The Future Is Now: Futurist Climate Planning, Immediatist Problem-Solving, and the Persistence of Fossil-Fuel Modernity in Taiwan

I-Lun Shih, university of Michigan

As governments and climate activists make long-range plans and mobilize significant resources to pursue decarbonization, the transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy is rarely a clean rupture. Instead, it is a contested process that unfolds within—and often through—existing carbon-intensive infrastructures. This paper argues that such contested continuity comes from two sources. First are the multiple and sometimes contradictory policy goals that shape energy governance—such as decarbonization, affordability, and energy security. Second are the strategic relationships among policymakers, activists, and employees of national energy companies, many of whom have spent decades working within fossil-fuel systems. In such contexts, policymakers, activists, and utility engineers alike often struggle to reconcile long-term climate responsibilities with the immediate need for stability and responsiveness in energy systems, particularly in the power grid. Because utility engineers are tasked with solving operational problems in real time—debugging, stabilizing, and restoring equilibrium—they develop what I call an “immediatist” temporality in responding to long-term climate planning. Drawing on extensive qualitative data—including trade publications, policy documents, and in-depth interviews with engineers and policymakers in a national energy company in Taiwan—I show how this problem-solving orientation shapes how long-term climate policies are implemented—and sometimes constrained. This study contributes to broader sociological debates on temporality, imagined futures, anticipation, and the relationship between democracy and electricity expertise. It also brings the power grid—once celebrated as one of the most important technological innovations of the twentieth century—back into debates about the green energy transition. As I show, the grid functions as the infrastructural “nerves” of modern energy systems, coordinating flows of electricity across fossil and renewable sources and placing utility engineers at the center of managing the transition.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 53. Energy, Climate Change, and the Immediacy of the Present