Written by Caleb Wellum, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Graeme Macdonald, Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Mark Simpson for the After Oil Collective. The After Oil Collective is a composite and collaborative assemblage, fluid in membership, that interrogates the social and cultural politics of energy use in the context of climate change and energy transition.
The world is in crisis, one made up of many overlapping and compounding crises: war, climate catastrophe, rising authoritarianism, economic instability, rampant AI development. This compound crisis makes the present feel calamitous and the future appear imperiled. Yet it likewise seems depressingly normal, or at least normalized—a new normal, everywhere invoked by people when describing this dire conjuncture, that demands either compliant resilience or visionary refusal or (somehow) both at once.
This now commonplace invocation of the new normal emerges from an (unevenly) evolving social and political consensus that existent norms can no longer be sustained. But what exactly does this new normal entail? Is it merely a palliating way to buttress the status quo (no matter how undesirable) against other more threateningly radical possibilities? Or does the prospect of a new normal signal that, despite growing agreement that some aspects of the modern world—fossil fuel use, for example—cannot continue, other aspects—the lifeworlds built on the use of those fuels—most definitely can and must continue, albeit through greener means? Just how new is this new normal? Put differently: as a world increasingly powered by renewable energy begins to emerge, in what ways is the old normal itself being renewed?
Comparable questions about the politics and futures of energy have preoccupied the After Oil Collective since its inception more than a decade ago. Across three “After Oil Schools,” the Collective has explored and critiqued visions of a world after oil, testing narratives and pathways for an energy transition whose political, social, cultural, and ecological consequences could and should–but may not–be just. Its guiding premise is that energy transition involves not simply a technological substitution but instead a broader transformation of the material and political conditions of social life. The first School asked what a genuine transition away from fossil fuels would require. The second explored prospects for a fully solar society, examining solar power’s capacities to enable a just transition while addressing risks of the seizure and capture of renewable power by agents and entities antagonistic to radical forms of change. The third School confronted the emergence of renewable energy at a global scale.
This third School faced a different analytic challenge than the first two: how to comprehend the meaning and significance of a transition to renewable energy that is already underway? Notwithstanding contemporary concerns about fossil fuel access and cost provoked by ongoing geopolitical conflicts, a renewable energy mix has emerged around the world, spreading at different rates in different places. Yet what are the politics of this transition? Who and what drives, supports, and benefits from it? What rhythms, textures, and aesthetic forms does it mobilize? What difference does it make? It seems to promise a new, improved, and more secure world—but one without disruption, friction, or diminution of the lifeways afforded by petroculture.
The Renewable Normal, the book emerging from this third School, critically assesses such promises. It identifies a retreat from the commitments associated with early notions of a just transition. The prevailing discourses around renewables seek to reassure us that there is nothing to fear from them. But this reassurance is grounded in a strange drive for continuity with the social relations and forms of the energy culture that renewables supposedly update, improve, and surpass. We call this mode of continuity the renewable normal.
Recognizing the renewable normal as a false promise and a missed opportunity to avert climate disaster might lead one to conclude, in colloquial terms, that “we’re fucked.” Fuckedness is our name for the affective experience and the political implications of this recognition. It involves a sense of political paralysis, disorientation, and betrayal at a future that feels foreclosed even as a transition is underway. But it’s different from more familiar modes of apocalypticism. To reckon with fuckedness, we argue, is to embrace a more sober and honest view of the limitations of actually-existing energy transition. It is to remain alert to more radical political openings. We call this state of alertness, essential for change to become possible, readiness.
At the heart of readiness is a desire to confront reality without illusions. But it also requires us to acknowledge the renewable normal’s shadowy and sinister twin, which has emerged with remarkable political force to haunt the prospect of energy transition today. We call this force the non-renewable reactionary, a populist energy politics that positions itself as a radical rejection of the tenets and practices of renewability. This reactionary force extends beyond the worldview of states and corporations. It is a deeply-felt political imaginary in which renewability jeopardizes the living standards and identities of working- and middle-class people facing increasingly precarious conditions. Its power and its threat lies in the way that the non-renewable reactionary mobilizes real fears and grievances into a vision and politics of renewal-through-extraction in the name of nationalism, security, and normality. To counter such reactionary forces, The Renewable Normal calls for renewable radicality, in which the defining features of renewable energy, especially intermittency and scale, are understood not as technical obstacles to overcome but instead as political conditions that require new forms of coordination, collective obligation, and democratic life.
The Renewable Normal closes by situating these questions within the contemporary geopolitics of energy transition. From renewed petro-nationalism in the United States to China’s strategic positioning across manufacturing, critical minerals, and energy infrastructures, the transition is unfolding through intensifying struggles over power, capital, and political order that threaten to entrench longstanding inequalities and create new ones. The challenge today is therefore not simply replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, but confronting the competing political projects that seek to shape the social world that renewability will make possible. What energies—material, political, social, cultural—might the work of this confrontation demand? And what such energies might it inspire and unleash?
