CEE Special Lecture Event

The Centre for Energy Ethics is thrilled to present an evening of special lectures courtesy of CEE Director Professor Mette High and EE2026 co-organiser Professor Jessica Smith (Colorado School of Mines).

5:00 - 6: 15pm - LHM Lecture (Professor Mette High)

6:15 - 7:15pm - Drinks Reception

7:15 - 8:30pm - Inaugural CEE Lecture (Professor Jessica Smith)

Ladislav Holy Memorial Lecture - Professor Mette High

Optimism without hope in the US oil and gas industry

Why does oil and gas production persist, even as calls for energy transitions grow ever more urgent?

Drawing on ethnographic research on the U.S. oil and gas industry, I examine how optimism is cultivated not simply as a way of relating to uncertain energy futures, but as a moral value in its own right. Focusing on Colorado’s private equity-funded oil and gas companies, I trace how industry actors mobilise and valorise optimism through discourses of innovation, risk-taking, and progress to defend hydrocarbons’ place in our collective future. Within entrepreneurial capitalism, optimism becomes a guiding ideal: to be optimistic is to be responsible, pragmatic, and ethically committed to particular visions of human flourishing, even amid an intensifying climate crisis and renewed anxieties around the security of global energy flows.

While recent anthropological work has privileged hope as a key way of relating to the future, this emphasis risks overlooking how optimism itself becomes ethically charged. In this context, optimism shapes how futures are imagined, justified, and acted upon.

By distinguishing optimism from hope, the lecture contributes to debates in energy ethics by showing how energy futures are anticipated and morally sanctioned. Rather than treating optimism as a failure of critique, we must take it seriously as a force that shapes the futures we inhabit.

CEE Inaugural Lecture - Professor Jessica Smith

Polarization and its discontents: Fighting for a future in (the other) U.S. coal country

The United States is facing the climate crises and a massive energy infrastructure build-out in a moment of unprecedented political polarization. Scholars who are often read as espousing left-leaning politics have posited links among fossil fuel systems, authoritarianism, and white patriarchal rule, and they have also uniquely blamed rural white Americans as a threat to democracy. In this lecture, Professor Smith explores how people living in a Wyoming coal region – one that has delivered Trump some of his widest margins in the entire country – actually experience, critique, and work against political extremism in their everyday lives. This perspective opens up space to theorize the surprising ambivalences that animate people’s ethical and political practices, but are often lost in splashy headlines and vote count statistics. Attending to these ambivalences invites us to reconsider how we approach research with political “others” as we imagine and work toward our collective futures.

Find out more about Energy Ethics 2026 at our Conference Hub