Profile III: Professor Dominic Boyer, Rice University
In this issue, The Daily Dynamo met with Professor Dominic Boyer of Rice University. In a tenure of more than one and a half decades at the University, he’s founded what is now known as the Rice Center for Energy Studies, serves on the Board of Governors for the Rice Sustainability Institute, and is a pioneer of the burgeoning field of Energy Humanities. As a serial author and researcher, Boyer’s impact is felt far in wide, as he positions himself as a pioneer of a new perspective on the energy transition as he battles against climate change.
Reflecting on what led him to found the Rice Center for Environmental Studies, he attributed its creation to the need for a multidisciplinary initiative that afforded humanities a greater voice in the arena of tackling climate change, a space long dominated by technology and policy voices instead.
“The obstacles we’re facing deal with politics and behavior”, Boyer stated, “[So] it’s more important than ever that folks with humanistic expertise are essential to these conversations.” Boyer touted the Center’s achievements, stating its biggest achievement was ‘shaping a field we call Energy Humanities’. The field of Energy Humanities was actually founded by Boyer himself, and though there are a myriad of ways to define the subject area, he abstracts it down to a relatively simple statement.
“To me, [it is] the intersection between energy and culture”, he said, defining a field he said can change depending on language, region, and other demographic factors. Despite these innumerous barriers, Boyer pointed out that the world is still “united through an energy system that is mostly derived from fossil fuels”.
However, Boyer defined our current moment in time as an inflection point, stating that the world is on a ‘cusp of an energy revolution’, emphasizing that such a change in energy can precipitate a change in the cultures of areas that experience such reform.
“Energy humanities is the space that we analyze that, where we can ask ourselves – how can we use this energy transition to help uplift the cultural norms and values we’d like to see”. With the rapid changes in infrastructure he believes will come to fruition in the coming decades, not only can a more sustainable world be created, but also a more just one as well.
It is this change in energy infrastructure that Boyer’s many research projects and publications focuses heavily on, particularly his latest book, No More Fossils, which paints a picture of a world transitioning from petroculture, or oil and gas, to electroculture, where the electrification of industry can replace such an economic paradigm. In the book, Dr. Boyer argues there have been three main energy regimes in the last five hundred years: sucrapolitics, carbopolitics, and petropolitics. The professor argued that sucrapolitics, which was the dominant paradigm that arose during the plantation system, which took ‘by far the most energy, or work’, referring to the scientific definition of the word. Sugar, in many ways, he asserted, ‘jumpstarted the machine revolution’.
“The first steam engines that were applied to manufacturing didn’t take place in Scotland the way all of us heard – they were employed in places like Jamaica to work on sugar plantations”, Boyer said, contextualizing the rise of the machine economy that grew in necessity as a response to the revolts against slave and human labor. “That machinery was fueled by a fuel called coal”, he stated, transitioning to the carbopolitical age. With carboculture came mass production and the ubiquity of commodities that were scarce a century prior. “However, coal had some limits”, the professor asserted, mainly the difficulty in extracting the resource. Such limits made a pivot towards oil and gas, or a petropolitcal world, much more attractive.
“In 1900, there were coal-powered vehicles, electric vehicles, even a pioneer hydrogen powered vehicle, but the reason why oil beat out its competitors was… it was plentiful, cheap, and easy to refill”, Boyer postulated, adding that even in an age of diversifying energy portfolios, petroculture dominates due to its own diverse commodities.
“Oil [came] to our life through automobiles and stays because of plastic”, he said, lamenting that the rise of petrochemicals ‘created a whole new material world’, adding that over half of all fibers produced globally are derived from such products, with many integrated into countless elements of our modern infrastructure. Boyer sees this market as one that the oil and gas sector will soon see as the cornerstone of their own operations.
“The fossil fuel industry is planning a massive pivot towards petrochemicals”, he posited, “Sooner or later, we’re going to hit peak demand for transportation fuels, so their next big move is to move into plastics”. To combat such a strategy, Boyer proposes two counterstrategies: investing in bioplastic production and reducing plastic use to only essential products.
“Places like Brazil are leading the world in bioplastic production”, he said, noting the agriculturally rich nation has the inputs available to manufacture ethanol, biofuels, and bioplastics. However, he believes the ‘more environmentally sensible’ choice is to limit plastic use to sectors such as the medical industry, where plastics function to provide health to billions – outside of those industries, Boyer asserted “there are a lot of plastics that we use for really no reason”, but also voiced his belief that plans for a replacement material, from wood to bioplastics, must be invested in tandem with policy that discourages single-use plastics.
Despite these many issues perpetuated by petroculture, Boyer adamantly believes that a transition, grounded in electricity, is imminent.
“Electricity is a mature energy system that’s been with us a very long time, in part with alliance with fossil fuels”, he said, evidencing present massive coal-powered electricity infrastructure present in the industrializing giants of India and China. “The fastest way to decarbonize the global economy [is] to shift as many things as possible to electricity, and to remove fossil fuels from the production chains as quickly as possible”, Boyer emphasized, lamenting the progress of renewables and sustainable infrastructure, from batteries to wind and solar energy, in just the last few years.
Dr. Boyer’s research focuses on this rapid shift away from conventional fuels towards electric infrastructure, what he calls ‘rapid electrification’. Research projects such as his electric vehicle (EV) ridesharing initiatives in Los Angeles shed light on this idea, reducing inconveniencies for the consumer while simultaneously decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. Many similar research projects are supported by Rice’s Sustainability Institute, which aims to create a hub of the several hundred faculty whose research delves into the environment. Boyer, who serves on the Board of Governors for the Institute, emphasized the importance of multidisciplinary research in solving the issues many face today.
“The climate challenges we’re facing are not problems that can be solved by any one discipline. But if we work together, complementing each other with our strengths, we can actually develop the types of holistic solutions needed to solve the world’s challenges”, Boyer mused.
One of these challenges he’s trying to solve is one he is extraordinarily passionate about – the health of glaciers, which started with his discovery of the ‘death’ of Iceland’s first major glacier, Okjökull, or Ok.
“This is a story that is becoming more than Iceland’s heritage, but world heritage”, he said, lamenting the importance of glaciers as a water resource, ecotourism hotspot, and cultural epicenter of civilizations near them. With his efforts to memorialize Ok in 2019, his team’s humanistic portrayal of a glacier’s death garnered worldwide attention, with ‘more than 10,000 media outlets’ reporting on the gesture. Now back in Iceland, Dr. Boyer aims to create a ‘glacier graveyard’ outside of capital Reykjavik to underscore that what is occurring on the tiny island is truly a global phenomenon.
“We are taking what was a national story with global resonance, now creating a globally oriented platform to tell the stories of all the disappearing glaciers”, Boyer explained, hoping that such efforts will result in narratives that motivate more substantial energy policy dialogue and action.
“We want more of the direction we’re going in now, happening more ambitiously”, Boyer urged, arguing that the use of fossil fuels has not only exacerbated climate change but disproportionately affected those who played little part in doing so, “we have to make sure that the countries, especially those who have benefited the most from fossil fuels are investing the most in making solutions available to all across the world”. While Boyer mainly advocates for what he sees as the fourth regime of electroculture, he remains optimistic that other zero-carbon mechanisms can accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels. However, such a transition is only possible if existing grid systems are ‘built up massively’ and ‘redesigned’.
Once again emphasizing his unique humanistic perspective on an energy transition, Boyer said – “It is within our grasp. There is no technological or policy reason we can’t do this. There are only cultural, institutional, behavioral problems that we need to overcome.. It’s time to leave them behind and move on to a better future”.
