James Adams Staff Picks - June 2021

I selected my artifacts for this month’s media brief from the curated set of articles of the South Eastern Energy News list serve, 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. Though this reading, I came across the article on the risk of energy shortfalls in Texas. This article helped me think about the assemblage of political economic, technological, eco-atmospheric, and socio-cultural systems that have cohered in ways that are rendering the entire state of Texas energy vulnerable. And this increased energy vulnerability can be seen as an infringement of Texan’s energy rights.

The article on carbon capture helped me think about and illustrate some of the discursive risks that are embedded in technocratic solutions to carbon emissions. The author does a great job of showing how a myopic focus on “carbon accounting” neglects the lived impact of carbon emissions in discrete locations, as well as the other, non-carbon related impacts of extractive industries that impact people’s health, livelihoods, and overall quality of life.

In a more general sense, I selected these two artifacts because they served as good examples of the way energy systems intersect with, depend on, and also support/impact numerous other socio-natural systems. Recognizing and understanding the dynamics of this complex tangle of systems is important to both my dissertation project and the Energy Rights Project.