Climate, Power, and Possible Futures, from the Banks of the Humber Estuary

Nayan Kulkarni’s Blade, Lucy and Jorge Orta’s Raft of the Medusa, and Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen’s Quicksand were exhibited in Hull during its year as the 2017 UK City of Culture. These artworks provide the impetus for an article that moves between the local, national, and global, in order to connect visual culture, climate politics, and questions of citizenship and borders in a warming world. In the first section, I discuss how Blade—a wind turbine rotor blade repurposed as a public art installation—provides the opportunity to examine the role of large-scale renewable energy transition in addressing the deep regional economic inequalities in the UK. In the second section, I consider how artworks displayed as part of the ‘Somewhere Becoming Sea’ exhibition linked Hull’s recent history to a global context of displacement and precarity, in the wake of the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ within Europe and at its borders. In the final section, I seek to bring together a number of threads from the preceding discussion, in order to outline some alternative political horizons. I turn initially to Sean McAllister’s documentary A Northern Soul (2018) and its powerful examination of how personal debt, the toxic fuel of neoliberalism, forecloses the future. In opposition to a future of deepening inequality and climate breakdown, I trace a renewed politics of public ownership and expanded social welfare in the UK, and its place in a prospective global renewable energy transition. This is a hopeful vision, given the current political climate, I argue, but it is also an eminently feasible one.

Located on the Humber estuary on the east coast of Britain, Hull provides an ideal site for the manufacture of turbines for the numerous offshore arrays currently being assembled in the North Sea. These arrays supply energy to a British electricity grid still chiefly dependent on coal, gas, and nuclear energy. 2 The provision of these arrays is only the latest chapter in Hull's long manufacturing and seafaring history.
This history is recorded in the city's maritime museum, which overlooks the square where Kulkarni's Blade took up residence. The museum details Hull's role in the Hanseatic League, the whaling and shipping fleets of the nineteenth century, and the deep-sea trawler fleets of the twentieth.
Most of the docks had closed by the early 1980s, though, as the fishing industry declined due to the 'Cod Wars' with Iceland, European fishing quotas, and rising oil prices. No comparable employment base has emerged: unemployment levels remain among the highest in the UK and over a third of children in the city live in poverty. 3 Hull's bid to become the 2017 City of Culture drew on the city's long and proud cultural history. Yet it was also intimately connected to this difficult recent 2 For a real-time map of the UK's offshore wind energy production, see https://www.thecrownestate.
co.uk/en-gb/our-places/asset-map/. 3 'In relation to national averages', the preface to a recent public health report read, 'Hull has a higher unemployment rate, more poor housing, residents qualified to a lower level and higher levels of crime' (Hull City Council, 2017: 1).
White: Climate, Power, and Possible Futures, from the Banks of the Humber Estuary 4 economic and social history. Hull was, in the organiser's words, a city ' coming out of the shadows', with the City of Culture award ' a unique chance to shed its image as a declining and deprived port city and to build a new profile as a vibrant cultural city' (Culture, Place and Policy Institute, 2018: 6).
A celebration of the environmental and economic potential of renewable energy production, Blade captured a sense of the guarded optimism that has flowed through Hull in recent years, as a result both of the opening of the Siemens factory and the City of Culture award. Yet as I argue in the first section below, Kulkarni's installation also offers the opportunity to examine further the role of corporations like Siemens in a putative 'green capitalism'. I use 'green capitalism' throughout what follows to denote the form of capitalism that has developed under neoliberalism, in which the rhetoric of environmentalism and sustainability has been mobilised by Western governments in the service of an economic system in which 'the "needs" and "development" of corporate industry are privileged above all else' (Demos, 2016: 36). 4 Hull, I argue, provides a particularly good illustration of the limits of private-sector led renewable energy production.
In the second section, I turn to two artworks on display in Hull in the months after Blade had returned to the Siemens factory. Lucy and Jorge Orta's Raft of the Medusa (2013) and Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen's Quicksand (2017) connected Hull to geographically distant locations via the prospect of unruly, rising seas. Both works invoked the 'refugee crisis' in Europe that came to a head in the Mediterranean during the summer of 2015. In so doing, I argue, they also raised significant questions around the relationships between politics, displacement, and visual culture, in a world where the prospects for those fleeing conflict, the consequences of environmental degradation, economic hardship, or a combination of all three, are increasingly constrained.
