Preface

Who owns the sun? It’s a seemingly ridiculous question. One could imagine sci-fi narratives in which moons or planets might eventually become subject to the law of property (subdivisions on the moon! mining on Mars!). But the sun? Impossible! There’s just no way one could put up fences on its surface or collect up all the energies it shines out to the universe.

And yet the battle over just who owns the energy of the sun is now in the process of being fought out. The practices of energy ownership definitive of the era of fossil fuels are in all too many cases quickly being extended to renewables.1 The ownership with which I’m concerned in this short book isn’t the control of renewable energy technologies, sites, systems, or networks by companies or governments; rather, it’s about who is trying to lay claim to the narratives guiding our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, how they are doing so, and why and to what ends.

The emergence of the sun (and water, wind, and earth) as a source of power that might soon eclipse fossil fuels constitutes a transition whose effects will go well beyond the type of energy we use. Even the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognizes this. The IEA’s 2022 World Energy Outlook report projects that owing to the rapid greening of energy systems, CO₂ emissions from the power sector will likely peak in 2025. “Global fossil fuel use has risen alongside gross domestic product (GDP) since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century,” the report notes. “Putting this rise into reverse while continuing to expand the global economy will be a pivotal moment in energy history.”2 For many around the world, this civilizational shift promises new economic, social, and political possibilities; for others, it is a threat to be managed, controlled, or eliminated altogether. Even in the IEA’s short summary of where we now find ourselves in energy history, one can find an example of the narratives of transition that interest me and the social and political imaginaries at play within them. For the IEA, the continued expansion of the global economy is a priority above all else, and though the reduction of CO₂ emissions is to be welcomed—how could it not be?—the uncertainties of the post–fossil fuel world are definitely not. These uncertainties go beyond figuring out how to balance economic expansion with climate change mitigation strategies. They extend to what 2025 means for the future of capitalism and to the possibility of deep disruptions to the norms and values that underpinned the production, distribution, and consumption of all things, including energy, from the start of the age of oil up to the present.

The anxiety that the IEA expresses, which positions renewable energies and growth as potential antagonists, is a common one; indeed, it might be seen as the starting point for all narratives intent on explaining the shape our renewable futures will take. The current forceful pushback on renewables by some governments (the government of the Canadian province of Alberta offers a prominent example) and the fossil fuel industry is due in part to their understanding of this antagonism as an immutable reality.3 They argue that growth is impossible without fossil fuels and that working-class jobs depend on the continuation of extraction; for these reasons alone, transition must happen slowly and steadily, if it is to take place at all. But at this point in history, even those governments and fossil fuel companies resistant to energy transition recognize its inevitability, as evidenced by investments in renewables made by both international and national oil companies as early as the 1980s; in the main, delay tactics on transition hope only to push the peak date of 2025 forward in time—to 2030, 2040, or even later—so that in the interim, profit can continue to be reaped on capital invested in extraction.4 A related narrative proposed by defenders of fossil fuels foregrounds technological innovation as the way to resolve the antagonism between GDP growth and CO₂ decline. For those who continue to want to extract, new technologies, such as hydrogen or carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), offer a means by which the consequences of fossil fuel use can be managed so that old-fashioned growth can continue. Whether CCUS works matters less than the appearance of technology having come to rescue, so as to allow oil to keep flowing smoothly and steadily.

These aren’t the only arguments to keep the energy status quo and reap the supposed benefits that accompany it. Other narratives have tried to defuse post-oil uncertainties by showing how the rise of renewables will result in economic growth. Here, too, the promise of innovation plays a key role, with new technologies—ever more efficient solar panels and electric vehicles being the most prominent of these—transforming antagonists into allies. Such narratives position renewables as a way of securing a green, clean future for existing forms of capitalist enterprise. And then there is the opposing position, which sees the threat of climate change and the advent of renewable energies as opportunities to question the legitimacy and necessity of the growth of GDP on into perpetuity. Theorists of degrowth have made powerful arguments against the rationale for measuring human well-being by the metric of economic growth and have proposed ways to envision human flourishing that would not come at the expense of the environment.5 Some have challenged the capacity of degrowth to manage the trick of improving the quality of life for everyone on the planet, arguing that growth (of hopefully a clean, green kind) remains important to providing greater opportunities for many on the planet who were unable to benefit from the economic outcomes of the fossil fuel era.6

