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.