In the third section, I continue to move between the local, national, and global, in order to outline an alternative social and political horizon to a world of deepening 4 Corporate Watch's A-Z of Green Capitalism provides a useful introduction to the ideas behind 'green capitalism' and its position as ' as a stage in the evolution of capitalism -or even perhaps a necessary step for its continuation ' (2016: 12). For a detailed critique of 'green Keynesianism' in particular, see chapter five, 'A Green Capitalism?' of Mann and Wainwright (2018).
White: Climate, Power, and Possible Futures, from the Banks of the Humber Estuary 5 inequality, hardening borders, and climate catastrophe. As Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright note in Climate Leviathan, 'We're fucked' has become a familiar refrain in 'political writing on climate change', a despondent cry in the face of continuing inaction and planetary systems spiralling out of control (2018: xi). But 'we're fucked' is not good enough, not least because those of us who dwell in the Global North largely still have the privilege of locating the most devastating effects of climate change at some point in the future, even if that date seems to be arriving ever sooner, looming ever larger on the horizon.
In addressing this challenge, I turn to a number of policies around renewable energy provision and public ownership recently announced by the Labour Party, as well as to the broader political and intellectual project that has coalesced around Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. 5 In so doing, I do not mean to imply that the prospect for global climate mitigation lies solely in Labour's electoral fortunes. Nevertheless, the increasingly condensed timeframe for meaningful action on CO 2 emissions dictates that any political project will have to start soon and will have to be interwoven with attempts to meet existing political challenges. In the UK, this especially means addressing the deep regional inequalities between North and South that have long characterised the economy.
The burgeoning field of the energy humanities provides a broader critical and theoretical framework for much of the following discussion. In the introduction to Energy Humanities: An Anthology, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer detail how fossil fuels have enabled the everyday freedoms and infrastructures, as well as the subjectivities and epistemologies, that those who dwell in the Global North equate with modernity. Energy, they argue, has played a ' critical', though hitherto underexamined role 'in shaping existing social infrastructures, lived and material infrastructures, and even cultural practices' (Szeman and Boyer, 2017: 3). Following from this, and as Szeman and Boyer make plain, renewable energy transition should 5 I follow Joe Kennedy's recent characterisation of Corbynism as a movement that unites a wide range of left-wing views and backgrounds, that provides a forum for disagreement and debate, and that is difficult to categorise definitively, but that has ' come about as various particular issues are linked together through the figure of Corbyn, whose real success has been in producing a sense of common interest ' (2018: 225).
White: Climate, Power, and Possible Futures, from the Banks of the Humber Estuary 6 not be thought of simply as a technical question of substituting one fuel input for another (2017: 3). Instead, it presents both the challenge and the opportunity to fundamentally rethink the way our politics and societies (and especially our cities) are organised, our relationship to work and free time, and the myriad ' cultural practices' through which we imagine the future. By examining Hull's recent history, and its possible future, I consider in this article how energy imaginaries are also economic, social, and cultural imaginaries.

Energy futures
I visited Blade in March 2017, on the last day of its residency in the city centre.
It was an overcast afternoon, but even under a low, grey sky, Blade was a remarkable spectacle (Figure 4). The turbine blades produced at the Siemens factory are cast by hand as a single piece of glass fibre-reinforced resin and balsa wood. The matte finish of the blade produced a peculiar optical illusion: even viewing the installation in person, it looked somehow superimposed or computer generated. Blade is an eye-catching synecdoche for the potential role of renewable energy manufacturing in the regeneration of communities that underwent rapid deindustrialisation in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Its symbolism seems Blade also intimates a broader transition from fossil to renewable energy in the long term, a welcome vision of the future in a low-lying, flood-prone city like Hull (around 90% of the city lies below the high-tide line). There is an appealing symmetry in the knowledge that a dock once used to export coal is now home to wind energy production. The return of social prosperity and civic pride in the city are closely connected to the ethical cache of renewable energy-the huge arrays located miles out to sea are good not only for the regional and national economy, but also for the planet.
This vision of urban renewal and economic growth-and of art neatly incorporated into a straightforward account of recovery-is clearly only part of the story, though. Blade's temporary presence in the city centre demands a more detailed account of how the word 'power' 'fluidly refers to energy systems and sociopolitical systems alike, which constitute nonidentical but overlapping circuits of efficacy and resistance' (Campana, 2017: 61 In practice, neoliberalism entails not simply the rolling back of the state, as some accounts suggest and as neoliberal theory itself claims, but rather an alignment of state and corporate interests, through which the 'boundary between state and corporate power' becomes 'more and more porous' (Harvey, 2005: 77-8).
