Darin Barney, Jesse Goldstein & Hannah Tollefson narrate anti-capitalist energy futures

Darin Barney is a professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He has written some really impactful work in communication studies, and received several awards for his academic work. He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group, the After Oil collective and Future Energy Systems at the University of Alberta, among other groups. Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a printmaker and has been a member of numerous art collectives, including Space 1026 in Philadelphia and more recently the Occuprint Collective. His current research focuses on the political economy of green technologies. Hannah Tollefson is a media and environmental studies scholar who works on questions of ecology, economy, and infrastructure. She studies how territory is technically mediated; the work of infrastructure in shaping relationships of place and scale; and the politics of energy transition. She is working on a project with Darin about contemporary efforts to develop oil sands bitumen for non-combustion uses and to devise formats for transporting bitumen in solid phase. Her work has appeared in a number of academic journals and anthologies. This conversation is focused on the reality that there is a surprising lack of friction between the fossiil fuel and the cleantech industries. Rather than posing a threat to the domination of everyday life by fossil fuels, we're seeing the ways in which compartmentalization of climate action and the diversification of portfolios is leading to a wholesale corporate capture of the future for energy, or, we should say, for fuels. In the case of Darin and Hannah's writing, their research has taken them into the boardrooms of companies that are vying for a place in the market for solid state bitumen products. With Jesse's work, there is a focus on how greenwashing as we know it has evolved into an ideology of only valuing innovation and imagination within narrow market terms, even when the innovation in question is devoted to cracking the climate crisis. In both instances, there is, in this critique of capitalist enclosure of clean energy or emergent forms of fuel, a sense that actually those that are involved in contemporary entrepreneurialism do want to have a positive social impact. The issue is that, as Jesse argues, the narrowing of innovation under capitalism means that these sorts of entrepreneurs are more or less obligated to concentrate their energy on doing well financially, rather than doing good socially or ecologically.