Opening up energy: toward more coherent research into transitions

Is the phrase “a just transition to renewable energy” self-contradictory? That is, is the modern, abstract energy denoted in the phrase (and many others like it) inherently unjust and unrenewable? It might help social science energy research climb out of the rut in which it is currently stuck to take this perhaps surprising question seriously. It can open fruitful new avenues of inquiry to grasp abstract energy not as a universal, non-political resource shuttled here and there across an unchanging landscape – as is common today across the social sciences, state and international institutions and NGOs – but as an ongoing colonial process of reorganizing human and nonhuman territories into hierarchies favorable to capital accumulation. After all, it is only by repatterning entropy boundaries and flows that the abstract energy developed during the 19^th century is able to serve the digital and other industrial machines that are used to bring more workers under the compulsions of capital, accelerate turnover, appropriate feedstocks and contain resistance. For grasping this process, the thermodynamics that theorized abstract energy is one indispensable, well-grounded idiom. But it is not neutral. In any democratic discussion about energy futures, it needs to be made vulnerable to translation into other energy languages in which plural energies of the commons are not subordinated to the singular energy hegemonic today in official circles. A regime of mutual, multi-directional translations, when combined with historical inquiry, exposure to alternative experience and democratic struggle, is a promising methodology for scholarship about livable energy futures.