The (Im)possible Energy Transition
Conversation with Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
![Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Coal Cart and the Tower [El carro de carbón y la torre], ca. 1911 / Copia póstuma, 2002, Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/large_landscape/public/Actividades/la_imposible_transicion_energetica.jpg.webp)
Held on 17 jun 2024
Inside the framework of the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme, science and environmental historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz reflects, alongside Adrián Almazán, the Seminar’s co-mobiliser, on global energy transformations in recent years and the need to adopt a critical perspective regarding models of ecological transition.
There is almost a total consensus on the need to phase out fossil fuels to halt climate change at the root, which requires energy transition investment that is capable of replacing these fuels with other sources of renewable, clean and decarbonised energy. Yet although ending CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions is clearly imperative, what happens if the idea of transition is in itself misleading? Is there any sense in thinking in terms of replacement when it comes to designing an energy strategy to tackle the current global eco-social crisis?
For Fressoz, the problem is that after two centuries of “energy transition” the world burns more petrol, gas and biomass than ever, and in his view a better idea would be to think in terms of energy symbiosis and addition rather than about transitions and replacements which, he asserts, have never materialised.
Inside the framework of
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Adrián Almazán co-mobilises the Critical Ecologies Seminar from Connective Tissue, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Programme.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a science, technology and environmental historian who is currently a researcher in the Historical Research Centre at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (CNRS). His work focuses on environmental history and the history of climate knowledge in the Anthropocene. He is the author of L’apocalypse joyeuse, Une histoire du risque technologique (Seuil, 2012), L’Événement anthropocène. La terre, l’histoire et nous (Seuil, 2013), Introduction à l’histoire environnementale (La Découverte, 2014), The Shock of the Anthropocene (with Christophe Bonneuil, Verso, 2015) and Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change (with Fabien Locher, Verso, 2024), among other works. His latest book is More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Penguin, 2024).
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How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
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Sven Lütticken
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The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter I
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This first chapter of the seminar, composed of three sessions, serves as an introduction to the fundamental issues of the research concerning theoretical, artistic, and activist engagements with the legal form. It includes three sessions dedicated respectively to: the legal form, through the work of French jurist, philosopher, and lawyer Bernard Edelman, with particular attention to his Marxist theory of photography (translated into German by Harun Farocki); the (legal) person, via contributions from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, academic, social justice activist, and writer Radha D’Souza, and visual artist Jonas Staal; and land, through the work of researcher Brenna Bhandar—specialist in the colonial foundations of modern law and the notion of property—and artist, filmmaker, and researcher Marwa Arsanios.
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