Catastatic!
“the Catastasis, or Counterturn, which destroys that expectation, imbroyles the action in new difficulties, and leaves you far distant from that hope in which it found you, as you may have observ'd in a violent stream resisted by a narrow passage; it runs round to an eddy, and carries back the waters with more swiftness then it brought them on”
– John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668)
The problem with catastrophe in talking about today’s energy crises is that we’re not there yet. It’s too soon for catastrophe.
Catastrophe is the final phase of classical dramatic form, the resolution of the plot, the downturn or collapse, the moment that generates pathos and transformation. In Aristotle’s Poetics, catastrophe is defined as the moment in a tragedy when the protagonist’s decisive flaw, their “error or frailty” is revealed. Aristotle advised that this revelation should inspire pity and fear in the audience rather than a sense of monstrous revulsion.
When Renaissance polymath Julius Caesar Scaliger reformulated Aristotelian poetics in the 1560s, he argued for the centrality of plot to poetics, identifying a basic plot structure in drama that more or less mirrors today’s Hollywood “three act” arc. But in Scaliger’s terms the formal phases of comic and tragic plots were protasis (the opening summary, the teaser as we might say today), epitasis (where the dramatic tension is set in motion), catastasis (where the activity and crux of the plot takes place), catastrophe (the resolution of the intrigue and an unanticipated return to calmness).
A century later, John Dryden (1668) called catastrophe “the unravelling of the plot: there you see all things settling again upon first foundations; and, the obstacles which hindered the design or action of the play once removed.” Dryden’s and Scaliger’s sense of catastrophe is in a way the return to normal, not at all what a language of crisis and emergency would have one believe.
Forgive this brief detour through poetics but my point is that it is wishful thinking to imagine we’ve achieved catastrophe today. If only! If the downturn were really upon us then the flaws, lessons and transformations would be clear. The dramatic phase we find ourselves mired in is instead catastasis, the time of endless intensifying counterturns, the time of embroiled action and eddying waters. I want to ask what might happen if we reconsider our energy politics (energopolitics, as I like to say) as essentially catastatic rather than catastrophic.
Let me give you an example drawn from my adoptive home of Texas, which is itself a study in the energy contradictions that hound our moment. Texas is an energopolitical space like no other. It is known throughout the world as an epicenter of fossil fuels and the statistics back this up. In 2021, Texas produced 1.741 billion barrels of crude oil. The rest of the United States together produced 1.716 billion barrels. But at the same time Texas has the greatest installed capacity of wind power, the same as the next four largest states put together. And, also in 2021, Texas led the nation in terms of residential solar installations. This combination of fossil and renewable energy leadership makes little sense except in terms of the settler liberal ideology that is so deeply woven into Texan frontier nostalgia. In its Minecraft-like logic, the whole world is nothing more than a bundle of resources to be developed and transformed by humans as a matter of divine right and dispensation. Oil and gas are resources that should be extracted from the earth, no matter the environmental cost. But, likewise, the wind and the sun are resources to be harvested lest they lie fallow and go to waste. Texas’s considerable renewable energy achievements have rarely been driven by environmental, even conservation, concerns. Instead, they have been dictated by the settler liberal teleology of industrial, technological progress. And, more recently, by the falling price of renewable energy.
This is not to say that Texas lacks energy drama. Indeed, recently, the politics of electricity have become so feverish that it has threatened the underlying unity of settler liberalism. Besides Hawaii, Texas is the only state to possess its own electricity grid and that grid supports the largest retail electricity market in the United States at 426 million megawatts-hours, 70% more than California, which is #2. Yet, at the same time, Texas has a great deregulated electricity market created by state law that exposes its population to enormous precarity. Everywhere costs are cut in the interests of competitive market advantage. Production and transmission facilities are not properly weatherized. The grid manager, ERCOT, operates with the lowest reserve margins of any system operator. Meanwhile, demand growth has been rising not only because of growing population but because of industrial development. And, most concerningly, Texas’s open arms approach to crypto mining threatens to add nearly a third more demand to a teetering grid over the next four years.
