From Nord Stream to the Strait of Hormuz, the world's hydrocarbon-based energy system is being remade. For many post-colonial states, decarbonization promises to transform dependence into possibilities for power and profit. Jordan was among the first countries to launch an aggressive national decarbonization program, in 2012; a decade in, the everyday lives of its residents reveal the chasm between decarbonization's promise and its reality. Focusing on Jordan's domestic solar thermal power networks, this talk examines the tension between the state's promise of external power and subjects' demands for a different energy future. Solar thermal is a distributed energy form widespread across the urban landscape yet marginalized in state and investor planning. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with laborers in the warehouses and factories of Zarqa, Russeifa, and East Amman, I argue that its growth is not a state oversight but the intentional result of communities retreating from the financialized electricity market to craft spaces of survivability. These practices reveal decarbonization as both an investor-led strategy for profiting from climate change and an emerging ontology of distributed infrastructure that reconfigures capital and power.
Kendra Kintzi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on development, decarbonization, and digital media in Southwest Asia. Trained as an ethnographer and political ecologist, her work examines how energy infrastructure and urban mobilization reveal alternative visions of collective climate futures. Prior to joining NYU, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Atkinson Center for Sustainability at Cornell University.