James Adams, University of California, Irvine.
One of the primary tasks at hand in planning energy transitions involves making the difficult decisions (logistically, ethically, and politically) of how and when the necessary adjustments should be made, as well as the question of which populations (including human or otherwise) should pay the price versus reap the rewards. This task is further complicated by the fact that energy systems are always already entangled with other interdependent systems (social, cultural, and epistemic as well as technical and ecological), leaving the adjustment process riddled with blindspots, uncertainties, contradictions, and double-binds.
Taking Austin, Texas as a case study, this paper begins by analyzing ethnographic and historical data for the way that petro-racial capitalism has and continues to influence efforts towards just energy transition in the US. I’ll then move to consider how more transversal and recursive planning infrastructures and framings can help us recognize this influence and better account for the full ecology of entangled systems involved in sociotechnical change.
The empirical material considered will include oral histories with local environmental justice and energy transition actors in Austin along with field notes taken from my dissertation fieldwork in Austin, including participant observations of two of Austin’s primary energy transition and climate protection planning processes. I’ll use this data to show how Austin’s notable successes in carbon reduction are inextricable from the city’s sedimented histories of racial exclusion and petro-capitalist development. I’ll then show how some Austinites are mobilizing in response, calling for a deeper reconsideration of the different ways that systems, industries, organizations, and communities are benefitted, harmed, and otherwise entangled with petro-racial capitalism.
Luke and Heynen define petro-racial capitalism as “an accumulation strategy reliant on the production, distribution, and consumption of petroleum that both requires and perpetuates colonial dispossession and racialized accumulation” (2020, 604). I’ll
establish dimensions of petro-racial capitalism in Austin by analyzing the city’s history along three different axes: 1) Political ecology: Austin’s technocratic governance regime, racial geography, and the city’s janus-faced history of environmentalism and environmental injustice, 2) Political economic: Austin’s strategic re-investment of fossil capital and its emergence as a new technopolis, and 3) Techno-political: the design and consolidation of the Texas grid and energy market and its impact on the shape and character of Austin’s logics and strategies of renewable energy transition.
Drawing connections across these axes, I will establish the way petro-racial capitalist energy systems have become part of Austin’s mental ecology (Bateson 1987, Guattari 2005), shaping (without determining) the extent and character of the way Austinite’s perceive, rationalize, desire, and/or even resist these systems. I’ll then show a more recent turn in Austin’s energy transition planning and politics, one which focuses on establishing more transversal relations across diverse modes of resistance, adds a new layer of complexity, increasing potential for rupture and escape. I’ll conclude by identifying the establishment of these transversal networks and infrastructures as an important intermediate strategy for guiding more just transitions to renewable energy.
