In this episode, you’ll hear from Allan Stoekl, Sarah Marie Wiebe, Casey Williams, and Imre Szeman about the political structures that constrain the collective agency required to combat climate change. It’s hard to summarize this expansive discussion, but it can maybe be captured best by three words: pleasure, solidarity and sacrifice—words that contain entire worlds.   

Allan Stoekl is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Penn State. He’s written extensively on 20th and 21st century French and European intellectual history, and more recently on questions of energy use and sustainability. Sarah Marie Wiebe is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on environmental justice, public engagement and community-engaged research. Drawing upon her lived-experience, she is currently writing a manuscript entitled Hot Mess: Becoming a Mother during a Code Red Climate Emergency. Casey Williams recently graduated from Duke University's doctoral Literature Program. His research looks at how fossil-fueled modes of life and work have shaped political responses to climate change since the 1980s. And, finally, Imre Szeman, who moderates this discussion, is Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He conducts research in energy humanities, environmental studies, and social and political philosophy.   

Here they talk about how energy transition might not be as “pain-free” as petro-capitalists want to convince us it can be—with cleaner oil or carbon capture and storage paving the way to maintaining the status quo. That model of top-down climate leadership has clearly failed in many ways, where “decisions upstairs,” in Allan’s words, are thought to magically lead to far-reaching positive effects on the sovereign decisions of people on the ground.   

In the face of that established neoliberal model, they try to think through what will be required to build mass support for energy transition at multiple scales.