In the recent U.S. elections, Louisianians voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and against subsizing polluting industries. Casey Williams explains how to understand this result and what it could mean for the future of fossil fuels.

Casey Williams provides a definition and overview of the Energy Humanities. It is a field of studies that attends to the ways energy resources, systems, and use patterns shape the material, social, and cultural conditions of modern life. Understanding what it means to live in a fossil-fueled world—at a moment when planetary warming compels a transition away from fossil energy—is its chief task. What new habits, values, desires, and forms of life and art might obtain in a world “after oil”?