The After Oil 3 project has resulted in a new book, The Renewable Normal, which will be published on October 1, 2026 in the University of Nebraska Press’s Provocations series. The book was collectively-authored by more than 20 researchers from around the world, and edited by Caleb Wellum, Jennifer Wenzel, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Graeme Macdonald, Mark Simpsoon, and Imre Szeman.
The Renewable Normal confronts the aesthetic, affective, and political dimensions of the transition to renewable energy. Written by the After Oil Collective, the book examines how renewable energy is being marshaled to sustain existing systems of inequality and exploitation under a banner of techno-optimism and green growth. It introduces the concept of the “renewable normal” to describe a regime of energy transition that promises transformation but delivers continuity, repackaging fossil-fueled modernity in a low-carbon disguise. Over four chapters, the volume explores how this regime captures hopes for climate solutions while closing down the very possibilities it appears to open. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions or utopian blueprints, The Renewable Normal urges a disposition to readiness: recognizing openings in the present, embracing the unruly rhythms of renewable life, and struggling collectively for transformative change.
At stake is a call to think and act beyond the limits of the current regimes of renewability in support of justice, freedom, and the renewal of collective existence. Recognizing that climate crisis demands collective labor, The Renewable Normal aims to encourage new forms of inquiry in the challenges involved in energetic and social renewal as a genuinely transformative possibility.
Praise
“The energy transition is now inevitable, but the opportunities it offers for social justice are not. Exploding the myth that the transformation is merely technical and attending instead to its uncertainties, this stimulating book opens a radical path to the future.”—Timothy Mitchell, author of Carbon Democracy and The Alibi of Capital
“From its brilliant Beckettian beginning, through its acute analysis of the ‘fuckedness’ of our current transition, all the way to the rousing call to arms against normalized eco-capitalism, this book is a compulsively readable invitation to stop thinking about energy transition as a technical process, and to reimagine it as collective political revolt.”—Laleh Khalili, author of Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy
The After Oil Collective is a composite and collaborative assemblage, fluid in membership, that interrogates the social and cultural politics of energy use in the context of climate change and energy transition. Co-authors of The Renewable Normal include: Bob Johnson, Caleb Wellum, Cara Daggett, Casey A. Williams, Darin Barney, Dylan Calmes, Emily Eaton, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Graeme Macdonald, Hiroki Shin, Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, Mark Simpson, Oxana Timofeeva, Penélope Plaza Azuaje, Rhys Williams, Sarah Marie Wiebe, Scott Stoneman, Shane Gunster, Stacey Balkan, Swaralipi Nandi, Terra Schwerin Rowe, Thomas S. Davis, and Walter Gordon.
