessarily that discoursesof globalization were
immediately about energy. Theythey really weren't, and that in
itself is is interesting. Orthat whatever passed for
cultural theory or culturalstudies from the 1970s to the
2000s, not sure what hashappened to it since, that
certainly didn't deal withenergy.

(07:33):
But what all of these sitesdealt with and what I feel like
has linked my work is that I'vebeen interested in the
narratives that contemporarysocieties tell to themselves
about their political pasts,their current structures and
strictures, and their futurepossibilities. So it's really

(07:54):
about the narrative of thepolitical as it emerges in
cultural and social sites. It'show there is this powerful
quotidian weight that makeseveryday life just seem given
and immutable. Even if we allknow there's histories and

(08:15):
things have changed, there'sthis sense that you can only
ever have the present. Maybe youcan have technological change,
but you certainly wouldn't moveaway from single family
dwellings, let's say, or fromusing automobiles.
And I wanted to puzzle that out.So it's about the politics of
the social, it's about politicalchange, it's about especially

(08:36):
power and class, and I think oneof the things that cuts through
there is actually questions ofexpertise, which will come up in
in Futures of the Sun again. SoI do see those being linked. I
think the sites are verydifferent and I think this
question of expertise runsthroughout. I've noticed that I
will take an expert discoursemuch more often than I suppose,

(08:58):
what I'm trained in, which isliterary studies or cultural
studies.
I'm compelled by an expertdiscourse to see the type of
work that it does. So that mightbe an analysis of Paul Krugman
when it comes to globalization.It comes down to analysis of
Bill Gates when it comes toFutures of the Sun. It's about
the ways we're supposed to thinkand questioning that and

(09:21):
interest, I guess the interestis in how come that works? How
come that supposed to works sooften?
I don't think I talked about thepost colonial, but that's in
there as well.

Yeah. So that's really, really great and
insightful. And I wonder if youcould sort of then try to think
what you just said aboutquestions of expertise in
relation to what you opened witharound the kinds of critiques
you felt you got about thatvolume that tried to link these
concepts together. You describedit as that people were uncertain

(09:53):
and and skeptical, and theirskepticism seemed to imply that
somehow there was a cheat. And Isort of hear the cheat as a kind
of there's a getting away withsomething that isn't quite up to
expert standards, and thatexpertise would require those
things to be separated.
But so I wonder, like, is therea way in which the critique
itself is also interestinglybound up with the question of

(10:13):
expertise that never getsexamined yet sort of
persistently operates throughthese kinds of discourses in
order to produce the givennessof the present as an
inevitability? Maybe that's tooforced as a question, but I just
find that that's a reallyinteresting potential juncture
in

the in what you just observed. This is why I
asked you to be my interlocutor.I think that you've, put
together something that I'm notquite sure that I would know
about. I I think that's right. Ithink that the other part of
what I've been trying to do isreally trying to make
interpretation certainlydialectical but kind of more

(10:50):
vernacular as much as I can.
So it's not that I shy away fromusing difficult concepts, or
it's not that I just do a typeof learned nonfiction, but I
have always struggled againstthe boundaries of disciplinary
knowledge. I know that everybodysays that. You're supposed to
say that if you're a criticalthinker. But I do feel that

(11:13):
maybe more so than most, I havenot really ever found a home, in
a discipline and that hasworried me at times and at other
times I see how that hasproduced a kind of capacity that
I value. I started by saying I'mnot at home in human geography.
I've been made very, you know,I've been made to feel at home.

(11:35):
It's not quite that. It's justthat I have no PhD in human
geography. I've never taken aclass in geography. Really, I'm
trained in history of ideas andin social and political
philosophy and continentalphilosophy, but I ended up doing
a PhD in, I suppose, ComparativeLiterature, though even that is
maybe a cheat.

(11:55):
My first job was inGlobalization Studies in
English. I suppose at theUniversity of Alberta, I was in
English and film, though theretoo I wasn't quite sure what I
was doing in English. Whenthere'd be disc discussions and
debates over what to put on aVictorian literature class, I
just thought, like, I don'tunderstand why this is a

(12:16):
problem, or I don't, I don'tknow what you guys are talking
about, what is Victorianliterature? And then I was in
Communication Studies, and againI had to kind of relearn a
discourse and in each of thosecases there was an uncertainty,
but it was a valuableuncertainty. And I've brought
that to the ways in which I'vetried to animate the research of

(12:37):
others.
So I've been also creatingstructures that give people the
capacity and the it gives themthe feeling of openness that
they can experiment with thesethings. So certainly, the way
that petrocultures is structuredis one of those things, but
we'll talk about maybe laterafter oil is like that. Other

(12:57):
initiatives that I've done, suchas this thing called Banff
Research and Culture, wasexplicitly about that, giving
younger scholars the opportunityto spend three or four weeks
together, sometimes five weekstogether, just doing whatever
they wanted to do. And as I wasreading back, I was looking at
Futures of the Sun and andreading it again, and I guess
like any author thinking I wouldhave wanted to change some

(13:20):
things. It does seem to me thatI'm not quite sure where one
would position this in acatalog, and that strikes me as
something that I value.
I'm not sure if that exactly gotyour answer, but I suppose,
yeah, that kind of strugglingagainst expertise is there in my

(13:43):
work I think, and I think thatthat desire on the part of the
critics to say, well I, I wantthis to be somewhere the way
this is is makes me a little bituncomfortable. Why is he writing
about, issues related toglobalization? Why is he writing
then about literary questionsthat really are more like

(14:04):
literary studies? What's goingon here? And this is maybe, I I
don't think I've gotten this,but this is perhaps not a
serious enough scholar.
But in order to do this kind ofwork, we just had to get past
that. I think this is true forfor you as well as you've moved
into this line of research.

