Energy is currently produced and consumed based on sexist, racist and classist power relations that favour the pursuit of private profits at the expense of the common good.
Extractivist oligopolies and corporatised politics have imposed humiliating austerity measures, privatisations of public services, and excessive and growing socio-economic inequality, displacement and dispossession, and environmental destruction. These processes drive skyrocketing levels of energy poverty and a worsening ecological crisis. The most exploited and discriminated people are hit the hardest: from women in low-income households, women of colour and women with disabilities, to transwomen, single mothers and undocumented women.
We need energy democracies and participatory politics in which a variety of ordinary women can influence tomorrow’s energy policies. Collective but diversified bottom-up power can ensure a new energy model is run by and services those who the current model exploits and discriminates against. But how do we get there? The growing call for the feminisation of politics – and energy politics for that matter – is about much more than merely increasing the representation of women in decision-making positions. We need to question the ways energy politics are shaped. We need to ask, energy for whom and energy for what?
An ecofeminist perspective on energy offers an important and underacknowledged framework for understanding what keeps us stuck in unsustainable energy cultures, as well as a paradigm for designing truly just energy systems.
In this episode of the State of power podcast, TNI researcher Lavinia Steinfort talks to Shannon Bell : professor of sociology, Cara Daggert : assistant professor in political science, and Christine Labaski, associate professor of women’s and gender studies in the field of Science Technology and society. They are all at virgina tech university in the United States, and are the co-authors of the brilliant article: Toward feminist energy systems: Why adding women and solar panels is not enough.They are also all members of the May apple energy transition collective.
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