So a lot of what I study really focuses on how our systems are designed for a particular set of things that have come from the past, but also need to be wrangled to accommodate the things that we expect in the future. Similarly we have to think about how what we do now is going to create these tracks that will stay into the future for a very long time. One of the things that really stands out to me as we think about time is just how important past systems are for our daily life experiences. In my job, I think a lot about how current infrastructure really affects the way that our world works and how we might need to change it in order to fulfill new objectives that we have for the future. There is a good example of this happening right now in my personal life. I’m spending a lot of time lately remediating my very old house. I live in a house that was built in 1885 and still has quite a lot of lead paint around. So we’ve been replacing windows and trying to move toward things that honor the history of the house but are still energy efficient and make the house comfortable to live in. We’ve been needing to go through and remove lead paint, and thinking about how that activity is pulling from something that happened in the past. In this case, the paint itself might be 50 or 60 years old, maybe quite a bit older, but we’re doing it because we want the house to be safe to live in for a long time going forward and so we’re incorporating what we know about what safety looks like in ways that weren’t as clear back when the the original paint was put on. There’s a lot of opportunities to think carefully about how time really shows up in our lives. The other really neat thing about an artist’s view about time is that it encourages us to think about where these conver- sations appear in our lives. It’s not necessarily something where everything is completely analytical all the time. It’s not all about equations. It’s also about thinking about our position in time and our position across time, both in the sense that we inherit time and that we are the creators of an inheritance that people are going to experience in the period. Thinking about the generational impacts that what we do now can have on people and the planet going forward is part of the reason why I find this work focusing on transitions so important and worthwhile. For me, what that looks like is incorporating the past — what we have now, the energy system that we work with now, particularly the fossil infrastructure that’s been providing a lot of these energy services in the U.S. for the last 100 years and asking how do we take that legacy infrastructure and essentially move on into something that is going to become the future’s legacy infrastructure? And hopefully do that in a way that preserves our ability to have a safe environment and continue to thrive. One of the things that comes up a lot when I think about legacy infrastructure is the importance of past choices. When we think about where our transmission lines are or where our natural gas pipelines are, or the ways that we’ve decided that the system should function, a lot of that is based around the operational constraints and technologies that we’ve had in the past. As we start to try to incorporate new technologies, be they solar panels or heat pumps or other kinds of technologies that we think are better suited toward a more climate protective and more just future, we have to consider the ways that our metrics need to change while still accommodating the infrastructures that we have from the past. It becomes a really important and interesting technical challenge. As one example, historically we’ve tried to encourage electric vehicle owners to charge cars overnight when there’s less demand for electricity because we’ve had these very large coal-fired power plants, nuclear power plants, that are hard to turn on and off and so run overnight. As we move into a situation that’s more depen- dent on solar, for example, that’s only available when the sun is out, we will need to encourage people to shift those habits to charge their cars during the day. These adapta- tions are going to be an important element of making the whole system work. HUMAN TIME Transcript of Video Essay Emily Grubert ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SUSTAINABLE ENERGY POLICY UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME I trained as a civil engineer and an environmental sociolo- gist, and like many of you, I am a big fan of Tony Foster’s work. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the role of time as we think about the different kinds of work we do. I found this Journey particularly fascinating to think about — considering the different ways that time interacts with our lives and that we interact with time. In my work, I think a lot about transitions. Specifically, I focus on energy transitions, thinking about how you transform infrastructure that we use to provide energy services that keep us safe and happy and able to thrive into new kinds of infrastructure that are less damaging for the planet. I also think about how those transitions can be leveraged to really support human outcomes, justice in particular, and about the way that our infrastructure shapes the way that we interact with the world around us. One of the ways where time shows up so dramatically in this context is thinking about what we do now as it affects the future. Tony talks a bit about how when you find yourself in these large situations, it’s so easy and important to remember how insignificant our time on Earth can be related to a lot of these other big things. As someone who looks at fossil fuels and sometimes thinks about things in the context of, you know, hundreds of millions of years at times, that point is really important. At the same time, what’s so critical is that the kinds of things that we do now reflect and reverberate through time for a pretty long 100
