Alternative Energy
The very notion that some sources of energy make up alternative energy demonstrates the way people impute normative values to technologies. For decades, proponents of alternative energy have done more than advocate particular technologies: They maintain that their proposed technologies are socially and morally better. These social and moral claims show that advocates regard alternative energy technologies as different in profound ways from existing conventional energy technologies.
Social Contexts
Alternative energy must be understood against a background of conventional energy. Conventional energy is not conventional just because it is in wide use. It is conventional in that it underlies the functioning and embodies the values of the conventional society. Thus coal, oil, and natural gas are conventional both because they dominate energy production in industrialized countries and, even more, because they make possible a high-consumption society and require large-scale industrial systems to extract, convert, and distribute the energy.
Advocates of alternative energy seek more than simply technological replacements for fossil fuels. They seek technological systems that will reinforce and embody alternative values, such as avoiding the exploitation of nonrenewable resources and people, favoring smaller scale production, and, most importantly, living in a manner more in concert with natural systems, in the early twenty-first century often termed living sustainably.
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