I would agree that that's true for me, you know,
and I feel I'm in an an Englishprogram, but I feel like I've
always I've always existed in anEnglish program in in a bad
faith relation to the ostensibleobject of analysis, the
literary. Your response puts mein mind of so many things. I'll
I'll just say a couple of them.One is, just thinking about the
way in which writers on energythat I know are influential for

(14:45):
both of us. I'm thinking inparticular here of, Timothy
Mitchell and his book CarbonDemocracy and the way in which
part of the argument of thatbook, which has many threads, is
to sort of track the way inwhich the abstracting power of a
shift from coal energy to oilenergy so that oil becomes ever
more abstract through the courseof the twentieth century is also
a story about the shiftingdistribution of expertise away

(15:08):
from the people who actuallyproduce the fuel, the coal
miners on the coal face, andtoward those experts who manage
the economy and and figure outall sorts of abstract questions
around how oil works.
And that that it's notaccidental that that happens
according to Mitchell because ofthe way in which that does
certain kinds of things that aregenerative politically for
elites. The other thing I wasjust going to observe is that

(15:31):
one of your favorite verbs,which I appreciate so much, is
the verb to unnerve. And I thinkwhat you've said about
unheimlich, unholiness of yoursituation vis a vis different
disciplines is part of that realcommitment as well as interest
in that which unnerves. And so II see that your work strives to
unnerve, the givenness and thecommon sense of things like

(15:53):
disciplinary expertise amongmany other things. But also, I
think you seek out opportunitiesto unnerve what you feel you
already know, and that's a arare ability, I think.
Can I ask you what you mean byfutures of the sun? So what does
the title say for you? What is afuture of the sun?

It was important for it to be plural, first off.
There are many possible futuresof the sun. The sun is a stand
in for all renewables. It'sreally about what are the
futures of what we think aboutas both the technical apparatus
of renewable energy, but thetypes of societies that we

(16:32):
imagine related to thoserenewables. What is it going to
look like when we don't use oilanymore?
There does seem to me to beeither implicitly, mostly
implicitly, but sometimesexplicitly, this expectation
that energy transition willbring with it some type of

(16:54):
social transition, and that'swhat's exciting about it. It
isn't just that we willhopefully meet the goals that
we've set for ourselves by02/1950 to reduce c o two
emissions per year, is thatsomething else will happen as
well, something more dramatic.Because just getting down to

(17:15):
zero c o two will not addressall of the accumulated c o two,
and we'll have to make some kindof transition socially anyway.
That'll just have to happen. Sothere's this possibility of
different futures.
Some of them reinforcing thestatus quo. Renewables won't do
anything. Some of them might beto reinvigorate strangely

(17:40):
against this narrative that wetend to have, I think sort of
implicitly again I would say orunconsciously. It'll
reinvigorate kinds of moreextreme politics. Or there might
be some other opportunity.
What has always fascinated me isthe way in which the transition,
this giant transition that ishappening from fossil fuels to

(18:02):
something else, might be thatsite of a revolutionary change
to what whatever that means.Right? It might not mean a
gigantic change in the way thathuman beings live together or
understand one another. Butthere isn't a kind of
infrastructural shift like thisone that has ever happened. So

(18:24):
petrocultures is all about thedegree to which modernity comes
to rely on a certain kind ofenergy.
And that energy gives humanbeings the capacity to do an
enormous amount of things. Andthey have come to take that as
simply normal. We can fly acrossoceans. We can go to space. And

(18:45):
this is just like, you know,something that's just whatever.
And that's changing. So everyway that we have seen ourselves
and understood ourselves inrelation to energy is changing,
is about to change. So then thefutures are about what does that
change mean? And that anxietyabout a big scale change is a

(19:06):
lot of what this book is about.So the futures are about what is
it gonna look like?
Who is making the claims aboutwhat it's gonna look like? If
there are many futures, whatmight some of those be? And
that's what this book is about.

Great. And I might try to draw you out a little bit
more on some of the things thatyou said because you you began
to gesture toward, some of thethe particular arguments that
you unfold in this book. But I Ithink that it's worth spending
some time talking in a littlebit more detail about, what they
constitute and how it was thatyou came to those and to
identify those and whether thereare others that you could have

(19:38):
included, but you decided notto. So the you open the book
sort of talking about the way inwhich there is a a kind of,
common sense that's emergingaround the inevitable passage
from a petro culture to a kindof renewable culture or a
culture of renewables. Andyou're you're really persuasive
and provocative in thinkingabout the idea of that as a kind

(20:01):
of common sense and as a kind ofsupposedly non ideological yet
ever most ideological center ofthings.
And then you unfolded inrelation to sort of three what
seemed like sort of prominentnarratives about how that
inevitability will unfold. So Iwonder if you could talk a
little bit, in a little bit moredetail about the ways of

(20:21):
thinking the future of the sunthat you offer in the book.

The reason you asked first what the reason was
for these choices. Maybe I'llcome back to that, but I'll just
say what these three are. Sowhen I was looking around at
what were dominant claims aboutthese futures. I I should say
that when I talked earlier aboutassessing expertise or

(20:48):
challenging it, I looked not toacademic expertise. I tried to
look at quite generaldiscourses, so the types of
things that are being discussedby the New York Times, in the
New York Times let's say, not bypeople on the street, but
certainly outside of ofacademia.