In her research on the development of an offshore wind power array in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Oaxaca, Mexico), Cymene Howe writes of how the project is 'steeped in neoliberal development logics, persuading government agencies and functionaries to align with the profit seeking interests of renewable energy corporations ' (2014: 384-5). The politics of renewable energy differ from place to place, of course, but Howe's comments capture a general principle that bears repeating: though they are often framed as an unalloyed good, there is nothing inherently emancipatory in renewable energy technologies. The form renewable energy projects take, their control and management, and their place within a broader political economy demand ongoing attention and critique.
In the UK, the privatisation of public utilities and services instigated by the Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher and continued by Tony Blair's New Labour after 1997 provides the conditions for current renewable energy manufacturing and provision. The neoliberal orthodoxies of privatisation and outsourcing have been forced onto the populations of states across the world, of course, but few countries have implemented these policies with as much fervour, or as little foresight, as the UK. In the 1980s, the UK's communications, gas, and water networks, as well as its ports and airports were sold off, followed by the railways in the 90s and, since then, the Royal Mail and elements of the National Health Service. The UK's energy board, White: Climate, Power, and Possible Futures, from the Banks of the Humber Estuary 9 regional suppliers, and infrastructure-grids, cables, and transformers, as well as its existing power stations-were split and sold to the highest bidders in the 1990s.
EDF Energy, majority-owned by the French state, began buying parts of the network in 1998. EDF now owns all the UK's nuclear reactors and many of its coal-and gaspowered stations. British electricity was in large part renationalised, but by the government of France (Meek, 2014: 218).
Renewable energy provision has followed a similar path. The UK's renewable energy network, particularly its offshore wind provision, is growing rapidly, but it remains an opaque and undemocratic mix of state-sized corporations like Siemens and majority state-owned energy companies like Ørsted (formerly DONG Energy) and Equinor (formerly Statoil). Both Ørsted and Equinor are public limited companies; the former is majority-owned by the Danish state, the latter by the Norwegian state. All receive significant financial support and are often unwilling to invest without profitability guarantees, tax breaks, or other effective public subsidies. In this context, we can think of Blade as what T. J. Demos calls a 'selective abstraction' (2016: 52). Siemens's property temporarily became public sculpture, but this transformation raises the question of the extent to which 'green' has simply become another of the strategies that ' capitalism has generated to sustain its own development and to safeguard its hegemony' in an age of impending climate catastrophe (Nardizzi, 2013: 148).
Kulkarni's own ambivalent comments on Blade and the long-term prospect of a meaningful energy transition are instructive here. In another interview shortly after the installation was revealed, Kulkarni reflected on how wind turbines: Are a necessary stopgap between the transformations in global relationships to new sources of energy and energy usage. However, like many technological teleologys [sic], we (the global rich) end up not having to make significant cultural and geo-political decisions for twenty years, as these decisions do not yet satisfy our hunger for energy -they just satiate it. Indeed, they defer more complex choices to the future. […] They are an emblem of the future, the defining form of the twenty-first century and symbolise a particular idea of the future. Indeed, they seem like a hopeful future and because of this, European energy politics becomes centred on them. Yet wind turbines cannot solve long term issues on their own, they are more palliative. (3 rd Dimension, 2017: n.p.) The deferral of complex, long-term decisions around energy provision and consumption is encapsulated in one element of the Greenport Hull plan that has not been widely publicised: the Siemens factory is intended to operate only for around thirty years, at which point, according to the plans originally filed by the company and Associated British Ports, it will be dismantled and the land will 'revert to general port use' (Wilson, 2011: 8).
This timescale-clearly aligned with the kind of profit seeking described by Howe, rather than a longer-term vision of energy transition for the public good-is a short one in comparison to the surrounding fossil fuel infrastructure in the area. Recent studies paint a troubling picture. A 2016 International Energy Agency (IEA) study on global energy consumption found that while the amount of energy generated from renewable sources has increased enormously since 1971 (the study's comparison point), its total share in the world energy supply had grown only marginally. In 1971, 86% of energy consumed worldwide was from fossil fuels; in 2014, this figure was still 82% (IEA, 2016: 10). As the IEA figures make plain, under capitalism ('green' or otherwise) the energy generated by renewable means does not replace the equivalent amount of fossil energy in the global grid.
