The Problem with “Solutions”: Apolitical Optimism in the Sustainable Energy Industry

Abstract

We might quibble over what constitutes an “environmental solution,” but the term is usually understood as a straightforward way of characterizing effective responses to environmental problems. Drawing from ethnographic research on New York City’s sustainable energy industry, this article instead suggests that the discourse of environmental solutions is not as commonsensical as it seems. I argue that environmental solutionism is the rhetorical offspring of polluting industries, masking exploitative corporate practices with a facade of apolitical consensus. Eschewing an essentialist line of critique that views corporations as unified hegemons, this article ethnographically documents the polysemy of the “solution” discourse in sustainable energy companies, theorizing the understated political work that this word does in service of neoliberal environmentalism. I then offer a brief history of environmental solutionism, exposing its evolution from a greenwashing tool to a habituated orientation to the environment among a diverse range of subjects. I then consider the material-discursive conditions under which solutionism has centered the corporation in environmentalist praxis, illuminating how people who are critical of corporate environmentalism nonetheless embrace it. I conclude by conceptualizing environmental solutionism as a site of “progressive dystopia”—Savannah Shange’s framework for elucidating the violent contradictions of progressive politics.