Energy—Capital—Metabolism

Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago
April 24–25, 2025 | Social Science Research Building & 1155 E. 60th St.
Register↗

Energy—Capital—Metabolism

Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago

Social Science Research Building & 1155 E. 60th St.
April 24–25, 2025

Register↗

← Conference Overview

The Politics of Energy-in-Transformation

Moderated by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Department of History and CEGU, The University of Chicago

Friday, April 25, 2025, 9:00–10:30am
John Hope Franklin Room, Social Science Research Building
(2^nd Floor, 1126 E. 59th St.)

“There are no energy transitions, just energy additions” might be the single most prominent critique leveled by the energy humanities. But how true is this, really? How useful is it for scholars or policymakers? This paper draws on a longue duree energy flows analysis of the United States to argue for more fine-grained analysis of energy transitions—and to argue that this analysis matters for both groups. Wholesale substitution of one fuel for another—what most people seem to understand as an “energy transition”—happens at large scales quite regularly, so why have fuels so rarely been abandoned at the national or international level? Drawing on historical examples of energy transitions within American transportation systems, I aim to show that large scale substitutions happen, that energy flows analysis shows why the abandoned fuels did not disappear, that these transitions drove increased overall energy consumption, and that they are reversible—if our political projects to reverse them are precise and targeted.

Robert Suits is an Assistant Professor in Environmental History at University College London. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago before holding postdoctoral positions at the University of Calgary and at the University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on energy, climate, and labor. His first book, The Hobo: An Environmental History, explores how migrant work in the industrial United States developed in response to energy transitions and climate disasters; he is also the lead researcher on a wide-ranging digital history project exploring energy transitions across U.S. history.

Securing an affordable source of energy to keep warm has long been critical to the health and wellbeing of the British public. From the mine to the hearth, gas pipe to boiler, heat has crystalized the relationship between bodies and carbon over the twentieth century. As the coal fire was replaced by electric and gas central heating in the post-war decades, it forged new connections between bodies and energy markets, which became increasingly globalized by the 1970s. The welfare state played a central role in ushering in this transition, through a mass house building program and regeneration program. But once it became clear that these new heating forms often made energy too expensive to use, it was the welfare state, through its benefit assistance program, which took on the burden of ensuring all citizens could afford fuel to warm their homes. This paper will explore how far different parts of the welfare state, such as health and housing, embedded new patterns of energy consumption which would later have to be subsidized by the state in the wake of price shocks and privatization. In doing so, the paper will foreground the role of the state in organizing the metabolic flows of energy through society, and highlight its role in shaping, and ultimately reinforcing society’s dependence on carbon.

Rebecca Wright is an Assistant Professor in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. Her research has focussed on cultural histories of energy, and more recently, how energy and health have co-evolved over the twentieth century. She is currently the Principal Investigator on a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award, “Carbon Bodies: Warmth and Fuelling Health in Britain, 1918 to 2022”. She has a forthcoming monograph, Moral Energy in America: From the Progressive Era to the Atomic Bomb, which will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press this Spring. 

Referring to socio-ecological studies, a socio-ecological (or socio-metabolic) regime is at first characterized by its energy system, in connection to material flows and land use. A transition occurs when a major change in energy can be observed: from uncontrolled solar energy (hunter-gatherers regime) to controlled solar energy (agrarian regime), then to fossil and fissil sources (industrial regime). Regarding this second transition, it is accompanied by the growing intensity of material flows, the linearization and the externalization of the social metabolism, especially the urban one.  In this talk, I would like to address the question of transition in the particular case of cities, in the European context of old industrialization and of the present injunction to ecological transition. I would like to show that the industrial regime that developed since the 18th century (we could discuss this) is still in its phase of development and consolidation, through a (at least) three steps process, meaning that the present-day situation is far from announcing a new socio-ecological transition that would involve major changes in energy, material and land flows and stocks. The analysis will mobilize a metabolic reading of the city, through the prism of the history of techniques and the environment. It will be based on empirical material relating more specifically to Paris and French cities.

Sabine Barles is professor of urbanism at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and researcher at UMR Géographie-cités. Trained as a civil engineer, she holds a Master degree in history of technology and a PhD in urban planning. Her work focuses on the materiality of human societies: she is interested in urban environmental history and history of urban technology (18th-21st century), in urban metabolism and territorial ecology. She also developed with an interdisciplinary group of colleagues some prospective socio-ecological scenarios (2050) for the Seine river basin.