(21:08):
I want to look at somethingwhereby elites, let's just say,
are learning, and governmentsand officials of various kinds,
are learning how they shouldthink about something. I just
wanted to put that out therebecause it does lead back to why
I chose the things I chose. Sowhen I was looking around and
thinking about what would bethree dominant narratives,

(21:32):
because I only had time forthree in a short book like this.
The first one that I thoughtabout was how we were conceding,
I guess, by we, I think,environmentalists. We were
conceding that the nation statewas the organization that was

(21:52):
ultimately going to make thescale of the changes necessary
that we thought we needed to do.
That might sound surprising, Ithink, but what I was reading
about a lot was this sense ofenvironmental change at the
scale and with the speed needed,it being like World War two, it
being like gearing up for WorldWar two. Or it was like the

(22:18):
shift that happened in The USvia post war Keynesianism. So
these were examples of where thegovernment put its unique powers
and its unique capacity to workto achieve something, And that
seemed on the part of somecritics at least, an example of
what could be done right nowwith respect to climate change.

(22:39):
And I wanted to kind of look atthat and and see how that works
and what that demands that oneaccept, and whether that is the
way to go. So I wanted to talkabout nationalism and the nation
state in relationship to energytransition and see what we're
supposed to know about it.
I mean, some of it, I think, wasall was already there, this idea

(23:00):
of the good war. That'ssomething that the Canadian
writer Seth Klein, he has a bookcalled that, the good war. So
it's a different way of lookingat what a state can do in
relationship, not to war, butsomething else. The second one
was about entrepreneurialculture. It's something I've
written about before.
But this, fetish around thecapacity of technological

(23:23):
entrepreneurs, of tech bros inSilicon Valley being the ones
that will lead us out of thehole that we've we've dug
ourselves in, in terms of ourenvironmental presence and our
futures. And that, like everyother situation, this is kind of
part of the narrative that Ithink is out there. Like every

(23:45):
other situation where we getourselves into trouble,
technology will manage theproblem. And I get this a lot.
As director of this institute, Iget to meet a lot of non
academics, both in government,but a lot in industry.
And they're very excited aboutwhat technology will do for
climate. And then the third oneis it's the opposite. It's a

(24:10):
narrative which is saying thefuture of the sun will be that
it looks a lot like the past. Sothe future is that the sun
doesn't exist. It's blackenedout by coal smoke or by using a
lot of oil.
This is the narrative of drill,baby, drill. This is the
narrative on day one of theprevious Trump government. The

(24:32):
first decision by the Trumpgovernment was to open up the
border to the pipeline. That'show important it was, and that
has been already put forward assomething that would happen on
day one in a second Trumppresidency. So, two models
whereby big organizations weregoing to lead us to a promised

(24:53):
land, and what that would looklike, what they're saying that
would look like, and then one inwhich they're saying the
promised land was the past whenit comes to energy.
So those would be the three. Sothere's one missing that is hard
to talk about. The politics ofleft wing environmentalism that
does get to a different future,and that exists in reality right

(25:16):
now. There aren't a lot ofexamples that I think could be
scaled up, but there arecertainly examples that I could
have looked at to try to seewhat is in there as a practice
that could be an example ofwhere to go. I can think, for
instance, of the Spanishcollective Mondragon movement.

(25:38):
I can think of small communaluses of energy of people that go
off grid. I'm not sure those arevery prominent narratives, and I
suppose that's what I was tryingto look here. They're not
filtering around in everydaylife. My sample size is small
for this, and that is when Itake my dog for a walk to the

(25:58):
park, and I'm talking to otherpeople, they talk a lot about
electric vehicles and they talka lot about what a government
should do and is not doing. Andthey might even say that they
don't like what people like meare talking about.
They don't know that it's me,but they'll just say that, you

(26:19):
know, more generally. People onthe left with respect to kind of
pushing the story of renewables,but they won't ponder how
interesting it is that smalltowns all over the world now
generate their own electricityand no longer rely on either
governments or on grids thatpreexist them. So it was, I
guess why I left it out wasreally that I didn't see it as

(26:40):
something that right now had thecapacity to be a common sense.
And I suppose the way I end thebook is with tips about how that
might happen. So it's about whatyou can learn from these other
common sense practices isperhaps a way to become common
sense and to learn that that isa politics in and of itself.

(27:01):
So that you shouldn't spend onlycritiquing these other
positions, but that there'ssomething you can learn from the
positions. Because the critiqueis satisfying for an academic to
make careers out of it, but it'snot necessarily something that
gets active in the dominantnarratives, in everyday
narratives, in what the New YorkTimes or even

the Wall Street Journal will report as
environmental practices oraddressing climate change on its
front page. And they do. That'sincredibly rich. And you invoked
another concept that maybe we'llreturn to if there's time or if
if we're moved to it. But thatfeels to me like another of the
key concepts alongside time inthinking about the particular

(27:46):
challenges around questions ofchanging energy systems of a
shift from a petro culture to arenewable culture and that so if
time is is one and the kinds ofcomplexities of time in relation
to issues of energy, scale isanother.
It's interesting to connect theidea of scale to the idea of
common sense and to think aboutthe way in which common sense
itself, of course. I'd neverthought this in this way before,

(28:08):
but you're absolutely right.Common sense itself is a kind of
index of scale of scalability.Right? That if something arrives
as a common sense, then what youknow about it is that it is at
scale in some kind of a way.
You anticipated the next sort ofplace I wanna take you in
relation to your book. I hopethis is okay. The place you lead
us toward the end of the bookand the way in which you invite

