Cultures of Energy

On this academic application edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast we are thrilled (16:57) to welcome old friend Leah Stokes back to the program to talk about her new book, The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet (MIT Press, 2026). We start with the problematic paradigm of the carbon footprint and why it doesn't model carbon responsibility either accurately or effectively. Then Leah tells us about how she came to the decision to tell intimate personal stories of change interleaved with the micropolitics of climate policy. We turn from there to the details of how the Inflation Reducation Act, the most ambitious piece of climate legislation in US history, came into being and the many ways it nearly failed. From there we talk about the importance of activist movements in shaping policy, Obama's failure to advance meaningful climate legislation, the dumb logic of climate hushing, Trump as a giant advertisement for electrification and what the policy priorities of the next carbon wave ought to be (e.g., free electricity at peak generation hours). Leah's book tour info can be found here. Also check out her Substack, Notes from the Electric Era here: https://substack.com/@leahstokes/note/c-296784840 #StokedforStokes! Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Cymene offers an epic #CymRant against AI-gone-wild on this week's podcast. Then (17:07) we welcome Ting Hui Lau to the podcast to talk about her fascinating and moving new book, Decolonial Endurance, which focuses on how Lisu communities straddling Southwestern China and Myanmar maintain their Indigenous culture and sovereignty despite the developmental and ethnocolonial schemes targeting them. We start with why Ting thinks it's so important to put Critical Indigenous Studies and Asian Studies into deeper dialogue. What does survivance (survival + endurance) look like in authoritarian Asia as the Lisu struggle to maintain their lifeworlds and relational mode of production? We move from there to discussing how Lisu are haunted by certain afterlives of development (e.g., forced sterilization) while also refusing to capitulate to them. Then we turn to how examining settler colonialism within Asia complicates the story of European settler colonialism. We close talking about fieldwork and friendship. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Dominic and Cymene enjoy a confetti-free trip to Philadelphia on this special Labor Day edition of the podcast. To keep us company (12:24) we welcome Conor Harrison to the program to talk about his new book, Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System (U Minnesota Press, 2026).  We start by discussing the variety of finance industry players operating in the energy sector and how their goals are not all the same. We delve into the deep history of energy and finance and how things started to get pretty symbiotic starting in the 1990s. Turning to the present, Conor explains the incentives that utilities have to hold on to fossil fuel plants and how finance has managed the decline (or not) of coal generation. We get into the crypto and data center boom in electricity demand, why consumer prices are soaring, and finance's role in the rise and fall of ESG investing. Finally, Conor explains why he thinks a strong return to public power and investor-owned utilities would accelerate and improve the energy transition. Hug a worker today everyone. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Cymene recounts her visit to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and we wonder whether students can be convinced that academic writing will improve their social lives. Then (17:30) we sit down with the marvelous Helen Kapstein to talk about her new book Petroforms: Oil and the Shaping of Nigerian Aesthetics (West Virginia UP, 2025). We begin with how oil seeks to evade both the commodity form and aesthetic forms, and how petrocriticism might respond. What is the true nature of our "blind spot" concerning oil in the global North and how does living on the front lines of extractivism counteract such blindness? We talk about how petroforms shift across genres, highlighting petrofeminism and petrohorror as two particularly interesting genres to consider. We wrap talking about the problem of recovery from petroculture and the world after oil. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love! If you happen to be in Dresden this week for Petrocultures 2026 please drop by and say hello!

The Queen and King of Jetlag recount tales of airplane toilets, surprise geckos and AI abominations on this week's episode. Then (16:32) Billy Fleming saves the podcast by joining us to talk about his marvelous new book, Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026). We start with the legacy of the New Deal and how what actually happened in the infrastructural boom of the FDR years is often misremembered. We move from there to talking about the optimal and necessary scales at which building postcarbon futures must proceed and how to balance bottom-up and top-down models and actions. We talk about the fetishization of efficiency and economization logics, the need for designs that serve multiple purposes at once, and why we must make hard choices today about what kinds of industry belong to our planetary future. We close talking about the case studies in the book that may help to inspire more bold experiments in postcarbon future-making and Billy's new project on recarbonization and the importance of managed decline. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.
 
Book credit:
Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions. By Billy Fleming. Edited by Jennifer Sigler. Designed by Cristian Ordóñez. 480 pages. Published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Distributed by Columbia University Press.
How to order it:
CUP: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/building-postcarbon-futures/9781558444560/
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=978-1558444560
Amazon: https://a.co/d/0cH9KxsB
Other links discussed in the conversation:
Climate and Community Institute: https://climateandcommunity.org/
Living New Deal: https://livingnewdeal.org/
Cristian Ordonez (book designer): https://studio.cristianordonez.com/
Book Tour/Events (schedule is updated regularly): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gh6taC3BlR6EfoAjD-255rdCYwv7T78XUXcThPOUah0/edit?usp=sharing