On the Grid: Climate Change and the Utopia of Green Energy [Hardcover]

What kind of future would the utopian idea of unlimited green energy bring?On the Grid, based on Michael Warner's Berkeley Tanner Lectures, encourages us to question the sharp turn in environmental thought which addresses climate change through the form of a new power grid, driven by renewable energy and the goal to electrify everything. Will carbon emissions be taken care of silently so individuals will only be asked to use more power? By what process --and with what kind of agency-- is the environmental future being built around and within us?On the Grid, part of the Berkeley Tanner Lectures series, starts a conversation about how the environmental tradition can better adapt to the current politics of grid reform.What kind of future would the utopian idea of unlimited green energy bring about?On the Grid, based on Michael Warner's Berkeley Tanner Lectures, raises critical questions about the sharp turn in environmental thought which addresses climate change through the form of a new power grid, driven by renewable energy and the goal to electrify everything. Environmental thought increasingly centers infrastructure, particularly the goal of a decarbonized electrical grid. The aim is unlimited energy use, but without greenhouse gas emissions. Warner asks: What kind of consumer is imagined when climate action takes the form of a green grid? How will that change actions around environmental ethics and politics, for example the mantra reduce, re-use, recycle ? What other features of the environmentalist tradition now need revision?Will carbon emissions be taken care of silently so individuals will only be asked to use more power? By what process --and with what kind of agency-- is the environmental future being built around and within us?On the Gridseeks to generate such questionings in part by reviewing the cultural and political history that has made grid infrastructure a central but usually unrecognized dimension of governmel)