(28:28):
us to sort of think about whatwe could learn from and draw on
when contemplating common sensesbeyond simply their critique.
One of the things that I findreally generative in this
project is the way that itarrives at this powerful and
surprising or maybe powerfulbecause surprising account of
the importance of tradition andmyth for left politics. And in a

(28:50):
way, I kind of bid to say, don'tconcede tradition and myth to
retrograde politics, but imagineactually the ways in which they
might be really vital, for leftpolitics as well.
And in making that case, you endwith a powerful passage, and I
and I actually just wanna sortof read it. You write, the
future of the sun won't dependon the technological

(29:10):
sophistication of solar panelsand the storage capacity of
batteries. It will depend on ourwillingness to forcefully
challenge those narratives ofenergy transition that promise
change while insisting that wekeep everything exactly as it
is. It will depend too on ourability to tell convincing
stories about the traditions weneed and want to honor, and

(29:32):
those to which it is no longerworth paying any attention
because they have gotten usnowhere. When I reread this, in
preparation for thisconversation today, I was struck
that it recalled for me, Iguess, something that our
comrade, Jennifer Wenzel, haswritten in, an essay called
forms of life.
And in that essay, she examineswhat she calls narrative grammar

(29:53):
of fossil infrastructure. And sowhat I wonder, and as I sort of
thought about this and thecomparison, was whether in the
argument that you make aboutnarrative, if this is kind of a
counterpart and a compliment tothe argument that Jennifer is
making. So she treatsinfrastructure as narrative. You
seem to posit narrative asitself a vital form of
infrastructure. And so I wonderif this comparison resonates for

(30:16):
you, if you could reflect alittle bit on that and how we
sort of think about narrativesat scale.

That's those are difficult questions. I think
scale is important. I thinkscale is important when when it
comes to addressing climatechange, but actually when it
comes to addressing any socialissue, that is one that we want
to change, that we want to movefrom one thing to another.
Narratives as infrastructureversus infrastructure as

(30:43):
narratives, I think they gotogether well. Jennifer is
somebody that I've done a numberof projects with.
I've written things with her. Wedon't think exactly alike, but
certainly we bring differentthings to the same bit of
writing or the same projects. Soan infrastructure, depending on
what one takes that to mean,whether that's a physical

(31:04):
infrastructure or that's about,say, the way that a political
system is organized or the way abureaucracy operates, that on
its own says something aboutwhat comes next, what's possible
to come next. Physicalinfrastructure is a difficult
one because the type ofnarrative that produces when it

(31:25):
comes to energy makes a bigdemand. It makes a demand that
that be different and that theinfrastructure needs to change
massively to produce thatnarrative change at the level of
infrastructure.
Narrative as infrastructure isyou make common you make

(31:45):
something into common sense thatis different than what it was
before. And we see examples ofhow criticism and social
movements do in fact make thispossible. So many examples, one
of them is the civil rightsmovement. One of them is about
women becoming members of thehuman race. People who can vote,

(32:09):
who should make as much money asmen.
Queer people getting married, ifthat's what they wanna do.
There's these kinds of ways inwhich they're driven those
changes by narrative. Makingsomething into common sense.
Making something that isunobjectionable because there's
nothing to any of those thingsthat is demanded by the

(32:29):
givenness of existence. Ofcourse, you can live differently
together in all kinds of ways.
Of course, injustices can berendered just. Of course, the
way that societies understandthemselves is, let's say, equal
or allowing for fullparticipation of all members of
society can come to be areality. So I suppose I have
those things in mind when I'mthinking about struggling by a

(32:52):
narrative over a common sense.So common sense would be you
don't use fossil fuels anymorebecause of what they do. A
common sense might be everythingyou do, you think about your
impact on the environment whenyou used to not think about it
whatsoever.
And I see that in practice. Isee that now in my I was gonna

(33:16):
say over the over the course ofmy life. Somehow that makes me
feel old. But in the last ten tofifteen years, those narratives
really are there In aconservative newspaper in
Canada, which is really thepaper of record, it's our New
York Times, The Globe and Mail,the paper of record in a
country, Canada, that depends onextraction of all kinds to fuel

(33:38):
its economy, The environment andclimate change is part of a lot
of its articles. So there's arecognition of something
happening that needs to beaddressed, and that's a change
to narrative that isastonishing, amazing.
Now has that unnerved otherkinds of infrastructures? I see
that as less so. Perhaps whatI'm saying is that the

(34:00):
linguistic narrative is the onethat's gonna fuel the
infrastructural one. But whenthe infrastructural one starts
to come, it'll reinforce theother changes. Something to that
effect.
They certainly go together. Iwill just say that it doesn't
not uniquely, but but certainly,unlike perhaps other changes,
you can't address climate changeon your block or in your country

(34:23):
or on your continent. So youneed to do the whole planet, and
that is an issue of scale thatis unlike anything that we've
had so far. So you just can't doit. You can recognize it.
You can be a country or a citythat has decided to ban
extraction, which has happened.Again, that narrative produces

(34:47):
outcomes. In Colombia, they haveput a ban on extraction
nationally. But for Colombia todo that doesn't do anything
about the climate inducedweather events that they might
have to live through. It doesn'treduce the c o two that they
exist in and what that means.
So that's why scale matters alot. Time matters. Time matters

(35:07):
because if the slower c o two isreduced, the slower we make the
the transition, the bigger thechallenge. So much so that it
starts to exceed scale.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As you were talking, it struck
me that one of the things that Ihave learned from this bro book
and I'm grateful to you for is away to to sort of think about
common sense differently. So tome, common sense is a slur.
That's how leftists tend to useit as a synonym for ideology and
so all of the things thatproduce a kind of bad given. I
think that one of the thingsthat's really interesting in the

(35:42):
arguments that you're making isthe way in which you invite us
to sort of think about how thecommon or the commons and common
sense are actually potentiallyconnectable rather than simply
opposed. Right? Then in acertain kind of leftist
tradition, common sense would beall of the bad ideology that
gets produced in order toreproduce capitalism, and that
that's antithetical to thecommons. But you're actually

(36:03):
inviting us to sort of maybethink about common sense as not
a bad concept, but as apossibility.
It doesn't have a given content.It has capacity.