Instead, capitalism's voracious appetite for profit and expanded markets puts the additional energy generated from renewable sources to new uses; relying solely on the logic of supply and demand to transition away from fossil fuels is 'foolhardy' at best (Malm, 2016: 381-2). Predictably, attempts at political intervention along these lines-tinkering at the edges of the economic system-have proven ineffective.
The repeated, occasionally spectacular, failure of regressive carbon taxes (particularly in the form of fuel taxes) and ' cap-and-trade' schemes (where corporations receive an emissions budget, but can trade their allowance) to halt the yearly increase in CO 2 emissions expose the broader paradox at the heart of a putative 'green capitalism:' an uncritical obedience to the doctrine of market forces and competition are being entrusted to remedy the problems that they are responsible for creating.
Siemens provided a good example of the barriers to large-scale energy transition under capitalism when it scrapped its solar energy division in 2012, citing its declining profitability as technological and manufacturing developments made solar energy production cheaper. It is not alone in this regard. In 2006, Shell paid the German start-up Solar World to take over its solar division. Two years later, Shell also withdrew from the London Array offshore wind power project. BP gradually closed its solar panel factories before withdrawing from the renewables field completely in 2013.
These decisions direct us toward one of the central 'problems' of renewable energy production and generation under capitalism: during periods of peak production, when the grid is already at capacity, any additional energy generated will be surplus to requirements. That is, the power of the sun, wind, and waves is often too plentiful to be profitable, and rates of investment fall accordingly. As Andreas Malm concludes, the 'realisation of the potential of solar and wind on the basis of capitalist property relations' quickly becomes a 'self-undermining, involuting enterprise' (2016: 372).
Between 2011 and 2013, a period which marked the height of the neoliberal re-entrenchment after the financial crisis of 2008, investment in renewable energy fell by over 20% globally and by over 40% in Europe (Malm, 2016: 371).
In the UK, investment in renewable energy fell by a further 56% between 2016 and 2017, amid continuing indecision on the part of the current government as to their long-term renewables strategy (Vaughan, 2018a). The last two decades have also shown that the counterpart to 'green' technologies like the new generation of wind turbines produced in Hull is the continued investment in and expansion of fossil fuel extraction. The fracking of shale gas has further expanded the domain of energy companies. In England, the recent decision to effectively remove control over fracking applications from local authorities potentially signals a new era for the industry. In the first three months of 2018, local councils blocked seven out of eight planning applications for wells, often as a result of overwhelming public opposition and protest; the new rules enable central government to bypass councils to greenlight drilling (Vaughan, 2018b). The area around Hull has been designated as open for exploratory drilling and extraction. The West Newton B Wellsite, perhaps the first of many shale gas drilling sites in the area, lies north-east of the city, just a few miles inland from the coast. The counterpart to the wind power arrays taking shape on the horizon, far out at sea, is the construction of new components of fossil capital infrastructure much closer to home.

Dangerous waters
Hull City Council's vision of becoming the UK's 'Energy City' has largely failed to materialise, due in significant part to supply-chain companies not following Siemens to the banks of the Humber. Many of the components for the Siemens turbines are still shipped in from elsewhere and then assembled. The result of the EU referendum of June 2016 is one clear factor in the stalling of the Council's ambitious plans. Siemens had initially planned to expand its factory in the city in order to export turbines to other countries in Europe, but these plans were quickly put on hold in the wake of what Tom Hazeldine calls the 'revolt of the rustbelt' (2017: 51). 67% of the electorate in Hull voted to leave the European Union, a pattern repeated across many of the former industrial heartlands of the North, the Midlands, and South Wales. All had suffered long periods of unemployment, lack of opportunity, and declining living standards, intensified since 2010 by the austerity policies imposed by successive Conservative and coalition governments. As Hazeldine emphasises, this wasn't the only vector in the Leave vote-age was perhaps the major variable nationwide, and many affluent and Conservative-voting areas of the of the South East voted Leave even more decisively-but it was a significant one. While 'the rhetoric of Leave was anti-immigrant', Hazeldine concludes, 'the anger that powered it to victory came from decline' (2017: 69).
The legacy of Hull's year as City of Culture is inextricable from the last nine years of austerity, a period which represents only the latest chapter in the rolling back of the provisions offered by the state and its role in planning for an uncertain future.
