Imre Szeman's new book, "Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over Renewable Life," explores how dominant powers—from "meta-entrepreneurs" like Elon Musk and Bill Gates to nationalist governments and petro-populists—compete to define a "common sense" of renewable futures that preserves the very systems driving the climate crisis. In this unorthodox review of the book, communications scholar and theorist Tanner Mirrlees introduces the text through a series of thematically connected concepts and questions that chart his response to the book and offer entry points for prospective readers. Mirrlees presents "Futures of the Sun" as a text that it will be important and useful to think with in a perplexing moment of flux and uncertainty in global climate politics.
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.
In A Social Ecology of Capital, the Canadian social theorist Éric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, Pineault highlights the deep contradictions that humanity now faces.
In this author's note on her new co-authored book, A Strategic Nature, Melissa Aronczyk explores the connection between public relations and carbon democracy. Aronczyk also details her surprising relationship with E. Bruce Harrison, the PR pioneer who dedicated his career to crafting messages for chemical and energy companies and whose contributions to our contemporary "culture of publicity" continue to shape political struggles over the environment.
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.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes, art historians, curators, and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre at University College London, discuss their new book, Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar. Through essays, interviews, and artistic interventions, the book examines the decline of sugar beet production in Eastern Europe as synecdoche of post-Soviet transition while reckoning with the entangled histories of sugar, colonialism, and extractivism in the Caribbean and Eastern Europe and suggesting alternate futures.
Helios is an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life. In this fifth installment, Nicholas Carby-Denning interviews University of Toronto political scientists Teresa Kramarz and Donald Kingsbury about their book Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador: The People's Oil? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Although this conversation took place in late 2022, its exploration of energy and populist politics continues to resonate in late 2024.
