Producing Techno-Optimism: The Alternative Energy Transition as Spectacle
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
The alternative/renewable energy transition has been heavily critiqued for its role in reproducing inequity, colonial relationships, and ecological disruption through the mining of rare earth minerals in the Global South, steel production, and top-down development initiatives. How and why, then, has alternative energy become the widely accepted answer to meet the needs of the climate crisis? Social scientists understand this relationship between climate response and inequality through the lens of “techno-optimism,” or the notion that technological innovation and advancement will allow for societies to engineer their way out of the climate crisis without giving attention to the social relations that brought about the crisis in the first place. In this presentation, I describe two experiences from an ongoing event ethnography project: a visit to view the Rampion wind farm in Brighton, UK and attendance at the Economist Impact events in London, UK. I leverage these experiences to identify the ways in which techno-optimism is actively produced. In stronger terms, I argue that these experiences suggest that the greenwashing of the energy transition is facilitated by corporate elites that actively work to obscure the potential for social and ecological harms through the use of spectacle.
