James Adams Staff Picks - December 2021

The articles I selected for this media brief were found through my subscription to the South Eastern Energy News listserve and the US Energy News listserve, published by the Energy News Network. As my dissertation project focuses on energy transition in Austin, Texas, I was reading articles that assessed the current state of Texas’ energy infrastructure and ongoing strategies and capacities to transition (or resist transitioning) to renewable energy.

            For this brief, I returned to discussions and responses to the Texas power crisis. I included an article that discussed the suggestions put forth to the Texas Public Utility Commission by multiple municipal and county governments, and then also included an article that discussed what the PUCT regulators ended up approving. The fact that the PUCT did not take these suggestions into account highlights the dissonance between the values and politics of energy in Texas at the city and state levels. This conflict in environmental governance at the city and state levels is an important dynamic for any energy scholar or energy justice organization or activist to understand and consider.

            I also included an article that questions Exxon’s commitment to net-zero emissions. While the discussion of Exxon is interesting in itself, I chose to include it because the article also poses the question of whether or not market devices alone are sufficient mechanisms for motivating or organizing a transition to renewables. I thought the article did a good job of illustrating how a truly effective energy justice movement cannot simply focus on fossil fuels or the harm that they have caused. Rather, they must address the network of power relations that have enabled these environmental justices to take place in the first place, if they are to prevent their reproduction in new forms.