Is energy geography running out of steam?

Abstract

Ptak and co-authors make a strong case for the importance of energy geography. However, it is not clear from the article how energy geography will engage with novel trends and emerging socio-political crises. This leads me to question whether energy geography is actually starting to run out of steam. I argue that we should be less concerned with the sub-discipline's purported peripherality, and instead seek to renew the field with the purpose of engaging with the real-world crises around us. As an example, I discuss the potential of energy geography for understanding the emergence of right-wing populism.

Introduction

Energy sits at the core of crises proliferating around us – not just climate change and other ecological pressures, but also the crises of legitimacy of mainstream politics. In their argument for ‘repositioning energy geographies in a time of crises’, Ptak et al. (2025) deliver a strong testament to the relevance of energy geography for understanding socio-ecological crises around us. I concur with the authors that, without an acute sense of how energy plays into shaping the proliferating socio-ecological crises around us, Geography as a discipline would lose a key analytical lens.

Energy geography is probably also the sub-discipline best positioned to deliver puns. In its prose, social actors are ‘empowered’, ‘fuelled’, and ‘energised’. The title of my article offers another example.

However, the article by Ptak and co-authors also made me wonder if the sub-discipline of energy geography is starting to run out of steam. The agenda the article offers is, in my opinion, too focused on the position, recognition and organisation of the sub-discipline per se, on its ‘peripherality’ in the discipline of Geography. It is not focused enough on offering a novel research agenda that can help us navigate the key societal challenges of the future. I was left wondering, what is the future agenda and purpose of energy geography, besides trying to become less peripheral? What are the new areas of concern, what new and innovative concepts and perspectives are emerging, and how will they help us understand and act upon emerging socio-ecological crises?

Energy geography in the political fault lines of our times

In particular, I missed a discussion of the rise of right-wing populism, which in my mind is the fundamental problem emerging in the past decade. Conflicts over how to deliver energy, at what price, and how to shift patterns of energy use, have been central to the ability of the populist right to mobilise political discontent and gain support in elections. Rising electricity prices, increased fuel taxes, road tolls, congestion charging, low emission zones, urban densification and other energy-related measures are policies that have generated anger, protest actions and declining legitimacy of mainstream political leaders – particularly at the urban scale (Gössling et al., 2024). At the moment, discontent against energy and climate policies and right-wing populism debilitate us from tackling the socio-ecological crises our political leaders should have been focused on.

A future-oriented agenda for energy geography should have a lot to say about the rise of right-wing populism and inform efforts to counter it. Yet, ‘populism’ receives a single mention by Ptak and co-authors, and then it is in the context of leftist populism – which is not exactly the brand of populism currently shaping the world.

The causes underlying the surge of right-wing populism are complex and involve long-term structural issues of socio-economic divergence (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018; Rodríguez-Pose and Bartalucci, 2024). But if I had to pick one policy area or sector that generated the discontent fuelling this, it would be energy. The current spatial politics of energy sits at the core of the apparent fragmentation of the Western ‘post-political’ consensus, stimulating the wave of populism that is currently shredding the marginal possibilities we had for governing towards planetary sustainability. Energy is key to the narratives used to justify the ongoing dismantling of key democratic institutions and to hollow out agencies tasked with advancing energy transitions and climate mitigation (Yazar and Haarstad, 2023). I can think of no better argument for the relevance of energy geographies than this. But where is energy geography in this debate?

The failure to properly manage the energy transition towards sustainability in a spatially just way is, arguably, an important reason for the apparent widespread discontent. When we studied these protests in a Nordic urban context in the DEMOCLIM project we found that protest groups were primarily concerned with how these issues affected their spheres of everyday life (Haarstad et al., 2024). In other words, discontent is ‘real’ and not just a result of people being ill-informed climate sceptics. Groups mobilising against climate and energy-related policies in the case of cities complained that decision-making was opaque, and that ‘the green transition’ discourse served to frame their claims as backwards and misguided.

The civic discontent against certain energy-related policies is not hard to understand. Urban policies related to the energy transition have been unfairly distributed. Road tolls are typically paid by those who commute into city centres by car (Böcker et al., 2024; Hansla et al., 2017). This includes low-income groups living in suburban and rural areas where public transportation is not an option. Similarly, low-emission zones in city centres burden low-income and vulnerable car owners (De Vrij and Vanoutrive, 2022) – not just the well-off ones. Meanwhile, ecological projects and urban densification in city centres contribute to ‘green gentrification’ (Anguelovski et al., 2022), which pushes low-income groups into suburban areas where cars may be the most affordable option. Meanwhile, policy discourses and academic analyses have often portrayed these car-dependent citizens, and the suburban spaces they reside in, as highly problematic.