I think that's right. I think that's absolutely
right. I know that initialimpulse to say, no. No. Common
sense is what we want to do awaywith.
I say we. I'll just speak aboutmyself. If you want to change
the things that you see asproblematic in the present,
whether that is aroundinequalities or racisms or

(36:36):
inability to address climatechange, then you find the common
sense views of that. However,they're mixed up always, and
maybe in some cases there's acommon sense that we should
address that. You want to movepast common sense, so I get what
you're saying.
Common sense, which I'm not thefirst to use it in this way,
common sense is for that samereason that we see it as a slur.

(37:00):
It's an incredibly powerfulpolitical position. One of my
students did his PhD on the wayin which the idea of the center,
as described in the Britishmagazine, The Economist, from
its founding to the present, itshifted has shifted massively
rightward. Now, the center is akind of a common sense. What the

(37:24):
economist is so good at issaying, well, let's be
reasonable.
There's this position. There'sthis other position. We're the
voice of reason. But you can seethat that reason that they
appeal to, which is so powerful,is marked by a position
ideologically. And so I see itas a very powerful place

(37:44):
rhetorically, narratively, tosay that what I think is my
positions are common sense, andI'm gonna struggle for those
until the point where it's justgiven, it's just how it is, it's
just normalized.
Again, that sounds like a slur,But if that's the site of

(38:07):
struggle or if it's rather notseen as the site of struggle,
you very quickly lose. If youhave a situation as in the
current US election and in otherparts of contemporary
neopopulism where the commonsense is being articulated all
the time. Those are justcritiqued as opposed to
something else being offered asa given. You lose the battle. So

(38:30):
this kind of appeal to anAmerica that's for Americans,
right, even though I don't knowwhat an American is exactly, and
that anything that doesn't saythat is objectionable, that's a
very powerful position.
I don't wanna concede thatposition, I suppose. I think
it's a mistake to concede thatposition, and there's other ways

(38:51):
to incorporate that. I'll justsay one other thing because I
feel like I'm going on aboutthis. But when I'm speaking to
publics about climate change andabout the capacity to
potentially make changes withconsequences, I'll often give
them a small anecdote. So, whenI go to visit my mother who is a
80 year old Hungarian immigrantwho's remained Hungarian despite

(39:13):
being in Canada for two thirdsof her life, I will have to
remind her over and over againto use the recycling bin.
She doesn't know how to do it. Imean, of course she does, but
she doesn't have it as part ofher immediate capacity. My son
doesn't know how not to do it.Just would never occur to him.
If he was just, you know, he wasasked about that, it would be

(39:35):
like, Oh, it's common sense.
Like, why would you even whatwhat's there to object to?
Doesn't make any sense. So,those little things do add up to
just a practice that one hasthat matters a lot. There's a
reason why the ExtinctionRebellion has a book called, I
can't remember the exact word,but it has common sense in the
title. They're trying to appealto common sense to just make it

(39:55):
like, of course, you have to dothis thing.
Why would you not wanna do it?So that is the reason why I feel
like it's a really powerfulspace that if it's just a
critique of common sense, youdon't have anything to fill it
in with. You have critique tofill it in with, and that's all.

Yeah. And that connects compellingly and
powerfully with the argumentabout tradition and myth. I
wanna take up the question ofpractice. You've introduced
that, and I do wanna move there.But before we leave this
conversation around,infrastructure, one of the
things that the book opened upfor me in a way that I knew but
hadn't necessarily seen in quitethe same terms was the
asymmetrical relationshipbetween a fuel source and its

(40:34):
infrastructures.
And so at one point toward theend of the last chapter, you
talk about how no one owns thesun so that it is common and
sort of insist that that'ssomething that we have to defend
in the strongest possible terms.And one of the things that it
struck me there was the way inwhich we often think about oil
in terms of its finitude. And soas a kind of resource that

(40:56):
requires ownership in some way.Whereas we think of renewables
as things that are infinite andso exceed the possibilities of
ownership or need to exceed thepossibilities of ownership. And
then what struck me though isthat whether or not anyone owns
the sun is a separate questionfrom how it is that the
infrastructure that enable us touse the sun's power come into
being and how they are produced.

(41:17):
And this and in a way, this sortof goes back to what you were
saying about how the thequestion of infrastructure as a
material question is a difficultone. It's a it's a vexed one
because, obviously, the sunmight belong to everyone, but
its mediation is a separateproblem maybe and one that we
need to sort of sort through. II wonder if you, anyway, if you
have any thoughts about thatquestion of the role of the of

(41:38):
the infrastructural inmediating, source that could be
owned by everybody or by nobody.

Yeah. Sure. That really connects up with the book
in the sense that this is aboutownership. These narratives are
related to ownership. It'sabout, I suppose, who owns it?
Who should own theinfrastructure that generates
the energy? You do need sometype of mediator to turn any
kind of natural energy intoenergy that can go into a grid.

