Renewable Energy: International Perspectives on Sustainability

284 Pages·2019·4.329 MB·English

by  Dmitry Kurochkin, Elena V. Shabliy, Ekundayo Shittu

Renewable Energy
International Perspectives
on Sustainability
Edited by
Dmitry Kurochkin
Elena V. Shabliy
Ekundayo Shittu
Renewable Energy
Dmitry Kurochkin · Elena V. Shabliy ·
Ekundayo Shittu
Editors
Renewable Energy
International Perspectives
on Sustainability
Editors
Dmitry Kurochkin Elena V. Shabliy
Harvard University Columbia University
Cambridge, MA, USA New York, NY, USA
Ekundayo Shittu
George Washington University
Washington, DC, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-14206-3 ISBN 978-3-030-14207-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14207-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932939
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Foreword
Is another world possible? This is the question more and more
humans are asking themselves in these days of what is now called the
Anthropocene, that is, an era where humans not solely because of their
numbers but because of their actions (those of some more than of others)
are weighing on the earth. Through their actions, humans risk to reach
a tipping point where new systems will come about and life on earth
as we have known it will be gravely endangered, if not threatened with
disappearance. We are approaching the end of an epoch that did not
begin, but was intensified, with the Industrial Revolution in the eight-
eenth century that thrived on programmatic domination of humans and
nature in concert with widespread colonial expansion. Industrial capital-
ism was made possible with new modes of producing and implementing
energy, that is, with technologies (such as the steam engine) based on the
burning of fossil fuels. With its beginnings in Europe and in the United
States, industrial capitalism rapidly spread through the world animated
by a promethean dream that made humans the conquerors of the earth.
Prolonged by ideas of growth and progress, this dream went together
with the expansion in space and linear time. Not just the United States
and Europe, but the Soviet Union as well, believed in human supremacy
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vi Foreword
and independence from the earth. In conjunctions with their governing
bodies, humans engaged in unbridled development, including the build-
ing of roads, dams, and the killing of flora and fauna in the name of pro-
gress. Humans were considered to be actors moving about against the
static background of the world.
In the decades following World War II, this idea reached its apogee
while at the same time it began running into a wall. In the 1950s and
1960s, scientists, anthropologists and other humanists took notice of
some of the dangers. In Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss
mourned the damage done to the Brazilian forests and its inhabitants
by development. In her acclaimed book, Silent Spring (1962), Rachel
Carson revealed how chemicals such as DDT killed birds. In Steps to an
Ecology of Mind (1972), combining science, anthropology, psychoanaly-
sis, by invoking how the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in one part of
the world could provoke a hurricane in another, Gregory Bateson pop-
ularized the idea of feedback loops. Similarly, after having sailed around
the world, Michel Serres committed himself to the study of cybernetics
and microbiology in order to renew what, in response to Rousseau, he
called a natural contract. Like Bateson, Serres argued that humans are
no longer thought to be independent, full historical subjects in control
but as material beings are linked to a world of open systems and feed-
back loops.
More and more, new materialists today see humans as part of a larger
circulation of matter. They continue to question the division between
species and even between human and non-human. Simultaneously,
there is a renewed interest today in the Cura tradition. The Roman
goddess, Cura, made the first human of humus. Humans are made of
earth—humus—from which they cannot quite escape. Cognate with
Cura, care is needed wherever humans deal with the world. Despite a
desire that counter-cultures awakened in the 1960s to return to the land
and to nature, it became quickly obvious that humans needed to look
at the world and its ecological problems in anticipation of conditions
that prevail today, including that is, large urban centers, global markets
and inventions in the area of the technosciences. It is up to humans
to address these issues with care, a term that since Roman times was
charged with ambivalence, as something that is pulling humans down
Foreword vii
and that, at the same time, is uplifting. With this double polarity of care
as both anxiety and potentiality, we can ask the question of the pos-
sibility of another world by way of a care of the possible. What kind of
catastrophes, some of which are already familiar—droughts, floods,
fires, hurricanes, receding glaciers, but also epidemics, just to mention a
few—are the result of global warming or climate change? But also, what
kind of possibles can be realized with care? Technological advances allow
humans to measure and even predict changes. Sensors enable them to
feed forward rather than feeding back. However, we can also speculate