For all the public and corporate investment since 2013 and the employment it has created, municipal funding has been decimated by central government cuts: Hull has lost more than £120 million from its budget since 2010 (Young, 2018). The visibility of the city's recent transformation obscures how additional drastic cuts to education, social provision, Jobseeker's Allowance, and disability benefits due to take place by 2020 will further entrench and deepen inequality (Young, 2018).
The effects of global warming will soon exacerbate existing inequalities.
The 'Hull City Plan' includes a section optimistically titled 'Living with Water', which presents a vision of the ' assets' and 'benefits' to be wrought from the city's precarious position. It seems likely though that any 'benefits' from rising sea levels will accrue to the rich and privileged, in line with the various forms of ' disaster capitalism' evolving across the world, while risk will arrive first at the doors of the poor and least powerful (Funk, 2014). In the 1980s, plans were developed to build a tidal barrier in the Humber, comparable in size to the Thames Barrier protecting London and even the vast Maeslant Barrier outside Rotterdam. The plan was rejected, though, not least because it would inhibit the number of commercial vessels and oil tankers that could use the estuary. More recently, flood defence spending has been allocated to the city and surrounding area. Work began in early 2018 on a £36.5 million scheme to strengthen defences along the River Hull, which runs through the heart of the city.
A further £42 million has been earmarked for a scheme to raise existing defences at various points along the Humber, as part of a nationwide flood defence project funded by central government. However, in an age of reduced municipal funding, and in the absence of any meaningful, long-term plan for mitigating CO 2 emissions, these preventative measures are a partial solution at best. Bigger walls will keep rising seas at bay for a while, but the question of who pays for large-scale adaptation, particularly the much-needed improvements to housing stock in the poorest areas of the city, is deferred. For many residents, 'property-level protection' (air bricks, antiflood doors, and non-return valves) and energy-efficiency measures are prohibitively expensive (Walsh, 2018).  More broadly, then, Quicksand attests to the challenge of imagining a different, more just future, a future that exceeds 'mere accommodation to the known harms of the present' (Segal, 2017: xv). In my final section below, I seek to bring together a number of threads from the preceding discussion, in order to address two connected questions. First, how might renewable energy transition form part of a broader social, cultural, and political project that counters the right's vision of a world in which, increasingly, 'socio-economic inequality will have a meteorological mandate' (Davis, 2010: 29)? And second, to what extent is it possible to mediate between the local-in this case the low-lying city of Hull, perched precariously on a rapidlyeroding coastline-and global?

Different horizons
Hull's deep-sea trawler fleet was once the largest in the world; its rapid decline and disappearance in the late 1970s and early 1980s left a long shadow over the city. A Northern Soul is a searching examination of the effects of austerity in the city, amid the longer history of deindustrialisation and lack of opportunity. As the film makes plain, the counterpart to the jobs created at the Siemens factory is, as elsewhere, the normalising of casualised, exploitative labour and the increasing prevalence of in-work poverty. Steve works full-time, and has done all his life, but is heavily in debt and reliant on payday loans. In a scene late in the film, Steve reorganises his debts into a repayment scheme that, he fears, will lock him into a job he hates for years to come. The scene is a powerful example of how personal debt, the toxic fuel of neoliberalism, ' devours the future's ability to be free of distress, and any sort of social life can begin to fade for those trapped in financial melancholia' (Segal, 2017: 12 and lyrical testament to the role of community in imagining more equitable and just futures for everyone, even under the most pressing conditions (Figure 7).
Though it does not figure significantly in A Northern Soul, the snap general election called in the summer of 2017 punctuated Hull's year as City of Culture. Like many cities in the North, Hull is a Labour stronghold and the 2017 election was no exception. The Labour manifesto included plans that would be particularly beneficial for the city: national and regional investment banks to fund reinvestment in the productive capacities of the economy and a three-stage plan to bring energy provision back into public ownership. Labour's Alternative Models of Ownership report, released just a few days after the 2017 general election, laid out an ambitious vision of national, municipal, cooperative, and worker control and ownership of utilities and services.
The report emphasised democratic participation at all levels of decision-making, in industries geared not toward the short or medium-term profits of large corporations, but toward a renewed sense of shared public prosperity (Labour Party, 2017: 11-32).