(42:07):
It's about that issue ofownership. The narratives around
what the future should look likeand whether it should take one
form or another, whether itshould take one status quo or or
another, is in part tolegitimate types of ownership of
infrastructures that could inpractice take different forms.

(42:27):
So what I mean by that is thereare wind farms being put up all
over the place.
Somebody owns those wind farms.Sometimes they're national
governments. Sometimes they'reregional governments. Sometimes
they're corporations that sellthe energy to the grid, and
often quite cheaply. Often,they're public private
consortiums.
And this is what, Bill Gatesreally is suggesting is the best

(42:51):
way forward to bring down theprice of creating new forms of
energy infrastructure, wherebypublic money already in short
supply is transferred to privatepurses. There's that question of
who's gonna own it. There's thepossibility of nobody owning it,
but you still need theinfrastructure. And it's already
the case that that question ofinfrastructure is one that we

(43:12):
should be having, and we are nothaving it. We we're missing it.
We're belated a little bit tohaving it. I think of the
example of, wind turbines. I'mpretty certain that only two
companies on the planet make theactual generator. They're both
Danish. And so when you see awind farm, the building of the
wind farm, the building of thetower is done by local industry

(43:36):
that employ people locally for ashort amount of time, but they
ship in these massivetransformers.
And so in a way, right now, thisis a rhetorical claim, wind is
owned by the Danes. Don't quoteme on this. But there is that
sense that ownership is part ofalso the fantasy of having a
different type of relationshipto the grid because it's about

(43:59):
individuals having access totheir own energy. You can put
together solar panels, likethey're plug and play, you can
buy them off a shelf. So you canhave your own energy.
You will find very quickly thatyou can't do that unless you
rewire your house because youcan't put the energy usually in
most places in the world nowback into the grid. So then the

(44:21):
where it tends to push you isoff grid. And off grid, in my
experience, having lived in thehinterlands of British Columbia,
off grid tends towardslibertarianism, tends towards
the kinds of populism that I'vementioned in here, tends towards
a decrease in scale, tendstowards this decision that one
is taking the steps to evadethat controlling system of

(44:45):
energy that you might have beenunder for a long time, but it's
not going towards the bigcommunal ownership that perhaps
I'm suggesting is the right wayor the only way forward for a
kind of energy transition that'sfor all of us and not just for
some of us as fossil fuelsalways were.

Just making sure that I note this down. So the
Danes own the wind. That's I gotthat right. Okay. Good.
Imra says the Danes own thewind.

And the Spanish own a lot of the sun. How's that?

A lot of the sun. Good. Perfect. Okay.

We can go through each power source one by one.
How's that? Sure. I think theFrench own nuclear. Yeah.
I think that they do. Yep.

Let's turn to talk a little bit about the question
of practice. In the work thatyou do on energy, you tend to
address, the kinds of issues andquestions that you do in four
ways or modes on your own. Andso Futures of the Sun would be a
good example of that. In pairs,where you might write an essay
with someone else. In bigparadigm shaping readers,

(45:46):
anthologies that bring togethera number of perspectives on an
issue, but then also in largecollaborative multi author
collectives.
And these are exemplified by,for instance, the Solarities
book also with Minnesota. Iwonder if you could talk a

little bit about how these four approaches differ
and how they might overlap, andalso what each one affords you.
Each one of them are a differentway of encountering an idea. So
the individual writing isreflective, taking a chance on
one's own. The interlocutors aretextual for the most part or I

(46:20):
suppose participant observationof people that take their dogs
to the park where I take my dog.So it's very high level
analysis.
It's about trying to puzzlesomething out on one's own.
Working with somebody else, youimmediately come across very
different opinions. You may haveread the same things. You may
have read different things.Certainly, your approach and

(46:41):
your understanding of howdynamics work changes.
And I think you're alsounsettled in how you write. So
what might be a phrase that Iuse a lot, you said, like, to
unnerve is one, it may be thatthat needs to be unnerved. That
may be a too easy go to. We allhave this kind of reflexive way

(47:04):
of talking about things orworking through ideas. Maybe
that's good to unnerve.
This is why I've always donethat, including writing with
you. It's a different process.You have to do it often live and
in person. You're made to behonest with your ideas. The
readers are a way of collectingmaterial to two things, I think.
One is to help. Often a lot ofyoung scholars have legitimacy

(47:26):
in the field. Give them a way ofseeing that they belong to this
field and have dis discussions.But it's also a place where you
can get a lot of singularvoices, each one of them working
through ideas individually. Andthe way that those are exciting
is by seeing how all of theseindividual voices together do
some kind of work or that theyhave disagreements.

(47:48):
They don't know it. I thinkthat's interesting because they
haven't read the other texts inthe reader. And then there's the
last one, which is groupwriting, which I don't think
anybody has tried in quite theway that the After Oil group has
tried. So I remember when wewere first coming up with After
Oil, the first collectiveendeavor was in 2015. And I

(48:11):
remember that my rationale forit was a frustration around what
it is that we were achieving byeach one of us writing essays,
critiquing energy systemsindividually when we were saying
shadings of the same thing.
And instead, I wanted us to gettogether to come clean. What is
it that we wanted to say? Whatis it that we could say together

(48:34):
that we might share with Publix?So that was that experiment.
There were 20 of us, I think.
The other thing again was thiskind of expertise, unnerving of
expertise, because we hadartists involved. We had a
former leader of the LiberalParty of Alberta involved and
figure out how to write a bookin three days. And it worked. We
decided to do it again. I thinkeach time we again play with the

