Post-carbon: Imagining the Future to Unmake the Present

Energy systems are at the heart of initiatives to tackle climate change. In the preceding two decades we have come to know a lot about low-carbon technologies. However, to date their implementation has been largely in addition to, rather than instead of, fossil fuel infrastructures. Here, I therefore explore how we can 'unmake' fossil fuel infrastructures, and the social, economic, and political relations entangled in them. In particular I focus on the ways in which post-carbon futures for high-carbon regions are imagined and contested and the implications of this for achieving a 'just transition'. The project involves qualitative fieldwork in Scotland, Canada and the Netherlands.