Solar Simulations in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism

In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalistic community-based organizations and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Many in both camps envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. Importantly, digital media and screen-based platforms shape this shared political imaginary. While solar technologies require mining, manufacturing, and physical labor, many clean energy advocates solely experience solar in the 2D world of the cloud—overlooking the racialized extraction and exploitation that bring solar into being. This simulation of sustainability blurs the ideological boundaries between radical climate justice principles and pro-corporate politics, diluting the political poles that separate white-collar experts from grassroots agitators. Drawing from ethnographic research on solar energy corporations and local “energy democracy” campaigns in New York City, I argue that the material properties of solar infrastructure—it’s shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and quantifiable currents—interact with our virtual and visual media—PowerPoint, Google Earth, and spreadsheets—in ways that generate the common yet contradictory sense that solar is capable of paradoxically undoing the very extractive, exploitative structures of power that it relies upon. As a corrective to this virtual world, I call for a just transition that centers the senses and sensibilities neglected by screenwork: haptic care for one’s local environment, the full-bodied feel of infrastructural labor, and the sublime affect of the nonhuman world.