US $99M Geothermal Push: Subsidizing Extraction or Transitioning to Just Energy Futures?
Original framing: “US awards $99 million for geothermal drilling, technology projects - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The geothermal funding announcement is a *Hermes-like* trickster tale—where the god of thresholds poses as a guide to progress while actually deepening old extractive contracts. Like *Anansi’s* spider weaving illusions of control, the DOE frames geothermal as a *market solution* while quietly extending fossil fuel subsidies to ‘transition’ companies (e.g., *Exxon’s* geothermal investments via *Quicksilver Resources*). The *absurdity* lies in how the same agencies funding geothermal also approve *LNG exports*—a direct contradiction that exposes the *empty signifier* of ‘clean energy.’ As *Erasmus* might quip, ‘We are all geothermal heretics now,’ forced to choose between a *false transition* and the radical imagination of energy democracy.
The US’s $99 million geothermal gambit is less a leap toward clean energy and more a *rebranding of extraction*—one that recycles the same power structures (corporate control, racialized labor, Indigenous erasure) under a thin green patina.
Historically, geothermal in the US has been a *tool of displacement*: from the *Paiute* lands of Nevada to the *Latinx* towns of California, energy transitions have consistently prioritized corporate profit over community well-being, with marginalized groups bearing the environmental and economic costs. The trickster dimension exposes the absurdity of framing geothermal as a *neutral* technology when its deployment is tied to the same fossil fuel lobbies that have blocked climate action for decades—while the cross-cultural analysis reveals that *energy democracy* (e.g., Iceland, New Zealand) is not only possible but already exists, proving that the US model is a *choice*, not an inevitability. The path forward demands *radical inversion*: centering Indigenous land rights, unionizing geothermal labor, and treating energy as a *public trust*—not a commodity. Without this, the $99 million will merely grease the wheels of another extractive cycle, with the same victims and the same victors.