Polls have repeatedly shown that the renationalisation of rail, water, and energy networks are popular policies with the British electorate after decades of declining services and shameless price gouging (Smith, 2017). This popularity offers a window report that global CO 2 emissions be reduced by 45% by 2030 suggests that Labour's plan for zero emissions by 2050 will need to be accelerated (IPCC, 2018). Further, Jeremy Corbyn's vague mention of 'low carbon sources' in his Liverpool speech probably signals a continuing role for nuclear energy. As Richard Seymour argues in detail, expanding nuclear energy generation, even as a supplement to renewables, would be an economic, infrastructural, and environmental mistake (2018). Like oil, gas, and coal, uranium is a finite resource, and there is evidence to suggest that all the available ore will be gone by the end of this century at the latest. Further, the management of nuclear waste creates long-term infrastructural ' dependencies', requiring money that would be better invested in renewables manufacturing and technology, such as the development of lithium ion batteries capable of storing electricity generated by wind and solar power (Seymour, 2018).
The precise details of the 'Green New Deal' outlined by Pettifor should also be the subject of ongoing deliberation. In particular, and despite its nostalgic name, the plan should not become a call for a return to full employment and the 40-hour working week. Instead, it presents the opportunity to fundamentally rethink our relationship to work and free time, and in particular to reclaim the notion of workplace 'flexibility' from the decollectivising tendencies of neoliberalism, in service of an employee-oriented and collective vision of the place of work in society.
In this sense, it is clear that large-scale renewable energy transition is a question not only of energy ownership and infrastructure, but also of social infrastructure, and particularly of state investment in social care, health, and education (Onaran, 2018: 187). The task of a future progressive government will not just be to roll back the worst effects of privatisation and austerity, but to fundamentally rethink the place of work, social care, and public life in a society where dependence on others is not the foundation for demonisation and stigmatisation, but the basis for collective wealth and happiness. The introduction of universal basic income (UBI) and universal basic services (UBS) (including transport, education, social care, childcare, and utilities) would provide the most immediately emancipatory element in a new social infrastructure. UBI and UBS could be implemented quickly and funded initially through increases in marginal and corporate tax rates, a land value tax, and a levy on the revenue of digital platforms like Facebook and Uber (Standing, 2018: 201-3). By providing a base-level of freedom-the freedom to refuse exploitative work and other oppressive relationships-UBI and UBS would alleviate the precarity and stress that currently dominate the lives of many.
Addressing inequality and lack of opportunity through devolved municipal power and new forms of public ownership, a 'Green New Deal', UBI and UBS would be significant steps in building a more equitable and sustainable future for the UK.
Accompanying these policies on social infrastructure, there will need to be a similarly large-scale attempt to address the manifold forms of institutional racism in British society. Alongside anti-fascist and anti-racist organising and education rooted in local communities, future policy-making at a national level requires 'the recognition that racial inequality and racism are deeply embedded in British society. They are not only products of individual failings but institutionally embedded' (Goodfellow, 2018: 152).
Anti-racist teaching, particularly education on the history and legacies of the British Empire, will be central to any long-term attitudinal change. As Maya Goodfellow argues, anti-racist policies of this nature would be the target of voluble opposition from the right, not least because they 'go to the heart of [the] relationship between whiteness and national identity and the normalisation of the racial hierarchy' (2018: 155). However, they are imperative in combating the racial inequalities in British society-inequalities that have been accentuated by austerity, which disproportionately impacts people of colour, and women of colour in particular-and its long history of anti-migrant politics (Goodfellow, 2018: 156). In the short term, the countering of the divisive discourse of a so-called 'white working class' with ostensibly 'legitimate concerns' about immigration and its effect on public services with an account of shared class interests is paramount. Gargi Bhattacharyya cogently describes the 'white working class' as 'the working class as reimagined through Thatcherism. Aspirant, atomized and defensively monocultural. And it is a framing that casts minoritized groups outside class identity altogether ' (2017: 19).
Anti-racist education will be increasingly significant in the longer term, particularly as the distinction between migrants and refugees becomes gradually more blurred as a result of the consequences of global warming and environmental degradation. Precisely how the conceptual and legal status of ' climate refugees' will develop over the coming decades is unclear (Demos, 2016: 76-7). What is clear is that political adaptation to global warming in Europe has already taken the form of the effective outsourcing of border control to nations like Chad and Niger, in order to block potential migrants from reaching the continent at all. Contrary to the EU's claims, these schemes-which disassociate border locations from myriad, often violent, bordering practices-do not deter migrants from attempting to travel to Europe. Instead, they simply push the dangers of irregular migration further into the shadows, as undocumented migrants resort to increasingly dangerous routes in their attempts to reach Europe (International Organisation for Migration, 2017).
