Sofía Avila and Fulvia Ferri
Thursday 28th June, 15.00-17.00, ICTA-UAB
Renewable energies will play a central role in the post-carbon future. But how does this future look like and how do we get there? Until now, mainstream scientific efforts and political debates have focused on modeling and discussing the 100% renewables target, asserting that modern technologies and mega-infrastructures need to be built fast enough to satisfy present energy demands. This is based on the assumption that current patterns of production and consumption will remain the same or continue to increase in the coming decades. In a way, this depoliticized and technocratic perspective has found legitimacy under the urgency of avoiding catastrophic climate change. However, the “business as usual perspective” does not challenge the very structures that have created the problem in the first place, nor does it question the socio-environmental inequalities intrinsically associated to them.
This workshop aims at examining the issues/problems connected with the ever-expansive flows of energy and materials required to sustain a growth-oriented society, either based on fossil, nuclear and/or renewables. As such, we aim to shift the discussion from how renewables will enable a continuity on our current development trajectory to how renewables provide sufficient resources to shape and sustain more just and sustainable ways of living?
The workshop will unfold in two parts, where participants will be divided into smaller groups for discussion. First, we will explore the social and biophysical limits of renewable energy production. Groups will analyze different conflicts from the EJAtlas related with the current expansion of renewable energy infrastructures. Then, we will envision how transformative societal projects based on alternative energy systems, can foster environmental justice and wellbeing. Questions about scales, agents, energy uses, societal values and rural-urban dynamics will be addressed as a spectrum of issues which is required to co-construct a wider debate.