A Roanoke native who now teaches about the environment wants to provide a little insight on his vision for a clean energy future.
Jay Turner, now a professor of Environmental Studies at Wellesley College, returns to Patrick Henry High School to deliver an address Monday. At a time when four-dollar a gallon gas, data centers, artificial intelligence, and climate change are dominating the headlines, as a historian, he said it's useful to take a step back.
"There are lots of reasons not to feel hopeful," he said. "What I'm going to talk about (Monday night) is I see big changes in energy systems. There are lots of challenges, but I think the transition from what I describe as a combustion-based past towards a post-combustion future, I think that offers promise.”
In his Patrick Henry days, Turner admits to growing up a science fair nerd, and was more focused on the environmental history of the land before shifting over the last decade to the future, and energy developments. One of his students' project at Wellesley is The Big Green Machine, a website that tracks clean energy investments in North America, Mexico, and Canada.
"People have raised lots of questions about whether this is doable," he explains. "Is that map really going to scale? What would it look like if it included all the fossil fuel resources we were relying upon as well? I think there are lots of reasonable objections. Some of those (include) this work is too hard to do, or too expensive. And I think when you look back, and draw on history, you can see otherwise."
Turner argues there are times we've changed our energy system faster that we have anticipated, lowering costs in the process. He said one of the goals for the address is to re-think how we tell energy history. "We've been burning things, and burning so much stuff for so long, it's really hard to imagine how consequential that is - we often just think of electricity as an extension of combustion. We've burned a lot of coal to generate electricity over the years," he said.
As an historian, Turner argues the rise of electricity, starting with the invention of the telegraph, opened up possibilities for sustainable forms of energy.
His free address at the Patrick Henry High School Main Auditorium, presented by the Mill Mountain Garden Club, is at 6pm September 28.
