This interdisciplinary Ph.D. seminar considers some of the major critical-theoretical approaches to energy as a formative dimension of global capitalism, with a particular emphasis on its historical geographies, its intermeshing with social power relations and imperial geopolitics, its political-institutional mediations, and its wide-ranging socio-environmental dimensions, from the microbiological to the planetary scales. In exploring such issues, we are especially concerned with the role of fossil-capitalist energy regimes in the proliferation of environmental crises, disasters and emergencies under contemporary conditions, and with the possible pathways for post-fossil forms of societal development (whether in capitalist or post-capitalist forms).

Following some broad overview readings on the “Anthropocene” debate and on the environment-making, crisis-riven dynamics of capitalism, we consider several major social-theoretical perspectives on energy systems and regimes—including various forms of sociohistorical thermodynamics; and a range of heterodox, Marxian-inspired approaches to the problematique. On this basis, we examine in detail the influential “fossil capital” hypothesis introduced by Andreas Malm as a key perspective on the specifically energetic (as opposed to merely environmental) dimensions of the “Capitalocene,” an epoch of historical time in which the dynamics, contradictions, and crisis tendencies of capital have fundamentally reshaped planetary environmental conditions. We then consider various historical-geographical perspectives on the pathways and transformations of fossil capital (and its extended, imperial metabolic dynamics) in relation to key political-economic transformations of the “long twentieth century,” especially since the “Great Acceleration” of the post-World War II period. Finally, we explore scholarship on emergent “renewable” or “Green” energy transitions, with particular attention to their geopolitical, territorial and sociopolitical dimensions in an early 21st century context of proliferating environmental emergencies and imperial conflict. The class concludes with a brief engagement with several key perspectives on how a post-fossil social formation might (or should) be configured, constructed and governed.