Adams: May Media Brief Staff Picks

I select most of my artifacts for media briefs from the news feed that I receive through email. I am subscribed to a number of different list serves, including US Energy News, South East Energy News, E&E News’ Climatewire and Energywire, and ProPublica. I am also subscribed to a number of different Texas-based group’s listservs that focus on energy, including Austin’s Citizens’ Climate Lobby and the North Texas Renewable Energy Group. Members of these groups are very active in sharing relevant news articles. I also receive news updates from businesses and organizations that work in energy in Austin, including CleanTx, Solar Austin, Pecan Street Inc., the Austin Clean Tech Incubator, and UT Austin’s Energy Institute. More recently, I subscribed to the Permian Basin Petroleum Association’s (PBPA) weekly newsletter, which offers an insider perspective on the Texas fossil fuels industry. Lastly, my advisor, Kim Fortun, also shares important news coverage of events related to my research. 

Generally, to begin looking for artifacts, I will go back through these emails and click through interesting titles, looking for those that I find most interesting or important to bring to the Energy Right’s Project. This time, however, was the first time that I created a word document dedicated to compiling links and brief notes on articles that I have been reading all month. This made the process of selecting artifacts for the media brief much easier. 

As I began looking back over this document for artifacts, I knew that I would like to follow up on developments in Austin and in the coverage of the Texas power crisis. I thus included the news that Pecan Street Inc. had announced its newly developed Center for Race, Energy & Climate Justice, along with their initial commentary on the race-energy nexus. This paper and new center for research is the culmination of a sustained effort to factor racial equity into their work on renewable energy. 

On the topic of the Texas power crisis, I included the “Collective Amnesia” article on the history of Texas energy policy leading up to the crisis, which I had accessed through the South East Energy News list serve. In re-reading, I noticed that this article was part of a three-part series produced by the Houston Chronicle. I read the remaining two articles and decided to turn all three into an artifact bundle, which could be treated as a single artifact. 

Next, I included the Dutch court ruling that was seeking to hold Shell accountable for climat impacts of the company’s carbon emissions. This article was shared by my advisor, who noted that the ruling marked an important discursive shift akin to the one documented by Riofrancos in her book Resource Radicalisms (2020). 

On top of this reading, I had also recently started reading the JRAI special issue on Energy Ethics (2021), which, among other arguments, criticized the ethical framework that casts fossil fuel industry workers as inherently immoral. Instead, they push anthropologists of energy to take the time to see the ways in which people who work in fossil fuels see their jobs and livelihoods as moral goods. In an attempt to respond to this critique, I decided to include the PBPA’s article on how the natural gas industry worked furiously to combat the power shortages and bring the grid back online. 

Lastly, as it was one of the biggest news evemts of the month, I knew I wanted to include a piece on the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. I chose ProPublica’s coverage of the event, which was sent to me in an email as their “big story” of the month. 

James' Artifacts

Osborne, James, Eric Dexheimer, and Jay Root. 2021. “‘Collective Amnesia’: Texas Politicians Knowingly Blew 3 Chances to Fix the Failing Power Grid.” Houston Chronicle. May 20, 2021. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/texas-politicians-power-grid-failures-blackout-16185399.php.

Osborne, James. 2021. “Fixing Texas’ Unreliable Power Grid Won’t Be Cheap or Easy. Can We Trust Politicians to Get It Done?” Houston Chronicle. May 25, 2021. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/failures-of-power-texas-grid-ercot-problem-fix-16191651.php.

Takahashi, Paul, Marcy de Luna, and James Osborne. 2021. “‘I Lost My Best Friend’: How Houston’s Winter Storm Went from Wonderland to Deadly Disaster.” Houston Chronicle. May 24, 2021. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/failures-of-power-series-part-2-blackouts-houston-16189658.php.

Shepperd, Ben. 2021. “PBPA Stepped Up in the Face of February’s Winter Storm.” Permian Basin Oil and Gas Magazine (blog). May 20, 2021. https://pboilandgasmagazine.com/pbpa-stepped-up-in-the-face-of-februarys-winter-storm/.

Golden, Daniel, and Renee Dudley. 2021. “The Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Hackers Had a Secret Weapon: Self-Promoting Cybersecurity Firms,” May 24, 2021. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-colonial-pipeline-ransomware-hackers-had-a-secret-weapon-self-promoting-cybersecurity-firms?token=4HsRcuNGpEdmAeWz4oEu5Cr56zj5_5OE.

Pecan Street. 2021. “The Race Energy Nexus.” Case Study. Austin, Texas: Pecan Street Inc.

Joshi, Ketan. 2021. “The Surprise Court Ruling That Cut Through Shell’s Greenwashing Facade.” The New Republic, May 28, 2021. https://newrepublic.com/article/162561/dutch-court-ruling-cut-shells-greenwashing-emissions?ct=t(RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN).