12 Min Read
June 6, 2025
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Hiroki Shin is Associate Professor in History of Energy and Environmental Humanities at the University of Birmingham, UK. His contributions to energy history and the museum sector include being co-investigator of the Material Cultures of Energy project, research fellow at the Science Museum, UK, and the recipient of the Smithsonian Institution’s senior fellowship. Shin also serves on the editorial board for the new monograph series Critical Energy Studies from MIT Press.
Cultural institutions are now coming to terms with the uncomfortable truth that they are deeply embedded in the high-carbon civilization that has fueled the climate crisis. Not only does the creation, maintenance, and operation of culture involve constant energy use, but institutions exist in the distinctive economic system that thrives on the extensive use of resources and the accumulation of fossil capital. Culture’s connection with the energy system goes much deeper, as cultural production is a crucial part of the value system that has co-evolved with the material world of the Anthropocene, a widely—though not officially by geologists—recognized geological epoch defined by the unprecedented destruction of the Earth’s ecosystem by human activity. This overlap between culture and energy is the foundation of energy humanities, which critique how modern cultural production has conspired with, and sometimes resisted, an energetic world system.
The rise of energy humanities over the last decade or so has coincided with the intensifying need for humanistic intervention in societal decarbonization. As technical and market-based solutions have failed to arrest the global community’s moribund march toward 2+ °C global warming, climate scientists, energy experts, and concerned citizens are searching for a whole-society climate change response. Cultural sectors are inspiring hope for an alternative energy future, which also means that cultural production is being closely scrutinized for its potential and shortcomings.
As an energy researcher who has been working closely with the museum sector, my main concern is identifying and enhancing the role of energy humanities in what I call cultural decarbonization in the museum. My formulation of this decarbonization involves practical and intellectual challenges that can be distilled into three aspects. The first is the operational decarbonization of culture, as the current modes of cultural production, management, and appreciation (or, if you like, consumption) in museums usually entail carbon costs. The second aspect addresses the existential problem of museums within the current capitalist mode of cultural production, in which fossil capital retains material and political influence, causing organizational and ethical problems for museums. The third aspect is epistemological, as culture is enmeshed with the energy-intensive societal values of our age. This article outlines how these three levels of cultural decarbonization have manifested in recent years and briefly discusses relevant historical roots. Despite some progress in decarbonizing their operations, European museums still grapple with the existential and epistemological levels of decarbonization: the fundamental cultural values they present remain largely unchanged. Energy humanities, as a critical lens for examining the humanistic nature of our energy civilization, can reshape our public culture and guide museums through this transformative process.1
Decarbonizing cultural operations: cultural sustainability and beyond
In the 2000s, cultural sustainability emerged as a key concept that urged cultural institutions to contribute to sustainability and affirmed their greater role in society and the economy. As managers, practitioners, and experts within the culture sector reevaluated their practices, they considered their resource use—especially their energy consumption—as a fundamental part of their transition toward greener practices. This change was driven by an enhanced awareness of the sector’s potential impact on the environment and a desire to mitigate harm, which reflected a broader societal shift toward sustainability. This focus on cultural sustainability was, however, accompanied by cultural institutions’ reluctance to engage with the climate change debate. This reluctance has been attributed to the issue’s highly politicized nature in the 1990s and early 2000s, when highlighting global warming in public cultural sites was seen as inviting divisive debates. Pioneering climate change advocates in the museum sector emerged as a relatively small group of concerned practitioners.2 Since then, advocates of climate-informed culture have hoped for museums and galleries to become leading forums for climate action—a hope that is yet to be fulfilled, though cultural venues have become sites of climate debates and events.3
Addressing the carbon emissions from the daily operations of cultural issues has been accelerated by the convergence of sustainability and climate issues. The Arts Council England introduced environmental reporting as a funding requirement in 2012. Between 2012 and 2015, over 700 cultural organizations in the UK, including museums, theaters, and music events, reported on their environmental performances, primarily their energy and water usage; they reported reducing energy-related CO2 emissions by 12,673 tons.4 The 2015 Paris Agreement further incentivized the cultural sector to intensify these efforts. As a result, decarbonization strategies have expanded beyond more obvious measures such as constructing environmentally friendly buildings, installing solar panels on rooftops, and planting trees on properties owned by cultural institutions. Museums and other cultural venues now consider carbon emissions within their supply chains and the environmental impacts of visitor travel.