(48:57):
form because we don't wanna getlazy.
You can figure you know you knowhow to write together. You've
done it once before. There's noreason that one should want to
do it again after experiencingtrying to write with 20 people.
But if you do gain somethingfrom it, that makes it
worthwhile. So we did it in adifferent form next time.
It was really led by DarrenBarney. We did it in conjunction

(49:18):
with the Center for ContemporaryArchitecture at McGill, and
Darren wanted to do in less dayswith more people. So I can't
remember exactly how many peoplewere there, but it was I think
it was 70. So Solarities, whichis also with University of
Minnesota Press, if you read itnow, it doesn't look doesn't
feel like it was 70 peoplewriting it. But if the first one

(49:40):
was about coming clean, thesecond one was about, well, what
do we do next?
Where do we push ourselves? Andwe needed all those people, I
think, because they could eachtell us something specific about
what their sense of thisemergent something that would be
renewables was about. So Icouldn't have written Futures of

(50:00):
the Sun without that book andwithout participating in that
project because it the languagedidn't exist yet to base one's
own critiques off of. I'm notsure I reference Solarities in
this book, but it's certainlythere guiding it. And we're
doing the same thing again.
We have a book that we're closeto finishing up, which is also
about renewabilities. I see itas taking what I'm doing in

(50:23):
Future of the Sun a step furtherof complicating it. But it's the
same idea. It's the same idea ofgetting together writers and
thinkers and academics fromdifferent disciplines to
experiment with producingknowledge differently. In the
humanities especially, we'vedeveloped a common sense that
the way you do a project is youwrite it yourself.

(50:43):
That you go off to a office. Yougo off to a, carol. And what
gives it legitimacy is theamount of time you spent on your
own putting together somethingerudite. I suppose it's like
what a novelist does. You writeon your own.
It reflects you. You perhaps getpraise for it. You get, capital

(51:04):
within your discipline. Andthere's no reason that that
should be the best way toproduce knowledge. There's other
ways to do it.
And especially so often in Lefttheory, Left politics, we talk
about doing things together in amultitude of individually
written books, all encouragingus all to do things together. So

(51:26):
I suppose what this project isabout, the idea is to make a
different kind of common sense.That this is okay too. That in
fact you get types of outcomesthat you wouldn't otherwise get,
and that perhaps it models thekinds of ways of being in
relation to one another that weneed to imagine for a better
future of the sun, one that'sdifferent than the ones that

(51:48):
I've described here. It may beabout unnerving expertise,
really unnerving expertise.
Like, this is what we're doing.It's about writing a book that
Bill Gates could not write andnot taking credit and being okay
with that and even recognizingthat that's important to do.
I've especially valued the modeof trying to write together in

(52:10):
this way. When we presented thismethod, we kind of gave the
background how we do this, thatpeople were fascinated. They
immediately wanted to trysomething else like this out.
And it certainly has proved tobe valuable. We're told by
people that it meant a lot tothem to come across After Royal.
Solarities has gotten fantasticreviews. It does things that a

(52:33):
book like mine can't do. And mymy book does other things, and
that's fine too.

Your, delineation of the After Oil projects and
the volumes that have come outof them seems spot on to me. And
the only thing that I might sortof add in addition to thinking
about that has to do withanother aspect of temporality in
the first one, which was inaddition to what you're saying
about the problem of thelimitations or the restrictions
that are potentially there abouteverybody writing their their

(52:59):
own individual critique aboutthe same problem and wanting to
do something that would give adifferent kind of perspective on
that and a different kind ofpurchase on the problem, was
also about an attempt toexperiment with publication that
could be fast. Right? That itsort of felt as though here's an
issue that feels quite urgentand the and the pace of academic
publishing can sometimes beslower. And so that was the
thing that we wanted to do withthe first one.

(53:20):
I think, also, we understood asaddressing a particular issue
around energy transition thatdidn't seem like it had yet
registered widely in some sortof broader consciousness. And so
it sort of felt, how is it thatyou animate this issue so that
it registers more widely withpeople given that we had
altogether too much knowledgealready about the nature of that

(53:40):
particular problem and the needfor a transition? I found that
the second one was theexperiment in scaling up the
number of people who areinvolved and then also sort of
trying to do the experiment andactually thinking about what an
actually existing energytransition could entail. What
would be its dimensions, itscoordinates, its possibilities,
its complexities, itschallenges, its contradictions?

(54:00):
I found this third one is reallyinteresting because it's about
asking us to think about how atransition already suddenly
seems underway and how does thatchange, what it might mean to
try to write together about thatcondition and the ongoingness of
that condition.
And I think one of theinteresting things about the
approach we've taken this timeis also to make the school. So
after all, school, as agathering of people to write

(54:21):
together and to think together,itself a kind of iterative
process so that not just onemeeting of the school, but
several over which time we goahead and try to produce the
writing. Maybe we could justmove towards some kind of a
conclusion to our conversationby returning to Futures of the
Sun and to talk a little bitabout what you feel you've
learned from the process ofwriting it, and and then the

(54:43):
process of reading what you'vewritten and sort of reflecting
on what you've written thatmight help you see what you
think comes next? And I guess Isort of think of the next in
maybe two registers in terms ofwhat might come next for what
you wanna write, but also whatmight come next in relation to
this unfolding narrative aroundenergy transition or energy

(55:04):
futurity or energytransformation.

