About Me

I was born in a country whose history and culture is steeped in fossil fuel use and resource extraction. However, I spent most of my 47 years taking cheap, available energy for granted. Two years ago, I started working on a comic book about petroleum, culture and climate change. This project has greatly changed how I understand the role that fossil fuels play in shaping lives and experiences. I started reading and thinking about how energy is produced, transported and consumed, and how it shapes our relationships to each other, the planet and our sense of the future. The more I thought about it, the more fossil fuels seemed entangled with the hopes, fears, dreams, anxieties and imaginations of myself and others. How can modern societies possibly change, when fossil fuels are so intimately connected to who we are?

At first, I was overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the changes that are needed in order to address climate change and energy use. However, I have come to realize that we are up against a challenge that requires the energies and imaginations of EVERYONE. The huge problem of global climate change is an opportunity to start imagining and working towards a better world, one where a minority of people in rich countries no longer live off the disadvantage and suffering of the rest of the world. I now see energy transition as a crisis that can allow us to develop new kinds of relationships that are based on sharing, justice and sustainability. It is an opportunity for fulfilling human potentials that the age of petroleum could never really satisfy.

I live in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, a city of half a million people whose history as a centre for industrial manufacturing was crucially shaped by its location, close to an energy corridor that ran from Niagara Falls. There is a great history in Hamilton of ordinary, working people rising up to demand better lives for themselves and their families. I believe the same kind of protest is needed to address climate change, but on a global scale. We cannot hope that politicians and corporations will fix these problems for us: change must come from ordinary people, learning, working and struggling together to create a better world. We live in exciting times!