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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.
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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.
Nélia Dias, Rodney Harrison, Dolly Jørgensen, Gertjan Plets, and Colin Sterling introduce Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage (PITCH) sector in the context of green transitions, a new Horizon Europe and UK Research and Innovation funded research project that brings together academic and cultural sector partners in six countries. The project aims to spur on the processes by which humanities and arts scholarship and public interventions can strengthen citizen engagement with the constantly changing nature of cultural heritage and its relationship to past and present petrocultures to lay the groundwork for rapid, society-wide European green transitions away from a reliance on fossil fuels.
Many people first encounter energy history in museums, where they learn about heroic steam powered engines and fossil-fueled technologies. The history of solar energy technologies, argues Frédéric Caille, is often either forgotten or repressed in these spaces. Such forgetting distorts our understanding of the past and narrows our sense of future possibilities. With his collaborative project to recover, reconstruct, and display forgotten solar water pumps from the 1970s, Caille and his colleagues frame forgotten solar technologies as “cosmograms”: objects which describe the world as it could have been, and could yet become.
In "The Thread of Energy" (OUP, 2021), Martin J. Pasqualetti "treats energy as a social issue with a technical component, rather than the other way around." In this Author's Note, Pasqualetti tells the story of how he came to realize the social importance of energy while outlining the book's key topics and themes for prospective readers.
