On the Grid: Climate Change and the Utopia of Green Energy

What kind of future would the utopian idea of unlimited green energy bring about? On the Grid, based on Michael Warner's Berkeley Tanner Lectures, raises critical questions about the sharp turn in environmental thought which addresses climate change through the form of a new power grid, driven by renewable energy and the goal to "electrify everything." Environmental thought increasingly centers infrastructure, particularly the goal of a decarbonized electrical grid. The aim is unlimited energy use, but without greenhouse gas emissions. Warner asks: What kind of consumer is imagined when climate action takes the form of a green grid? How will that change actions around environmental ethics and politics, for example the mantra "reduce, re-use, recycle"? What other features of the environmentalist tradition now need revision?

Will carbon emissions be taken care of silently so individuals will only be asked to use more power? By what process --and with what kind of agency-- is the environmental future being built around and within us? On the Grid seeks to generate such questionings in part by reviewing the cultural and political history that has made grid infrastructure a central but usually unrecognized dimension of government, as well as a structuring framework of the modern. Warner then traces a parallel history of various kinds of resistance to the grid, from Thoreau to present, including a countercultural tradition that was formative for much of the environmental movement. Is the green grid a case of "improved means to unimproved ends"? With contributions by Dale Jamieson, Jedediah Britton-Purdy, and Anahid Nersessian, and an introduction by volume editor Michael Lucey, On the Grid starts a conversation about how the environmental tradition can better adapt to the current politics of grid reform.

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, and taught at Northwestern and Rutgers before going to Yale, where he served as chair of the Department of English. His books include Publics and Counterpublics (2002); The Trouble with Normal (1999); and The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (1990). With Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, he edited Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010). He is also the editor of The Portable Walt Whitman (2003); American Sermons (1999); The English Literatures of America (with Myra Jehlen. 1996); and Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993).

Michael Lucey is Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California Berkeley. He is the author of What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk (2022). He has edited or co-edited special issues of Paragraph ("Approaching Proust in 2022") and Representations ("Language-in-Use and the Literary Artifact"). Earlier books include Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert (2019), Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (2006), and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (2003). He is also a translator.