It is important to note, however, that carbon emissions in the culture sector are minuscule compared to other energy intensive sectors such as energy generation, industrial production, and transportation. This low emission level is not intended to belittle the culture sector’s decarbonization, as the full potential of cultural decarbonization is far greater than operational decarbonization, nor should a reduction in carbon emissions justify maintaining the traditional mode of cultural production. In recent years, the social responsibility of cultural institutions such as museums and galleries has extended beyond their carbon footprints, and their roles in the present economic system—especially regarding their relations with the fossil fuel industry—have sparked intense debate.
Can culture be carbon free?
In the twenty-first century, cultural institutions in most countries are deeply embedded in the capitalistic mode of cultural production and operation. Symbolically and financially, museums and galleries are often associated with the capitalistic value system that applies the logic of monetary equivalents (i.e., exchange value) to all human creative activities. Eco-activists’ attacks on high-profile artworks are, according to Sally Hickson, acts that challenge the general public to rethink what we really value by subjecting valued/invaluable pieces of artwork to physical harm.5 Some protests expose the ties between cultural institutions and the oil industry, usually through the latter’s investment in the culture sector.
The oil industry’s cultural sponsorship has caused heated debate, which depletes public trust in cultural institutions. In the UK, activists and concerned citizens (including groups of school teachers) have pressured public culture institutions to sever ties with the fossil fuel industry. The high-profile cases of the Tate Galleries, which ended its partnership with British Petroleum (BP) in 2017, and the British Museum, which, despite strong criticism, has continued its association with BP, have adorned the media. As of March 2024, there is controversy involving the Science Museum, London, which received funding from the Indian fossil giant Adani to create a new energy gallery. Here, a personal disclaimer is necessary, as this author (a former research fellow at the museum) has had a minor role in the development of the new gallery.6
The direct roots of many museums’ connections with industrial sponsors are found in the privatization of public culture and the subsequent lack of public investment since the 1980s, which amplified the cultural institutions’ financial dependence on private sponsors. Museums struggle to reconcile their social responsibility with their educational mission when their current business model makes it nearly impossible to find funding for energy-related programs from sources outside the energy industry. The ethical problem of receiving petro-money seems self-evident, but the oft-evoked analogy between the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry is not fully warranted.7 While the rejection of tobacco funding has led to the desired end of reducing the visibility of tobacco products, a similar rejection of funding from the energy sector, in which fossil fuel still has overwhelming share, may lead to the undesired consequence of reducing the visibility of energy issues in public cultural sites. This is especially the case as the emerging renewable energy industry is generally organized around relatively small corporations that will not become cultural benefactors any time soon. There is an urgent need to find a new model of funding energy- and climate-related public exhibitions, as the issue of fossil industry sponsorship is damaging the credibility of scientific and technical knowledge presented in museums.
It would be a mistake to assume that the disappearance of oil companies’ cultural patronage would completely decarbonize culture, as there is an existential connection between the modern exhibition culture and the modern energy system. The exhibition as a medium of culture has shaped the narrative of modern energy. Within the UK, there has been an intimate relationship between exhibitions, culture, and the development of modern energy since the 1851 Great Exhibition. As highlighted by Alice Bell, the central theme of this archetype of modern exhibition was the depiction of a new civilization based on the burning of coal, which was embodied in the displays of the steam engine, a diverse range of machine-produced industrial products, and fuel samples.8 Energy historians have documented how exhibitions publicly showcased the potential of modern energy, from electrical illumination to nuclear science, in tangible forms. Many major museums in the UK and continental Europe emerged from the mineral energy regime. In this longitudinal historical context, it should also be remembered that the early exhibitions on what we now recognize as environmental topics emerged from the coal economy. The first public exhibition on air pollution, the Smoke Abatement Exhibition of 1881–82, did not question the use of coal, as its main aim was to reduce pollution by promoting a more efficient use of coal, with an increased use of “smokeless” anthracite and gas appliances (when manufactured gas was generated by burning coal).9
The origins of some of Europe’s major science museums are directly related to the coal economy. For instance, the Deutsches Museum, conceived by electrical engineer Oskar von Miller and opened in 1906, was built on Coal Island (Kohleninsel); thus, the museum constitutes a physical legacy of the coal economy. Some of the original collections of the Science Museum in London, including steam locomotives, can be traced back to the 1851 Great Exhibition. Across Europe, steam engines and other coal-related displays such as model coal tunnels were key attractions around which science and technology museums were organized—and coal technology continues to dominate the stories of European industrialization told at public museums. Unlike in the US, there are only a few oil museums in Europe, with a few exceptions including the comparatively new Stavanger Oil Museum in Norway (established in 1999).
