Alexander Dunlap reviews the last year-and-a half of fieldwork exploring the life cycle of solar panels in the United States. In agreement with Jean-Baptiste Fressoz latest book— More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy—Dunlap argues that the situation is even more concerning and that not only does the concept of “energy transition” need to be discarded but so do its partner terms: “renewable energy” and “sustainable development.” As it currently stands, these concepts are manipulative, misleading and preventing adequate socioecological action. With Fressoz’s book in mind, this point will be advanced by exploring solar panel development across five sites: Mining, manufacturing, operation and recycling, which includes general electronic waste recycling in a US Federal Prison. While Dunlap is an advocate of lower-carbon technologies, such as wind, solar and micro-hydroelectric energy extraction, this presentation shows how painfully disconnected the political debates and terminology are from the reality of solar, but also industrial production of lower-carbon technologies and the onset of socioecological crisis itself.

About the speaker

Alexander Dunlap is a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston University Institute for Global (IGS), USA, and Docent at the Global Development Studies Department, University of Helsinki, Finland. Their work has critically examined police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development and extractive projects more generally in Latin America, Europe and the United States. They are an editor at Human Geography and co-manage the section "Energy Geography and the Political Ecology of Place" in Energy Research & Social Science. They have written numerous books, most recently This System is Killing Us: Land Grabbing, the Green Economy & Ecological Conflict (Pluto Press & in Spanish Bajo Tierra Ediciones) and the co-edited volume The Prospects of a Pluriversal Transition to a Post-Capitalist, Post-Carbon Future (Routledge).