Energy Futures

Ajith Raj and Rachel W. Jekanowski

Related terms: Anthropocene, critical future studies, energy humanities, energy transition, petrocultures, thermodynamics.

The terms ‘energy’ and ‘future’ acquire vastly different meanings when combined. While ‘energy’ is colloquially used to describe the generation, use, and transmission of power – and the transformation of power into motion (Park and Allaby 2017) – the concept of an ‘energy future’ holds vastly divergent meanings within public discourse, energy policy, finance, and visual and literary culture. Within speculative fiction, for instance, authors explore how conflicts over energy reserves, such as offshore oil in the Norwegian hit television series Occupied (2015-2019), lead to societal struggle and political repression. More hopeful and less extractivist visions of the future predicated on smaller-scale, renewable energy sources appear in the American solarpunk novel A Psalm for the Wild Built (2021). Within government policy, economics, and development discourses, ‘energy futures’ are more typically framed in nationalist or techno-managerial terms, emphasizing risk management with ‘fiscal energy futures,’ national security (e.g., ‘securing the energy future’), or state sovereignty over natural resources (Abram, Waltorp, Ortar, and Pink 2023).

We propose that ‘energy futures’ express the imagined trajectories by which societies produce, distribute, and consume energy through visions of the time to come or could come to pass. By linking ideas about ‘the future’ with present-day beliefs about how energy shapes societies, economies, culture, and environments, ‘energy futures’ bring together ideas of place, time, and energy in complex, often conflicting ways.

In this glossary entry, we unpack this concept using theories from energy studies and critical futures studies while grounding energy futures (and the fuels that power them) in specific geographies. As transdisciplinary and cultural scholars, we approach future-thinking in relation to the places where we work: the island of Newfoundland in Eastern Canada, a meeting place of cultures and energy flows for millennia. This approach demonstrates how place-based energy futures manifest and change, shedding light on the delicate connections between what powers life and how energy remakes ecological and cultural worlds.

As geographers and anthropologists have shown, energy futures are inseparable from place, ideology, and history. Seated in a heated house on Fogo Island, Ajith reads the lyrics to a poem, “A Life on the Ocean Wave” by Epes Sargent, from the songbook Songs for Newfoundland Youth. Watching the stormy weather outside as the song’s imagery unfolds contrasts strongly with his upbringing in a tropical climate:

A life on the ocean wave
A home on the rolling deep
Where the scatter'd waters rave
And the winds reveal their keep
Like an eagle cag'd I pine
On this dull unchanging shore
Oh give me the flashing brine
The spray and the tempest's roar

How have islanders over the centuries made Fogo Island home, despite the harsh weather and distance from the mainland? For energy scholars like Laura Watts (2018), the answer lies in the flexible production and harnessing of energy. Long before propane stoves or gas-powered cars, Fogo islanders developed ways of using other forms of energy to build and sustain their communities. They fished for cod, building an economy and culture around this source of metabolic energy. Channeling creative energies and labor, islanders built saltbox houses and local gardens to shelter both people and subsistence agriculture against the harsh weather. The same ferocious Atlantic winds and tides have become promises of renewable energy sources, which could power tomorrow’s electric grids.

Lest we fall into rosy accounts of resilient island communities, place-based histories of energy reveal how human industry shapes environments at all scales. Within the Anthropocene, modern life is definitely shaped by fossil fuels, even within geographic peripheries. Newfoundland, with its heavy winds, has become a site of speculation for renewable energy futures as heavily industrialized countries such as Germany seek to develop alternative fuels abroad for domestic energy needs (Butler 2022; Dallaire, Jekanowski, and Roberts 2025).

‘Energy,’ in its broadest sense, is the capacity to do work (Pinkus 2016). According to the first law of thermodynamics, also called the law of energy conservation, energy cannot be created nor destroyed in a closed system; it is converted from one form into another, producing heat, force, and movement.

