Please sign up to join us for the University of Bristol Centre for the Environmental Humanities annual lecture 'The Future of the Sun' with Professor Imre Szeman

2025 is when global fossil fuel use will finally begin to decrease, ending a period of energy history initiated in the eighteenth century which has traumatized the earth and its inhabitants.

What happens next?

“The Future of the Sun” assesses claims being made about the best approach to energy transition and the shape of the renewable world that lies just over the horizon. Nation-states and entrepreneurs are offering publics competing visions of energy and environmental futures, even as right-wing ideologues fight to ensure the future looks much like the past. Who should we believe can and will undertake climate action in the interest of all the planet’s inhabitants? Are each of these actors only in it for themselves? What do the gaps, limits, and problems in the plans of the powerful tell us about how to best approach energy transition, so that we get the environmentally just futures we want? This paper will look offer a look at some of the discursive struggles now being fought to establish (in the words of Bill Gates) “the dull, factually correct middle” in which our green futures are supposed to be lived out.

There will be a drinks reception after the talk.

Imre Szeman is inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto. From 2021-2022, he was the Climate Critic for the Green Party of Canada. He is co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, which explores the socio-cultural dimensions of energy use and its implications for energy transition and climate change, and the leader of the After Oil Collective. Szeman is author (most recently) of On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (2019) and co-editor of the Energized: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy (forthcoming 2023).