Although I’ve touched on many of these arguments in this book, my focus is on a far messier set of narratives being written, told, and sold about who should own the sun and what it means to do so. Contemporary forms of political power, whether implicitly or explicitly, have for two centuries grown as dependent on the power of fossil fuels as have economies.7 As the end of the fossil fuel era approaches, it should thus come as little surprise that competing narratives of energy futures are already in play, each trying to be the first to make sense of what a politics anchored on renewable energy and legitimated by climate action (to whatever degree and extent) might look like. These narratives are not yet fully coherent ones—nor would one expect them to be. They are now in the process of being tested in the space of uncertainty captured in the IEA’s assessment of where we find ourselves. In each chapter, I offer an assessment of a still-emerging narrative about the shape of political power after fossil fuels; my own assessment must be seen as similarly emergent—as an attempt to grapple, as much as possible, with phenomena still in the process of development.

It should go without saying: climate change is the most significant crisis faced by modern governments, regardless of whether they take up the challenge of doing anything about it. The growing number of deadly weather-related events has transfigured climate change from an idea articulated by experts into a reality with which it is necessary to contend. Governments might be unnerved by climate change and by renewable energy transition. But they and other actors have asserted or reasserted the legitimacy of their power by making a case for their unique ability to take on the challenge of climate change and energy transition. The post–fossil fuel narratives I explore here are all attempts to reaffirm status quo forms of political, economic, and technological power. In the first chapter, I look at the way in which advocates for postglobal liberalism (contra populism) argue that liberal nationalism is the only way in which to combat climate change. The second chapter explores the way in which neoliberalism is being extended to decision-making about climate change and energy transition. In this case, the failure of the nation-state to take effective charge of energy transition is being used by private industry and entrepreneurs as further evidence of the need for them to lead the way in shaping what the world will look like post-2025. I end with an assessment of the role energy plays in populist nationalisms. In such nationalisms, energy transition is viewed as a threat to populism’s power and legitimacy, even as fossil fuel extraction is foregrounded as an essential element of tradition. I leave it up to the reader to determine whether the brief concluding argument I make for the use of tradition and myth to very different political ends makes sense as a starting point for a new politics of energy transition and climate change. What I know for certain is that there needs to be a counternarrative to the futures of the sun being articulated today.

The degree to which any one of these narratives comes to define the politics of the post–fossil era will depend on its success at becoming the norm against which others are forced to measure themselves. In essence, we can see each as struggling to transform itself into the undisputed “common sense” about how to approach energy transition and climate change. Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea describe common sense as comprising “frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world.”8 Common sense shares similarities with what Antonio Gramsci has described as “spontaneous consent,” and perhaps even more so with Louis Althusser’s description of ideology as the recognition by subjects “that ‘it’s really true,’ that ‘this is the way it is,’ not some other way, that they have to obey God, the priest, De Gaulle, the boss, the engineer, and love their neighbor, and so on . . . they have recognized that ‘all is well’ (the way it is), and they say, for good measure: So be it.”9 But there is a reason I prefer using common sense as a way to describe positions that subjects and institutions name as irrefutable. The notion of common sense is not just a description of an already achieved state—or not only that—but names the ongoing, active struggle to establish a norm, perhaps especially in situations in which one does not yet exist. Appeals to “common sense” are a way of bringing people into one’s narrative fold, an almost effortless way of defining an “us” (those who recognize the given and only way of doing things) versus a “them” (those who, it is implied in the appeal, hold extreme or critical views or who just don’t get it).10 In other words, “common sense” is something that has to be made. Each of the narratives of renewable futures at which I look here makes the case that its views are “common sense” precisely because they are anything but.

The chapters included in this book were presented at the University of Glasgow on November 15, 16, and 17 as the 2022 Leverhulme Lectures. The lectures were written for a mixed audience comprising both academics and nonacademics and consciously written in a style that—I hoped—would appeal to both. Although I would have liked to extend parts of the argument beyond what I could offer in three one-hour lectures, I have chosen to leave the text as close to its original form as possible, in large part to avoid interrupting the flow of a text written to be read aloud. There have been some changes made to address grammatical and spelling mistakes, and small nudges added to keep things flowing, but no other major changes.