Ü/PS Energy and Politics in Speculative Fiction

In Berlin in 1995 the first of an annual series of UN summits seeking urgent resolution to the climate crisis was held: COP1. Global emissions of carbon that year reached a new peak of 23.46 gigatons, emphasising the immediate need for change. 28 years later that total has risen to 36.8. Our political apparatus, constituted by fossil capital and constrained by uncritical speculations of constant growth, is evidently insufficient for the task at hand. How this came to be, and how this may be changed, is the purview of this seminar: unpicking the connections between the energy sources that we use, the politics that we enact, and the speculative fictions that we imagine. Tracing currents of racism, fascism and chauvinism through the politics of oil—the very same stuff that has granted us democracy as we know it—this seminar employs speculative fiction to shed light on where we have been, where we are going, and where we could go, if only we modify our structures of power, both politically and energetically.