Swinging for the fences in 2022

Mission statement - going big and going small at the same time. Also: want to join?

Dear people,

January came with two big deadlines, so I decided to wait a bit to hit play after the Christmas pause. But here we are again, so let’s roll tape number 2022!

As is tradition, let’s start off the year with some resolutions. Or at the least with some perspective.

I started this newsletter because I wanted insights from social science research to be a bigger part of the conversation about “the energy transition” and to allow anyone working on this transition to develop a deeper understanding of, well… the social life of energy.

That still sounds like a pretty good goal to me. In fact, since I began in 2019, sustainability and the energy transition have been catapulted into the mainstream (well, at least the bubble became bigger), due to extreme weather events and fossil fuel price fluctuations, and thanks to youth taking to the streets and scientists ringing the alarm. Many more people are now dealing with the questions that this newsletter tries to tackle.

At the same time, perhaps this newsletter hasn’t quite found the right format to reach this goal. What I’ve done for the most part is communicate relatively high-level insights and conclusions from research. That’s kind of what happens when you start to summarize. But most of you are already experts in this stuff in your own right! Judging by email accounts, I would say that about half of you are in academia, another third or so work in think tanks or advocacy organizations, while the remainder is a collection of policymakers, professionals and people here for personal interest. That means that you’re probably familiar with these high-level conclusions. The people who might find these insights revealing probably haven’t found their way to the newsletter and if they did… maybe its format was less than compelling: still too nerdy, too wordy.

Alright, so. How to get out of this pickle?

I’m not entirely sure, but here’s what I propose.

Take bigger swings

I want to tackle more questions of sustainability that we don’t have good answers to yet, where we don’t have our theory straight, where we’re still figuring things out, not just empirically, but even conceptually. Basically I want to present work that tries to answer the question: what could an actually sustainable society look like? We know that if we really were going stay below 1,5 degrees warming, we’d need radical changes that go beyond erecting turbines and laying out solar panels. What is a good way to do that? That question is a good opportunity to engage in some utopian thinking and try to work our way back from there. In the process, we might find we see the present in a new light and our Overton window has shifted. Think going beyond the GDP and how that might affect our energy use, but I might also consider perspectives that help us think about controversial technologies like carbon capture.

Window of possibility. Photo by Brian Ho.

Dive into the nitty-gritty

What happens when you give people the opportunity and the capacity to think about what they want to do with (clean) energy in their lives? What does it mean to empower them to then act on it? Energy democracy has come up quite a bit in this newsletter, but this is one of those domains where knowing the theory (and piously reaffirming its principles) is one thing, and quite another to put it into practice. High-level insights are not enough. And so I get the impressions that we’re all trying to invent the wheel on our own. That’s why I want to look out for inspiration for practical applications of principles of procedural justice and co-creation.

Request your assistance

These new directions also bring me personally into somewhat unchartered territory so I could really use your help! Please get in touch and tell me: what questions or topics or authors do you think deserve more attention, whether it’s in your professional field or in the public eye? What has you excited? (I’m particularly looking for nice ethnographic work. Nothing like ethnography to dive into the nitty-gritty of things, but also few things like ethnography to excite the imagination. So, if you’re one of those academics and you know about some great anthropology of energy, let me know about it!)

But there is still a bigger request I’d like to make.

Perhaps some of you believe in the ‘mission’ of the newsletter as well, and would it find it exciting to help me write it? If so, then please get in touch! Turning this into a team effort could have the following benefits: to bring it back to the weekly cadence I think it deserves; to enhance these newsletters with visualizations that allow your tired, overstimulated brains help latch onto messages more easily; and finally, perhaps more personally, create some to space to experiment with fictional narrative, to bring the social life of energy to… life.

If you do want to contribute but not commit, you can of course always also propose a one-off, if you think there is one particular finding or trend that deserves more attention.

With these newish year’s resolutions and with your help then, we could make it more engaging and provocative, better serve the professional community and make it accessible to wider crowd! 🤞😃

Alright, I hope you all started this year in good health and optimistic spirit. See you around the bend. Write to me.

Best,

Marten