Not everyone protesting against energy-related policies is right-wing populist, obviously. Nevertheless, the discontent that people experience and express around these issues can easily find its way into populist politics, because the discontent is at its core about the legitimacy of mainstream governance and decision-making (Lockwood, 2018; Mudde, 2010). Right-wing populism has found effective ways to capture these sentiments – the pro-climate or leftist movements have not. It seems that, across these energy-related policy areas, political decision-makers are failing to convince broad sections of the citizenry that energy transitions are necessary or that the costs and benefits of these policies are fairly distributed.

The defence of the incumbent energy regime is among right-wing populism's greatest hits. This is illustrated by tropes such as ‘Trump digs coal’ or the claim that there is a ‘war on cars’. Thereby, energy can come to mark a major ideological fault line in contemporary society. What type of energy source a person backs – fossil or renewable – appears to signal what type of politics one favours more broadly. Renewables signals progressive, sustainability-oriented politics of change, while an affinity for fossil fuels signals that one is ‘realist’ and in touch with the real-life challenges that ‘ordinary’ people face here and now. At the current moment, with widespread socio-economic hardship, the storyline around ‘real-life’ challenges of ‘ordinary’ people is winning hearts and minds. This undermines not only our ability to navigate towards ecological sustainability and development within planetary boundaries (an ability that was already quite fragile), it also undermines progress that has been made in social justice around gender, ethnicity and much else.

In other words, our inability to manage and frame the energy transition in a just manner is, in my reading, a source of the discontent that is helping the populist right mobilise support and votes.

Against this backdrop, I was somewhat puzzled by the Ptak and co-authors’ framing of energy geography as ‘peripheral’ and ‘marginal’. Rather than outlining a set of innovative themes and approaches for analysing the key issues of our time in new ways, the agenda they set out is primarily focused, as I read it, on strengthening the position of the sub-discipline of energy geography vis-à-vis other sub-disciplines in geography. To me, that may actually be a sign that this sub-discipline is running out of steam. Is the creative and novel invigoration of ideas in energy geography being replaced by concern for disciplinary ordering and appreciation from peers?

What is ‘peripherality’ in human geography, anyway?

In any case, the claim that a sub-discipline is ‘peripheral’ builds on some assumptions I do not necessarily share. This would assume that the discipline has a centre, but it is not clear to me that it has. I see human geography as a bricolage of various intersecting knowledge-generating networks that are loosely and dynamically organised, without a clear centre or hierarchy.

The major conferences, such as the annual conference American Association of Geographers, are examples of this. There are thousands of presentations across several conference locations, and most can find a community for their chosen topic. Of course, there are keynotes and the President's address and such, but these do not necessarily create strong centrifugal points. In this diverse landscape of themes, methods and approaches it is hard to identify any structures at all – and thanks for that. Likewise, the pages of the discipline's flagship journals are filled with a wide variety of topics and perspectives, without any clear hierarchy or thematic pecking order. Perhaps some themes and framings are more prevalent than others, but I have not seen evidence that particular themes are actively marginalised.

And even if one could establish that a particular sub-discipline was, by some measure, on the periphery – would it matter? The position of the sub-discipline vis-à-vis other sub-disciplines in the academic-institutional order of things should not be a significant matter of concern for us. The measure of the value of academic work is rather that it helps us understand the world around us and act on it in an informed way. By that measure, energy geography is already central to human geography because, as Ptak and co-authors document in an excellent way, work in the sub-discipline has developed the conceptual tools to shed light on the key challenges of our time. But let's look forward by focusing on building that substantive thematic agenda and its worldly relevance.

The agenda for energy geography going forward should be to help the academic community and epistemic communities beyond academia comprehend the role of energy in the major challenges of our time, and to act on these challenges in ways that advance transformations towards justice and sustainability. Energy geography can help us think more carefully about the politics and narratives of energy in the way we navigate the Anthropocene. I would challenge the authors to not just emphasise how energy geographers have analysed the way energy has shaped society in the past. How can these insights concretely be used to shape imaginaries and pathways in the future? What are the lacunas and weaknesses the sub-discipline needs to mend? How can energy geography and its conceptual repertoire reinvigorate itself to help tackle emerging socio-ecological crises?

I have proposed that the rise and spread of right-wing populism is that major challenge (although there are of course other candidates). Here is ample work to be done in tracking and shedding light on how energy-related discourses are used to legitimize its regressive policy agenda and dismantle institutions. Energy geographers can inform attempts to energy policies that are more inclusive and value plural, and that thereby do not fan the flames of discontent as previous policy regimes have done. An energy geography that can deliver on these things would constitute a discipline steaming ahead, reenergized and empowered (as some of the sub-disciplines most beloved puns would put it). Also, there are probably many more puns to be made.