Faced with the contradiction of heritage preservation in an age of ecological collapse, museums around the globe have begun to reckon with their responsibility towards climate mitigation. Often ignored in these discussions are oil museums, understudied cultural attractions where museum workers are tasked with researching, interpreting, and exhibiting the artifacts and histories of an energy industry in transition. This interview, conducted by Camille-Mary Sharp virtually in April 2024, brings into conversation two educators from distinct institutions: the Norwegian Petroleum Museum (Stavanger, Norway) and the Oil Museum of Canada (Oil Springs, Canada). Working ocean, seas, and lakes apart, Julia Stangeland and Christina Sydorko nevertheless find common ground—both raised on farms and trained as teachers, they now channel their passion and expertise towards critical energy literacy for current and future generations. This discussion reflects the interviewees’ individual views and is not representative of their respective institutions.
A recent spate of climate protests and mass-movement civil disobedience events has reinvigorated mainstream discussions of the ethics of civil disobedience, direct action, and various forms of ecosabotage. In this paper, I examine the present-day case for both non-violent civil disobedience and more extreme forms of "direct action" in response to the global climate emergency. In particular, I explore how the framework of virtue ethics can be applied in this context, yielding conclusions that will be disappointing to prospective eco-saboteurs but encouraging to those committed to non-violent resistance.
The essay provides an historical overview of the German transition to a post-fossil energy regime. It stresses the crucial link between the nuclear phaseout, the demise of monopolies in the electric power sector, and the creation of a context for investments in wind and solar power. It shows that the present strength of the German renewable electric power sector is the product of a favorable climate for these investments between 1990 and 2000. With the last major bottleneck now several decades in the past, it seems imperative to comment on long-term investments and sophisticated political housekeeping and to challenge energy mythologies that fail to make the crucial link outlined above.
When five containers washed ashore on the western coast of Jutland, Denmark, it was a miniscule event. Yet that event is indicative of the ways in which the world-system of commodity capitalism based on resource extractivism has increasingly exposed the Global North to environmental wrought. Connecting the event in Denmark to The Man with the Compound Eye, a 2011 novel by Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi, shows literature’s ability to uncover the frailty of the idea of containerization and of enclosing and compartmentalizing the effects of extractivism.
Cultural institutions are beginning to confront their deep entanglement with the high-carbon systems that have driven the climate crisis, recognizing operational, existential, and epistemological challenges in a decarbonizing world. Exhibitions have historically celebrated fossil energy as progress, and museums now face the complex task of balancing this legacy with urgent climate narratives that promote societal transformation. Energy humanities offer a critical lens to support cultural institutions in reshaping their societal roles and future visions to ethically contribute to a low-carbon future.
In this reflection on teaching energy humanities in literary studies, Carolin Slickers shares how a seminar at the University of Bonn challenged students to see energy not as a topic but as a structure that shapes literature, infrastructure, and daily life. From Frankenstein to solarpunk, students traced how energy moves through fiction, and how fiction, in turn, shapes their understanding of work, technology, and climate futures.
This series introduction situates energy humanities in a rapidly changing global context marked by war, climate disasters, political backlash, and stalled transitions. Revisiting the foundational claims of Szeman and Boyer’s Energy Humanities (2017), Hélène Ducros and Nicholas Ostrum argue that technology functions both as infrastructure and as ideology, shaping how energy systems have come to structure modern life. The essays that follow examine how energy informs culture, pedagogy, politics, and ethics, and how new ways of thinking might point toward more just and sustainable futures.
In the final Forum on Fossil Capital essay, Imre Szeman explores how the current solar transition complicates Malm's conclusions about the possibility for energy transition under capitalism, noting the emergence of a new ideology: "solar fetishism."
In the third Forum on Fossil Capital essay, Andrew M. Rose puts Fossil Capital into conversation with Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy, emphasizing the need for green social movements to reconsider their approach in appealing to democratic states and institutions–entities which are not simply captured by fossil fuel interests but fundamentally and at their very origin an outgrowth of the carbon economy.
In part two of our Forum on Fossil Capital, Daniel Worden explores how Malm's work helps to make it clear how a revised cultural history of modernity can synthesize energy and capitalism, how criticism can make visible our culture’s authorization of fossil fuel systems, and how a thinker might distinguish between fossil capital’s ideological forms and the forms of alternatives.
In part one of our Forum on Fossil Capital, Jennifer Wenzel explores what is excluded in Fossil Capital. Wenzel puts Julie Livingston's Self-Devouring Growth to enrich how we understand growth and the role of empire in Malm's narrative.
Andreas Malm's 2016 book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, has significantly shaped debates about the relationship between energy, capitalism, and global warming. Eva Cherniavsky (University of Washington) introduces this EH Forum on Fossil Capital, in which four leading scholars assess the strengths and limits of Malm’s influential book, and ask: where do we locate the cultural and political prospects for creating a post-carbon economy?
In the final installment in our series on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," historian Troy Vettese explores Mitchell's unique scholarly method. Vettese argues that the power and originality of Mitchell's books, including "Carbon Democracy," stems from his adoption of approaches from postcolonial studies and Actor Network Theory (ANT). Mitchell has avoided ANT’s tendency to conservatism and has instead practised a radical critique of the economic, environmental, and political structures that he studies.
In the third installment in our series on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," communication studies researcher Ayesha Vemuri explores Mitchell's larger oeuvre to argue that mainstream responses to address the climate crisis can be understood as extensions of what he calls “the rule of experts.” By maintaining a global hegemony of elite expertise over that of local and indigenous knowledges, efforts to address the ecological crisis uphold structures of power that undergird the ecological crisis. If we want to develop just responses to climate change, we will need a new approach to expertise.
In the second installment in our series of essays on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," historian and cultural critic Bob Johnson assesses the book's intellectual contributions to the study of energy and society. In so doing, Johnson argues that the book's two main insights have too often been neglected and calls on scholars to consider anew how we might engage more deeply with the implications of Mitchell's work.
In the first installment in our series of essays on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," political scientist Cara Daggett explores why the book works so well in the classroom. Carbon Democracy, Daggett notes, upends influential American mythologies using a writing and analytical style that helps readers see that what we took to be natural fact is indeed contingent and contestable. Students find these moments just as intellectually invigorating as their professors do.
