Articles

In this Author's Note, Lisa Moore and Sheena Wilson turn to fiction to examine how petroculture shapes everyday life. Written during the pandemic, the 43 flash stories in We Were In It trace love, loss, and transformation amid energy transition, showing how collaborative storytelling can make the climate crisis felt in intimate, human terms.

Harry Pitt Scott examines the growing prominence of “electrify everything” as the guiding narrative of the energy transition. He traces how the International Energy Agency and advocates like Saul Griffith frame electrification as both necessary and sufficient, even as clean power lags behind demand. For Scott, the appeal of this vision lies in its promise of continuity, one that sees electricity as a clean replacement that leaves political and social arrangements unchanged.

In this EH feature, Sara Castelo Branco reflects on a symposium dedicated to the sun as a political object. Drawing on presentations about green hydrogen schemes, Chinese-financed solar plants, and the affective labour of solar maintenance, she argues that even the most sustainable energy imaginaries risk reproducing extractive and colonial logics. Orienting politics around the sun, she suggests, means confronting the unequal relations it continues to illuminate.

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.