with our imagination and hopefully realize some potentialities by apply-
ing another care of the possible. What other worlds are there? What
is possible? What kind of human capacitations would ensure that the
nine billions of humans projected to be eleven billions by the end of
the twenty-first century can lead a decent life? For Isabelle Stengers, a
scientist turned philosopher, care of the possible is a pragmatism. It is
a way of not developing grandiose theories but of continually invent-
ing, be it in small steps, another way of being, another ethos, in a world
that would begin with the importance of a cosmopolitics. The way we
think of the world, of the cosmos is always already political. A politics
of subject and object that subtended the actions of humans during the
Industrial Revolution is now being replaced by one of entanglements.
With such a different vision, we have to develop other ideas of care.
With achievements in the techno-sciences, we are in the midst of
what some like Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic
Forum, believe to be the fourth Industrial Revolution, that is one with
artificial intelligence and technologies that will enable us to live in a
very different way. Pundits think that many of these technologies are on
the threshold of being adopted broadly. New technologies (such robots,
driverless cars, AI, 3D printing and the like) are nearing what Schwab
calls a tipping point. He and other CEOs ask a two-pronged question:
how will novelty and innovation affect humans and the environment?
For humans, it is a question of “jobs.” For the environment, one of
“sustainability.”
However, the question of sustainability should be asked not as an
afterthought but as the main question that includes people and the
environment. Sustainability is one of the answer to “is another world
viii Foreword
possible.” Fossil fuels still animate global production. Jussi Parikka and
others have shown how the gadgets we use (iphones, computers, etc.)
are largely dependent on electricity, hence fossil fuels. Extraction of fos-
sil fuels from the core of the earth and carbon emissions into its atmos-
phere have recently reached an all-time high. Resistance to the use of
fossil fuels is often equated with a resistance to market-capitalism. Yet,
as philosopher Felix Guattari has shown, markets are many and of dif-
ferent orientation and facture. Ecological markets are developing rap-
idly, helped by private citizens and by companies. With our current
understanding of the world as an entangled web, to enable humans to
live well, that is, to lead decent lives, other ways of producing and con-
serving energy must be achieved through new and different markets. To
enjoy the fourth Industrial Revolution, we have to care so as to make
the world sustainable.
To arrive at this condition, the first step is to replace fossil fuels
with what we now call alternative energies that we see where wind tur-
bines are sprouting on hilltops and fields and where solar panels cover
expanses of arid soil. Other alternatives will undoubtedly become pos-
sible in the centuries ahead. Yet, there has to be a common desire to
change our ways, to adopt a different ethos in the name both of indi-
vidual citizens and of communities, of countries and continents. It is up
to humans to think of their fragility on this earth and to act at the same
time, both as citizens and through their representative delegates, that is,
through their institutions and governments. To construct an earth or
better yet, a planet in common, humans have to situate themselves and
relate to one another not in a deadly dialectic but in ongoing negotia-
tion. To live sustainably as citizens, to buy from sustainable markets, to
elect governments that believe in sustainability is to care for our lives,
those of others and of generations to come. To live sustainably is also
a way of not forgetting other forms of life that have had to suffer from
our heroic and futile dreams of mastery. With our computer-assisted
subjectivities and our increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, we
cannot simply accept to live in an impoverished world. A starting point,
for making another world possible, is the curbing of fossil fuels and car-
bon emissions to make sustainability a central project, if not the dream
Foreword ix
of our lives. We could thus insure the flourishing of humans as well as
of fauna and flora. To look at governing bodies and institutions that
deploy care to make another world possible—such is what the chapters
in this timely book convincingly and productively set out to do.
Cambridge, MA, USA Verena Andermatt Conley
Department of Comparative Literature
Harvard University
Verena Andermatt Conley teaches in Comparative Literature and Romance
Languages and Literature at Harvard University. Recent publications include
Spatial Ecologies (Liverpool) and, with Irving Goh, Nancy Now (Polity). She is
currently working on the politics of care in relation to ecology and technology
as well as on the transformations of a colonial garden in Algiers.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the faculty at Moscow State University, Harvard
Business School, Harvard Divinity School, Tulane Energy Institute,
Columbia University, and the National Research University Higher
School of Economics.
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