Jay Turner on the History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future
In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Jay Turner, Professor of Environmental Studies at Wellesley College and Author of Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future.
Jay is also Author of The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (2012), which focuses on debates over public lands protection in the United States. His second book, The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (2018, co-authored) details the evolution of conservative opposition to environmental reform, culminating with the Trump administration.
He and Ted discuss his background, growing up in Virginia, attending Washington and Lee University, Brown University, and Princeton University for his PhD in environmental history. Jay has been teaching in the Environmental Studies Program at Wellesley College since the fall of 2006, and has also been active in sustainability initiatives at Wellesley and nearby communities, especially those pertaining to energy and climate change. In 2017, he helped lead a community solar campaign in Natick, Massachusetts that resulted in more than 150 new solar installations.
His most recent book, Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future, unpacks the history of batteries to explore why solving the battery problem is crucial to a clean energy transition. He highlights their many uses: powering zero-emission vehicles, storing electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, and modernizing the electric grid, and demonstrates that they are essential to scaling up the renewable energy resources that help address global warming. He also digs into batteries’ unique environmental impact—including mining, disposal, and more—questioning a clean energy transition risk trading one set of problems for another. With new insight on questions of justice and sustainability, Charged draws on the past for crucial lessons that will help us build a clean energy future, from the ground up.
