Political Ecology Group Seminar - Carlos Tornel

Political Ecology Group Seminar (ONLINE ONLY).

Title and speaker: Rendering renewable or the political ecology of "renewable energy” with Dr. Carlos Tornel (Global Tapestry of Alternatives), who will be joining us online from Mexico. 

Date and time: Tuesday, February 3rd, 1-2pm UK time, ONLINE ONLY (Teams meeting link below) 

Abstract: This talk reframes “renewable energy” through political ecology by treating energy and renewability not as neutral technical descriptors, but as historically produced categories tied to modern practices of measurement, commensuration, and control. Rather than assuming energy as a self-evident substance, how does it become thinkable and governable through notions such as work, efficiency, and quantification?—and how “renewables” inherit these abstractions while being presented as moral and technical solutions to multiple socioecological crises. From this perspective, renewability under capitalism is structurally contradictory: decarbonization tends to proceed additively, layering new infrastructures onto existing fossil systems, while remaining entangled with mining, heavy transport, concrete and steel, digitized logistics, and hydrocarbon-dependent production. Large-scale renewables thus operate as “fossil-fuel-plus” arrangements. The talk introduces the notion of “rendering renewable” to name the depoliticizing work that translates heterogeneous socioecological relations into standardized units—energy, carbon, efficiency—so they can circulate through state planning, finance, and corporate accumulation. The talk concludes by proposing “real renewability” as energy autonomy: collective capacity to decide what energy is for, how much is enough, and how to govern it through autogestión and territorial self-determination.

Microsoft Teams meeting

Link to join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/3922278055970?p=i58xh9CkGILbo3e8Z3

Meeting ID: 392 227 805 597 0

Passcode: Fh7PK2Yu

Please don’t hesitate to contact María Inés Hernández (mih33@cam.ac.uk) with any questions or requests you may have. If you would like to receive live updates from the Political Ecology Research Group, please get in touch with Inés to be added to the mailing list.