The ERCOT grid came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of emergency shutdown in February 2021 in an event that is locally known as “The Texas Freeze.” Winter storm Uri plunged temperatures statewide, spiking demand for electric heating at the same time that the grid experienced unexpectedly severe production losses across every type of energy supply, a shortfall of 46 Gigawatts, “the largest shortfall of energy supply in modern US history” according to one expert. Emergency load shedding deprived 2.8 million Texans of electricity (many of them also lost heat and water in the event) for several days as wintry temperatures endured. At least 246 people died as a result of lost power, most from hypothermia.
Almost immediately, catastatic politics surged. Despite the fact that frozen pipes and wells at Texas’s many unwinterized natural gas facilities were the main culprit for bringing the ERCOT grid to the verge of collapse, Texas governor Greg Abbott famously went on Fox News while millions remained without power to complain about renewable energy, citing especially frozen wind turbines, somehow blaming the near grid failure on a Green New Deal whose policies don’t exist in Texas. The finger pointing and angry rhetoric continued for many months after the power came back on. The only body with the actual capacity to rebalance the state’s electropolitics—the Texas legislature—were the most theatrical at all, performing an excruciating series of public hearings that excoriated largely powerless utility functionaries while deflecting responsibility from derelict legislators. In the end, after weeks of drama, in the end only minimal legislative progress was made in terms of improving the reliability of the grid, a combination of consumer protections against price gouging with a voluntary scheme for winterization. Meanwhile, ERCOT’s reserve margins remain concerningly low even as demand for electricity continues to expand. In 2022 there have been several days in which ERCOT has been forced to request emergency conservation from its customers to avoid blackouts.
Tragic flaws were certainly accentuated during and after the Texas Freeze: namely, 1) the desperate clinging to fossil fuels as the backbone of the Texan economy despite its proven capacity to become a leader in energy transition. And, 2) the ongoing acceptance of settler liberal fantasies of the market as the only morally positive sphere of sociality beyond the heteronormative patriarchal (Christian, needless to say) family.
Still, the downturn has not come. No one is claiming that lessons have been learned. The energopolitical course remains steady, pointed toward more dramatic counterturns in the future. Each successive disaster will provide new plot points. Were the Texas grid to actually collapse, which seems today more than an abstract possibility, ERCOT would have to initiate what is known as a Black Start, an agonizing, months long seesawing process of restoring the grid megawatt by megawatt. Black Start seems to me a fitting catastrophe to bring the centuries long drama of high carbon liberalism to a close. Until then, catastasis—with emphasis on “stasis”—will endure, energopolitics as usual, intensifying with each new conflict, generating more anxiety and tension with each counterturn.
Although I know this dispatch is writing against catastrophe, I want to end with an acknowledgment of catastrophe’s alluring narrative power. We are drawn toward catastrophe, to be sure, we want the release it promises. No less talented a storyteller than J.R.R. Tolkien (1966) saw the dramatic necessity of catastrophe. Yet he distinguished two modes: dyscatastrophe, a state of sorrow and failure, and eucatastrophe, “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Dyscatastrophe reflects a narrative acceptance of the tragedy of human mortality and insignificance. Eucatastrophe nevertheless snatches a moment of Joy from the existential jaws of defeat. As one might expect of Tolkien, his take on catastrophe is deeply Christian, a miracle of redemption and sacrifice rewarded.
Yet neither the deeper history of catastrophe nor its future are Christian and what that history and future promises is less redemption than de-intensification. Our reward for accomplishing energy transition will not be salvation but rather the Joy of not having to fight constantly with billionaire oilmen and their legions of bad faith character actors. There are so many other better dramas that require our time and attention. That is the eucatastrophe toward which we are wriggling, the end of energopolitics, at least this catastatic phase of it.
References
Dryden, John. 1668. An Essay of Dramatick Poesie. London: Henry Herringman.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 1966. “On Fairy-Stories” in The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine.