“I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.”

S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.

https://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/sylwiac/

www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33445
https://chbooks.com/Books/T/The-Eyelid
https://ciscm.fr/en/merveilleuse-utopie

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“I've been a climate activist since I was about 12 years old. It began with a deep passion for wildlife. I started taking up litter and telling off my schoolmates, eventually I set up a green council when I was about 13 or 14. As I learned more and more about the climate crisis and how sprawling and interconnected it was, not just with nature, but with the oppression that exists within human society, I started getting more involved and impassioned, getting involved in protests, marches. When I was about 15 years old, I helped shut down an airport for a night. I eventually started going to the UN climate talks. I went to Davos and it started to become my everything. I felt like I was doing something meaningful about the crisis, but also felt a sense of deep despair and loss, both from the perspective of the impending collapse of the biosphere and also a deep dislocation from the dominant culture and the consensus reality. I felt like no one else was feeling the sense of urgency and emergency that I felt. I started to get incredibly anxious. In 2019, when I was 27, I jumped off a six storey building. My memory has blacked it out, but I spent a month in a coma and woke up having lost both of my legs. The five years since have been one of not just physical and mental recovery, but also trying to untangle the messy web of causality as to how and why it was that I lost my mind in the way I did. I try to find some of the gifts in that madness, what it was pointing towards in terms of the unbalance of the ecosphere and how human civilization has begun to operate completely out of step with the ecosphere.”

Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.

https://charliehertzogyoung.me
https://footnotepress.com/books/spinning-out/

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“The fact is you've got a lot of industrial and political muscle now coming behind clean energy, especially from China, which is the leading country deploying wind energy, the leading country deploying solar, and the leading manufacturer and user of electric vehicles by miles. As one recent report put it, ‘We have petrostates in the world. China is the first electrostate.’ And China is on its way to becoming the world's most powerful country. So, where China leads, the rest of the world is almost certain to follow. Yes, there are massive air pollution problems in China, of course, but I think it's more than that. It's also about seeing that this is the future that the world is going to have. And if these goods are going to be made anywhere, well, the Chinese government clearly would like them to be made in China. And they've set out, you know, industrial policies and all kinds of other policies for, well, at least a decade now, in pursuit of that aim. It's interesting now to see other countries, India, for example, and the United States now sort of deploying muscle to try and carve out a slice of the pie themselves as well.”

The Five-pronged Clean Energy Future
“I thought about it, and I was wondering, what do we actually need in the world? Because we don't need petrol and we don't need coal. We need energy to power various things. So, we need these energy services. So, what's the simplest way of providing all of the energy services? And it really seems to me that we can basically do it all with about five different types of goods. So the system of the future I put out in the book is first of all, you have the generation of electricity, which is mainly going to be with renewables, mainly with wind and solar because they are the cheapest and they're getting cheaper thanks to Wright's Law. Then you need energy storage and other means of sharing matching demand to supply. So, storage is the one that people will be most familiar with, which can be batteries, for example. And again, the price of batteries has also plummeted about 85 percent price reduction in a decade. And it continues because, again, we have mounting volumes. In a competitive market, there's lots of innovation going on in terms of battery design, in terms of construction, and all of this stuff, new materials coming into batteries. So, that's your first two, that's your renewable generation and your battery storage. Electric vehicles will be the main method of transportation. Already, they dominate sales in the two-wheeler market in China and India. They're already eating into global oil demand. They're taking about 1.5 percent of global oil demand already, and the sales are increasing exponentially in China and other countries as well. They are cost-competitive. It's just on the purchase price in some markets with some models now. And it's going to get cheaper again because battery costs will fall. Heating and cooling, which is a big demand for energy. We can use heat pumps, which are super efficient running on electricity…Hydrogen, that will probably be the fifth prong, but a smaller prong, rather like the little finger on your hand."

Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service and BBC News, before setting up the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the Director of Policy and Strategy at the global clean energy think tank Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy. He is the author of The Future of Energy; Denied:The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.

https://mhpbooks.com/books/the-future-of-energy
https://ember-climate.org/about/people/richard-black
https://ember-climate.org
www.therealpress.co.uk/?s=Richard+black

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