Building a New World: Carbon Memories in creating Green Energy Markets

• In Event: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This paper considers how carbon memories are replicated in forming green energy markets and climate change ideologies. “Carbon memories” derives from Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy and Piere Nora’s Between History and Memory, a term here signifying the memory of carbon cultures or the cultural memory of carbon-producing energies.

Expanding from econometric studies, which often view energy investments as simple means to an economic end, this work considers energy markets as a networked system of social relations that inform culture. Green energy market speculation and formation are therefore regarded as places of clashing human interests that both inform, and are shaped by, carbon memory.

Applying these concepts to cross-cultural case studies conducted in Texas and France, this paper discusses oral histories of residents in the Cross Timbers involved in legal battles with European green energy companies that own and operate renewable energy sites in the region. The lawsuits have been raised due to improper land use, over-extending land leases, land damage, and a rise in violence in the region.

By contextualizing these stories alongside regional case studies in the United States and Europe, which have long histories of extraction, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism inherent to the energy industry, this paper examines the inseparable connection between sites of green energy and the production and reproduction of carbon memory.

The paper therefore questions the colonial implications of “building a new world” in the creation of green energy markets when new systems of green energy have the potential to reproduce the cultures and economies that produced past injustice.

Author

• Stephanie Childress, University of Texas at Austin