Exhibitions on the theme of energy have developed over more than a century in a world dominated by fossil fuel, and this historical context has shaped a distinctive form of cultural Exhibitions on the theme of energy have developed over more than a century in a world dominated by fossil fuel, and this historical context has shaped a distinctive form of cultural articulation that privileges the extensive use of mineral energy, particularly coal, oil, and their associated technology. This firmly embedded cultural value has only recently been challenged as the climate debate has entered museum exhibitions. American museums pioneered with exhibitions such as the Global Warming New Energy Future exhibition (2008–2009) at the American Museum of Natural History. In Europe, the Deutsches Museum’s Welcome to the Anthropocene (2014–2016) and energie.wenden (2017) exhibitions and the Science Museum’s Atmosphere Gallery (2012) heralded the new era of energy exhibition, though museums have been criticized for not being unequivocal about anthropogenic climate change.
With a growing consensus on global warming since the 2010s, discussing climate change in museums is no longer uncommon. Norwegian museums have been noted for their self-reflective practice in recent years, the latest example being the Teknisk Museum’s new exhibition Energy in the Time of Climate Crisis.10 However, the increasingly dominant climate change narrative conflicts with the conventional energy narrative that celebrates the fossil fuel economy as a landmark achievement in human history, which is evident in permanent galleries featuring steam engines, internal combustion engines, automobiles, planes, and space rockets. These contradictory stories can be confusing and frustrating for museum visitors who are mostly well-informed of the ongoing climate discussion. It is therefore imperative for museums to find a new narrative that encompasses the positive and negative aspects of our energy heritage.
Technological optimism is also deeply embedded in exhibitions. Science displays have been dominated by heroic stories of human ingenuity in what has already been invented, current experiments, and future realities. While hope about the future is important, the optimistic message of future fixes might appear to justify business as usual—a message the oil industry strives to secure. A public exchange between George Monbiot and Bob Ward in the Guardian in 2021 concerned a temporary exhibition on carbon capture technology, Our Future Planet at the Science Museum in London (2021–2022). Monbiot, journalist and climate activist, argued that two of the exhibition’s major benefactors, BP and Equinor (a Norwegian oil company), exaggerated the merits of the technology and the oil industry’s commitment to preventing global warming.11 Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Environment, defended the exhibition as a valuable contribution to the communication of climate change issues and technological options for the benefit of the general public.12 The debate has shifted from the ethics of accepting fossil fuel sponsorship to the broader issue of public knowledge about climate and energy. While this author is not convinced by Monbiot’s simplistic argument that having specific sponsors necessarily renders the exhibition untrustworthy, Ward’s technological optimism seems to have very limited appeal when the world desperately needs immediate responses beyond technical fixes to the rapidly deteriorating world climate.
Decarbonizing museums involves creating new climate-informed energy narratives, revising the existing progressive narrative, and exploring how this epistemological cultural decarbonization would realize the full potential of culture to encourage societal decarbonization and a renewable energy transition. In this process, museums can fully engage with the public not only by informing them but also by encouraging a debate, including one about their own displays.
Driving cultural decarbonization forward
As Stephanie LeMenager has remarked, “Every museum makes a statement about the future, about what kind of past will sustain it.”13 Indeed, museums constitute our energy futures through distinctively cultural experiences—by compelling us to reflect upon past energy choices that shaped our present climate predicament and to reimagine our energy future and move toward it. In this cultural space for speculation, despair, and hope, energy humanists have a rightful place. Museums, as cultural media, should not be viewed as innocuous, neutral sites that simply serve as platforms for knowledge transfer. Like any other cultural production, museums are dynamic sites where knowledge is negotiated, contested, and questioned.
In this space for contemplation and action, scholars are demanding a role greater than they have traditionally been allocated by making museums and exhibitions active sites of academic and political intervention. One notable example is the Museum of Carbon Ruins, a project initiated by researchers at Lund University, Sweden. The exhibit is set in 2053, when the global community has supposedly achieved net zero emissions of carbon dioxide. This exhibition encourages speculation about the energy future through displays including a jar of oil, a frequent flyer card, plastic products, and a hamburger.14 Collaboration with, rather than condemnation of, cultural practitioners seems to be the sensible way forward, as another collaborative project, Reimagining Museums for Climate Action, which coincided with the COP26 in Glasgow in 2020, demonstrated. The exhibition showcased how academic–practitioner co-curation can stimulate new ideas among experts while inspiring the public.15 Curiously and regrettably, energy-themed and science museums have often been excluded from these new initiatives, which, I argue, is partly due to the insufficient understanding of the unique and challenging natures and histories of those museums—a knowledge gap this article hopes to highlight.