Goodfellow's comments on the role of anti-racist education in the rebuilding of British society also direct us to the difficult issue of the scalability of certain forms of climate politics. The policies outlined above around public ownership, decentralised energy provision, and expanded welfare would be contained within a particular nation, and a particularly wealthy nation in the global context at that. The relationship between intra-and international policies on both energy infrastructure and social infrastructure represents a significant challenge for any meaningful attempt to halt spiralling CO 2 emissions. After all, it is not difficult to envisage how increased renewable energy provision and expanded welfare in nations in the Global North could dovetail with the protectionism and nativism that is central to the growing right-wing populist-autarky in Europe and North America. Indeed, in this scenario, large-scale offshore wind power arrays could be used to assert sovereignty over international waters, to the detriment of states in the Global South.
As I intimate in the first section above, while renewable energy production has increased enormously over the last three decades, the precise nature of how it has grown and in whose interests often remains undertheorised. As the work of numerous scholars in the growing field of the energy humanities makes clear, the Delucchi and Mark Z. Jacobson, argue that a 100% renewable energy global society is possible by 2050, with around 90% of energy needs supplied by wind and solar power (2011a). Further, Delucchi and Jacobson argue that this transition could be achieved using technology that already exists and that nearly all the raw materials required could be recycled from the existing fossil fuel infrastructure (2011b). In a recent study published in collaboration with scholars in Germany and Denmark, they also argue that a full transition would result in around a 40% reduction in energy use worldwide, largely due to the halt of the mining, transportation, processing, and combustion of fossil fuels (Jacobson et al., 2017). Solar and wind power are likely to be cheaper than fossil fuels before 2025, a calculation that does not even consider the vast state subsidies paid to energy companies each year, or the increasingly damaging impacts of global warming and the premature deaths caused by air pollution. With these externalities of our current carbon society factored into the equation, renewable energy would already be significantly cheaper than fossil fuels, particularly in countries in the Global South (Malm, 2016: 368-9).
Delucchi and Jacobson argue that renewable energy transition should be thought of in terms of the 'bundling' of different types of renewable energy in different places, in order to overcome the variability of wind and solar power (2012: 483). Global collaboration, rather than renewables localism, is the key to energy transition on a large scale. The scale of the necessary energy transition is imposing, to say the least, yet as Malm emphasises, Delucchi and Jacobson's studies are the clearest and most detailed demonstration that the path towards a 'return to the flow' is blocked by obstacles that are political rather than technological. The 'super grids' and 'bundling' of renewable energy sources they outline are already technologically feasible but require a politics fundamentally incompatible with capitalist accumulation: longterm collaboration and mutual concession, municipal and state funding, investment, and ownership, and direct fossil fuel suppression (Malm, 2016: 381). Vergès argues, we live not in the Anthropocene, but in the 'racial Capitalocene': the latter demands an account of climate change as the result not of generalised 'human hubris', but ' of the long history of colonialism and racial capitalism and its Promethean thinking-the idea that "Man" can invent a mechanical, technical solution to any problem' (Vergès, 2017).
Amid the interwoven economic and environmental crises of the last decade and more, the Labour Party has the opportunity to build a clear case for a democratic socialist internationalism; that is, to explicitly connect domestic policies around energy provision and the welfare state to policies around migration, borders, and citizenship, in service of a long-term vision of global cooperation. The immediate end to the violent bordering practices described above (and the power of the corporate interests that currently maintain them) should be only the first step toward a politics that is not only anti-imperialist and welcoming of migrants, but that seeks to redress the long legacies of colonialism and imperialism, and the unequal ecological exchange that has been foundational for the prosperity of the Global North. As Vijay Prashad argues, there can be no meaningful analysis of our prospects for avoiding climate catastrophe without the discussion of public goods such as housing, transportation, and healthcare in both the Global North and South, or of the historical origins of the violent borders that lock those in the Global South into cycles of hyper-exploitation, in locations where climate change is already decimating environments and lives (2014: 291). In one sense, these broader considerations may seem to have taken us far from the banks of the Humber.