Since the Enlightenment, Western philosophical writing on energy systems has been shaped by economic ideas premised on neoclassical thought and a Cartesian worldview, which imagined the world system as a machine composed of nature, society, and economy. This mechanistic metaphor appropriated the first law of thermodynamics – the conservation of energy – to support a productivist ideology and free-market utopia, wherein nature was imagined as a boundless reservoir of transformable, reversible energy without degradation (Walker 2020). Neoclassical economic imaginaries sidestepped the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, the energy dispersal or disorder, inevitably increases in closed systems, as no energy conversion is fully efficient. This law, equally applicable to planetary systems that neoclassical economics conceived as ‘closed,’ undermines the notion of perpetual growth in economic models (Walker 2020).

When viewed from the edge of the Atlantic, the fallacies of applying thermodynamics to neoclassical economics are cast in stark relief. Jeremy Walker, drawing on ecological economists like Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, states that modern economic growth is entropic and fueled by high-energy inputs (Walker 2020). Within the petroleum-fueled Anthropocene, burning fossil fuels transforms high-quality (low-entropy) energy into unusable, high-entropy waste in the form of heat, pollution, and ecological degradation. When industrial activity exceeds the capacity of natural systems to absorb and recycle waste, the entropic burden leads to systemic decline and disorder, such as global heating and ecological degradation. As such, climate change and the decline of energy systems are fundamentally entropic problems, driving systems toward disorder unless balanced by more sustainable practices and ecological regeneration.

Neoclassical economics constructs what Walker identifies as “agnotology,” a systematic ignorance built on abstracting the economy from bio-physical realities. This perspective frames the economy as a self-correcting equilibrium machine, overlooking entropy. This framing commits an epistemic fallacy, mistaking closed-system thermodynamics for real-world dynamics, and an ontological reduction, in which energy, once embedded in ecological and social relations, becomes a fictitious commodity (Block and Somers 2017; Walker 2020).

Energy humanities scholarship, a subset of the environmental humanities, adopts energy as an object of study from thermodynamics to explore how fuels and energy systems contribute to social, political, cultural, and economic changes. Cara New Daggett in The Birth of Energy (2019), for instance, explores the metaphorical and cultural expressions of ‘energy,’ pushing its definition beyond combustible or renewable fuel inputs to include biological and social metabolic energies, labour, social activities, and even cultural vitality. Thinking with Daggett, the song “A Life on the Ocean Wave” becomes more than a reminder of the past. It is also evidence of the creative energies of a place. Through this lens, the definition of ‘energy’ can be expanded to encompass cultural exertions of labour, including the ways that environments inspire and fuel artistic labor, storytelling, and other artistic expressions. As Epes’ song contrasts the static, unchanging shore with the “flashing brine” and “tempest’s roar,” we might hear the spiritual energy of this place emerge, expressing vitality amidst hardship.

Energy, in all its forms, abounds in St. John’s, the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador (Jekanowski, Polack, Farquharson, and Bavington 2020). The harbor, which dominates the city’s physical and cultural geography, is busy with marine traffic: small-scale fishing boats, offshore oil supply vessels, towering cruise ships during the summer months, and the occasional DFO ship or naval ship. Harbour Drive runs along this working harbor, offering a popular walking route with views of Signal Hill and the Narrows, and access to several of the city’s artist-run centers. Material and cultural expressions of ‘energy’ are layered on this landscape, as transnational finance, tourism, local fisheries, oil infrastructures, state power, and creative energies manifest different – and often conflicting – imaginaries of desirable futures.

Theorizing energy futures through place offers important insights for environmental humanities scholars and practitioners; expanding, first and foremost, ideas of energy beyond thermodynamic, material qualities to also encompass social, cultural, financial, and political valences. St. John’s, like other resource-dependent cities across the province including Labrador City (mining) and Corner Brook (paper pulp), manifest how values, identity, politics, and even public art become bound up with the production and consumption of fuels, including but not limited to oil and gas (LeMenager 2014; Szeman and Boyer 2017; Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman 2017). Contested energy geographies such as the St. John’s Harbour can also prompt questions about the material and ethical questions of future-making. Which futures are being ‘energized’ in a given place, and for whom (Mathews and Barnes 2016)? How does ‘energy’ – and fuel – materially and imaginatively shape constructions of ‘the future’ across societies, geographies, and history?