So I do have two projects. One is a more specific
description and discussion ofenergy transition and the other
is a more expansive one. Thefirst project is something that
I've started here at theUniversity of Toronto in
conjunction with my colleague,Sergio Montero, who is also a
director of a new institute herecalled the Institute for

(55:28):
Inclusive Economies andSustainable Livelihoods. Looks
especially at the global Southin terms of sustainable
livelihoods and even morespecifically to Colombia, Chile,
Argentina. And what we have beendoing, the two of us, in
conjunction with some otherresearchers in Sweden, The UK,

(55:49):
some other European countries,and also some countries in South
America, is start to do aproject on battery cities.
That's what we've been callingit. It's to try to look at what
are the conditions under whichbattery plants are being created
very rapidly around the world.There were none at scale five

(56:13):
years ago. Now there arehundreds, maybe as many as a
thousand now, either in processof being created or already
created. What is interestingabout this, my colleagues who
are social scientists have onekind of interest, for me it's
about why this has become soimportant as a development.
Why the battery? What does itmean to the communities that are

(56:34):
there, but also what does itmean ideologically or
conceptually? Or what is thenarrative around the battery?
Why is the battery somethingnew? Not a wind farm, not a
solar farm, not energy in thatsense, but some kind of I
suppose it's infrastructure.
It's what we were talking aboutin terms of infrastructure. To
do certain things withrenewables, you need the

(56:56):
infrastructure of the battery.This is a five or six year
project. I'm kind of there withsocial scientists. They seem to
go and interview people and, getnumbers and things like that,
but they also want me along forthe ride.
So the second one, which is alonger term one, I've called it
Sustainability Inc, as ifsustainability was a
corporation. I hadn't thoughtabout it quite this way until we

(57:18):
had this discussion, but it is aproject about expertise. And I
guess I have an issue withexpertise, don't I? Now that I
think about it. I have aquestion about expertise because
of how it constitutes a reality.
Experts have the power totransform ideas into reality.
The the experts can be membersof the professional managerial

(57:39):
class. They can be engineers.They don't have to be experts
like scientists or at any kindof high level. So Sustainability
Inc.
So this emerges from my currentposition as director of this
institute, which hassustainability in its name. And
I've had a chance over the lasttwo years since I've been to the
University of Toronto to attendmeetings of experts who are

(58:02):
shaping and have been shapinglanguage in relationship to the
idea of sustainability fordecades, but are especially
doing so as we run up to the02/1930 end of the current
United Nations SustainableDevelopment Goals that they
established. It was a fifteenyear arc. So I go to these

(58:23):
meetings that are made up ofrepresentatives from the United
Nations, from industry, fromacademics, from government.
They're not major people.
They're not even vice presidentswhen it comes to industry, but
they might be somebody in theindustry that is responsible for
producing the sustainabilityreport for a company, or they
might be the people that writethe report. Mining companies

(58:45):
have sustainability, annualsustainability reports at this
point. And so they come to thesemeetings to trade ideas about
what is the concept ofsustainability. They don't know
that they're doing that. So it'snot just that they have, like,
one session and they go over andover the word.
That they have lots of sessionswhere they're trying to speak to
one another and relate to oneanother ideas about how their

(59:08):
organization fits into thisdynamic around this concept that
speaks to a much wider set ofissues than the environment. So
sustainability is also aboutgender relations, it's about
access to water, it's aboutequalities. There's 17 of them
in total. Job opportunities. Soit really is this language about

(59:30):
making everything better, fixingeverything all at once.
There's nothing you couldn't putinto one of these 17 goals.
They've been established fromthe beginning on a
contradiction. So, the firsttime this idea of sustainability
was used was in 1984, I believe,or '85 at an event, the UN put
together. It came out as thisbook called Our Common Futures.

(59:52):
It's the Brundtland Report, theBrundtland Commission that was
put together to try to create amore sustainable world.
There's a real pushback on whatseemed to be an emerging idea
that sustainability had to beabout flattening growth or even
degrowth. And so there's thisagreement made that
sustainability means, amongstother things, a ongoing steady

(01:00:12):
state 3% increase in economies.Anybody who critiques this, and
there are many people, includingthe current degrowth scholars,
will point out that 3% meansover twenty one years you have a
doubling of the global economy.And indeed, it's been going at
that speed and that level of, Iguess, forward acceleration,
even as all of this other stuffis being worked out. So I

(01:00:35):
suppose I'm trying tounderstand, well, first of all,
just the language, the discourseof it, what it looks like in
different parts of the world.
A second is what theseindividuals think about their
relationship to sustainability.So some of this will be around
interviews. Some of this will beparticipant observation. And I
kind of see it as the last thingI'm going to do. And hopefully,

(01:00:57):
I'm gonna write it a little bitlike nonfiction.
So this to me is a big task anda big challenge. I'd like to
have it ready for 2030, but weshall see.

Mark Simpson (01:01:09):
Both of those projects sound amazing, and I'm
gonna say that I think you'regonna have to sort of speed up
your schedule a little bit herebecause I want to read both of
those. And so, you know, youmight have to sleep a little
less. That might feelunsustainable, but I don't care.
I wanna read them. So faster,please.

Imre Szeman (01:01:23):
I'll do my best. Thanks very much, Mark. Those
were fantastic questions. Ireally enjoyed talking to you
today.

Mark Simpson (01:01:30):
Thank you so much for your incredibly rich and
wonderful answers. I'm buzzing.This has been so fun.

Narrator (01:01:38):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book Futures ofthe The Struggle over Renewable
Life by Imre Zeman is availablefrom University of Minnesota
Press. Thank you for listening.

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