Cultural decarbonization in museums is not just about refusing funding from oil companies. No less important is critiquing the high-carbon civilization and its accompanying value system. Energy humanities can uniquely contribute to decarbonizing our public culture, a key site where future visions are shaped, deep-seated assumptions are questioned, and, among all else, negative legacies from our carbon-intensive past are scrutinized and debated. In doing so, energy humanities become a form of critical praxis, which has the capacity to destabilize the entrenched energy-intense social values. Cultural institutions need this new alliance with energy humanities to reshape their values and roles to navigate our age of decarbonization ethically and critically.
Articles in this series
Introduction: Energy Humanities in Practice: Teaching, Technology, Transition
EH in Practice 1: Libraries and Laboratories: Teaching Energy Humanities in Literary Studies
EH in Practice 2: The World of Energy and The Myth of Containerization
EH in Practice 3: Museums and the Challenge of Cultural Decarbonization
EH in Practice 4: Preserving Oil: In Conversation with Educators at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum and Oil Museum of Canada
EH in Practice 5: Virtue Ethics and Ecosabotage
EH in Practice 6: The Rise and Fall of Energiewende: A Case Study in Horse Racing Syndrome
Notes
1. Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, “Breaking the Impasse: The Rise of Energy Humanities,” University Affairs 40, no. 3 (2014): 40–44.
2. Brenda Berck, “Museums: Rethinking the Boundaries,” Museum International 44, no. 2 (1992): 69–72; Robert R. Janes, Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse? (London: Routledge, 2009); Jeffrey K. Stine, “Placing Environmental History on Display,” Environmental History 7, no. 4 (2002): 566–88.
3. Fiona Cameron and Brett Neilson, Climate Change and Museum Futures (Routledge, 2015).
4. Julie’s Bicycle, Sustaining Great Art: Environmental Report, 2012–2015 (Arts Council England, 2015).
5. Sally Hickson, “Eco-Activist Attacks on Museum Artwork Ask Us to Figure out What We Value,” The Conversation, last modified November 3, 2022, http://theconversation.com/eco-activist-attacks-on-museum-artwork-ask-us-to-figure-out-what-we-value-193575
6. The author discussed the exhibition theme with the curatorial team during the gallery’s development stage and commented on the section about children’s ideas on energy saving. The author received no remuneration whatsoever.
7. Derrick Chong, “Tate and BP – Oil and Gas as the New Tobacco?: Arts Sponsorship, Branding, and Marketing,” in The International Handbooks of Museum Studies (Wiley & Sons, 2015), 179–201; George Monbiot, “Why Is the Science Museum Still Being Contaminated by Shell’s Dirty Money?,” The Guardian, last modified April 21, 2021, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/21/science-museum-shell-money-exhibition-climate.
8. Alice Bell, Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2021).
9. John Ranlett, “The Smoke Abatement Exhibition of 1881,” History Today 31 (1981): 10–13.
10. Lise Camilla Ruud and Erik Thorstensen, “‘We Must All Be Ready for Major Changes’: Visiting Climate for Change at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum,” Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 14, no. 1 (March 2022): 55–75, https://doi.org/10.3167/jemms.2022.140104. On the exhibition, see /www.tekniskmuseum.no/en/exhibition/energy.
11. Monbiot, “Why Is the Science Museum Still Being Contaminated by Shell’s Dirty Money?”
12. Bob Ward, “The Science Museum’s Carbon Capture Exhibition Is Not ‘Greenwash,’” The Guardian, last modified April 22, 2021, www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/22/the-science-museum-carbon-capture-exhibition-is-not-greenwash.
13. Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford University Press, 2014), 142.
14. www.climaginaries.org/carbon-ruins. See also Paul Graham Raven and Johannes Stripple, “Touring the Carbon Ruins: Towards an Ethics of Speculative Decarbonisation,” Global Discourse 11, nos. 1–2 (2021): 221–40. The project is discussed in Graeme Macdonald, Terra Schwerin Rowe and Hiroki Shin, "Museums of the Future," Volatile Trajectories (podcast), Nov 24, 2022, accessed Mar 28, 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUphrqAXx4w
15. Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling, Reimagining Museums for Climate Action (Museums for Climate Action, 2021).