But in another, of course, they return us right there, to the role of Hull and cities like it in any prospective global 'return to the flow'. As the gateway to the North Sea, Hull will have a particular role to play in regional and national energy policy; but in this vision of large-scale renewables transition, it would be one 'Energy City' among many.

Conclusion
In the preceding discussion, I have sought to move between the local, national, and global, and to connect a range of materials, in order to situate Hull's recent history in a broader discussion of visual culture, energy transition, political ecology, borders, and citizenship. Much of the impetus for this approach came from the early months of 2017, and in particular from Kulkarni's Blade. Alongside the ambitious, if flawed Hull City Plan, Kulkarni's installation captured a sense of guarded optimism in the city. Kulkarni discussed at the time how, as a symbol of the return of manufacturing employment after a long period of economic and social decline, Blade invoked a 'hopeful' future for Hull's residents. Yet as I discuss, and as Kulkarni acknowledged, Blade raised difficult questions about the precise character of that future and how we might get there. In so doing, Blade also raised important questions around the role of art in a time of climate crisis: how can art respond to interwoven economic and environmental crises? can it help to foster new modes of accountability in the present? how can art address manifold injustices taking place at multiple scales-the regional, national, and global-and over multiple timeframes?
There are no simple answers to these questions. What is clear, though, is that large corporations like Siemens are already deeply invested in making particular worlds come into view, worlds in which they remain indispensable and the profit motive remains paramount. 8 As I argue throughout, some futures will be no future at all. A 'green capitalism'-in which the global economy still cleaves to the class interests of corporations and the wealthy-is beset by inherent contradictions. For all their self-proclaimed 'green' credentials, Siemens have repeatedly demonstrated that they will turn to renewable energy production only on the condition that it is profitable; like all corporations, they ' can attend to no other bottom line' (Malm, 2016: 381). More broadly, neoliberalism's atomising logic of consumer choice and competition has leant itself to a deliberate obfuscation on the part of corporations and governments as to the role of collective action in addressing climate change.
As I argue in the second section, the effects of global warming will soon exacerbate existing inequalities both within and between nations. Increasing levels of migration will provide additional opportunities for demagogic right-wing leaders to further demonise migrants, entrenching ever more deeply what Liz Fekete (2018) calls the political ' convergence' of far-right and centre-right across Europe since the early 1990s. This is a convergence not just between 'the ideologies of political 8 Though it is not possible to discuss it in detail here, Siemens's recent MindSphere demo provides a good example of how corporations imagine the future (https://siemens.mindsphere.io/en/livedemo). In a Wes Anderson-style animation, a miniaturised world runs like clockwork thanks to an array of Siemens technologies and data-gathering techniques-this is a world in which social and political antagonism is decisively overwritten by algorithmic governance.
White: Climate, Power, and Possible Futures, from the Banks of the Humber Estuary 29 parties' around questions of asylum and migration Fekete argues, but also between 'transnational capital, the military-security-industrial complex, media barons and the powerful law-and-order lobbies' (Fekete, 2018: 38). Larsen's Quicksand attests to how difficult it can be to imagine a future beyond fossil capitalism and its increasingly cruel and violent border regimes.
As I contend in my third section, it seems clear that the renewal of the very idea of democratic, collective control over the future will be fundamental to any meaningful opposition to this vision, as well as to the global 'return to the flow' traced by Malm. Climate crisis calls not for undemocratic technocracy-and especially not for the reckless forms of geoengineering seemingly so beloved of Silicon Valley billionaires-but for more democratisation. It also calls for the wholesale decommodification of the basic tenants of everyday life, the expropriation of the wealth of the malignant and heavily subsidised fossil fuel industry and large corporations like Siemens, and the fundamental rethinking (and eventually the outright abolition) of the exclusionary capacities of national borders. 9 The centrality of questions around power, climate, and migration to Hull's year as City of Culture provides a valuable opportunity to think further about the social and cultural framing of energy technologies, at multiple scales. In this vein, and to close, I want to argue that a vital thread between the local and global is a sense not only of shared vulnerability, but also of the possibilities for shared prosperity and public affluence. As Matthew Huber argues, ' climate solidarity cannot only be forged in reaction to the devastating effects of climate change'. It 'must also be about a more positive story: "a world to win." This means connecting struggles across the globe that seek to decommodify the critical necessities of life: food, housing, healthcare, and, for climate, most of all, energy' (Huber, 2018). This is, in many ways,