Cogent interdisciplinary fields such as critical future studies provide analytical frameworks to explore some of these questions. Critical future studies examine practices and discourses of future-making, moving beyond quantitative methods such as prediction, forecasting, and scenario-building (Godhe and Goode 2018). Like explorations of deep time in the environmental humanities (Farrier 2019; Yusoff 2013; Yusoff 2024), this field expands temporal frames to include geological time and deep time scales, challenging anthropocentric temporal narratives, which are critical for sustainability and ethical future-making (Adam and Groves 2007). Ethical energy future-making, from this lens, might embody more reciprocal forms of care and temporal expansions of state and institutional responsibility to future generations, fostering agency and self-determination through less extractive energy production and use (Slaughter 1998; Adam and Groves 2007).

A prominent site of emergent (and speculative) ‘energy futures’ is Newfoundland’s wind-to-hydrogen sector, proposing large-scale wind farms and green hydrogen plants along the west coast of the island. While still in the impact assessment phase, these proposed developments showcase the dual realities of ‘energy’: it is essential to contemporary life, yet its infrastructures and finances frequently fuel inequality. Energy infrastructures such as pipelines, grids, and ports are built not only as material enablers but also in alignment with the neoclassical economic vision of unlimited growth without any material constraints. The locations of pipelines or oil refineries have been shown to seed injustices, including pollution, environmental racism, and political disenfranchisement. In Canada, like in many countries, the expansion of pipelines has resulted in ‘fossil fuel lock-in,’ tethering regional and national economies, as well as energy consumers, to oil and gas extraction (Brooks et al. 2023). In the wake of settler colonialism, imperialism, and accelerated extractivist regimes, ‘energy’ is difficult to untangle from the ways that extractive financial regimes and racial structures of power are used to prop up “settler futurity” at the expense of Indigenous, Black, and immigrant peoples (Tuck and Yang 2012). Renewable energy developments such as wind farms are not exempt from this dynamic. Like oil and gas, these infrastructures are entangled with the political structures, imaginaries, and epistemologies they help realize (Mathews and Barnes 2016). Decarbonizing local and global energy systems without challenging dominant neoliberal epistemic frameworks within energy discourse risks continued extraction and the foreclosure of more just energy futures. Just transitions cannot be achieved through technological change or fuel substitutions alone but require new epistemologies and imaginaries that transcend colonial and business-as-usual rationalities (Stirling 2014; Jasanoff 2018).

The interdisciplinary tools and critical inquiry offered by the environmental humanities can help reveal foundational myths and logics underpinning capitalist extraction. Chief amongst these is the metaphor of the world system-as-machine, through which techno-scientific and neoclassical energy futures derive their legitimacy. The environmental humanities provide critical frameworks for understanding how imaginaries of both ‘energy’ and ‘the future’ are used to prop up exploitative economic systems, political regimes, and oppressive ideologies. At the same time, approaches from environmental humanities and critical future studies may offer synthesizing ethical future discourses centering on entropy as a cultural problem, not a technical externality (Walker 2020). Such discourses are instrumental in challenging disembodied objectivity; a “view from nowhere” overlooks power dynamics, marginalized voices, and claims neutrality (Jue 2020). This brings forth relational ontologies that account for social justice, thermodynamic realities, and ecological sustainability in conceptualizing ethical energy futures without conforming to ‘there is no way out’ narratives.

Tracing manifestations of ‘energies’ across time, through their embeddedness in Newfoundland, we have sought to show how energy futures are tied to place, as well as to ethical questions of justice, equity, and self-determination. By foregrounding situated and interdisciplinary approaches to imagined pathways and temporalities of ‘energy,’ environmental humanities scholars can be better equipped to trace co-existing and conflicting futurities – and grapple with the forms of injustice these future imaginaries may manifest. Imagining more ethical energy futures requires engagement with ‘energy’ as an expansive category, linked to culture, society, and place. Asking ‘whose futures’ are being championed in cultural histories or corporate proposals for new energy developments can help scholars and activists resist both extractive logics and reductive equations between energy production and economic growth. To enact more sustainable and socially just futures, future-making must center on ethical questions, charting a path away from extractive imaginaries towards sustaining life otherwise.

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