Energy Utopia

“Energy Poverty” examines Peabody Energy’s “Advanced Energy for Life” campaign and the trope of energy poverty as a key site of rhetorical struggle over coal’s future. Peabody’s campaign responds to economic and political pressures on the coal industry with an ostensibly moral rationale for continued reliance on coal. The campaign invokes an “energy utopia” and a cultural politics of life that attempts to position access to coal-fired electricity as the solution to global poverty and as necessary for “the good life,” while deflecting anxieties about climate change and obscuring issues of energy justice. The campaign transforms the market failure of neoliberalism to provide half the world with affordable electricity into an opportunity for heroism among global elites, who can solve poverty by expanding markets for coal.