This panel puts into dialogue two fields of historical inquiry that have, until recently, been relatively siloed: energy history and climate history. To date, historians of science have largely told the history of the climate crisis as a story about climate denialism. They have painstakingly documented the powerful coalitions of industry trade groups, conservative think tanks, contrarian scientists, and bad-faith climate skeptics who worked to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming and thwart meaningful action on climate change. Meanwhile, historians of capitalism have emphasized the inextricable link between the emergence of the “fossil economy” and our current climate predicament, showing how, with the invention of steam power, the world was set on a path toward a destabilized climate. But in recent years, scholars have offered another explanation for the origins and durability of the climate crisis: the deep ideological and material linkages between the modern states and the carbon economy. Placing energy and fossil fuels at the center of analysis, this panel furthers attempts to reframe the history of the climate crisis as not merely an effect of bad-faith science denialism or the inexorable march of fossil capital but also as a story about the centrality of fossil fuels in the political and economic life of states and empires during the twentieth century. It brings together scholars interested in probing the conjunctural twentieth-century histories of carbon energy, the state, and the contemporary climate crisis.

Leah Aronowsky considers how the political legacy of the 1970s oil shocks informed scientific debates about what was or was not possible when it came to addressing climate change in the United States, especially when it came to the question of whether policy efforts should be oriented toward the goal of preventing climate change versus preparing for its inevitable consequences. Interrogating the role of emulation in the postcolonial embrace of energy-intensive development, Elizabeth Chatterjee explores the influence of foreign models in the emergence of India’s coal-dominated energy regime during the 1970s. Stephen Gross shows how financialization and neoliberalism extended to the oil industry during the long 1990s, reshaping this sector and enabling it to exploit challenging new hydrocarbon reserves at the very moment that climate was becoming politicized at the international level. And Dante LaRiccia’s contribution seeks to diversify existing typologies of “oil states” by moving beyond the narrow fixation on petroleum extraction. His paper examines the rise and fall of the Puerto Rican “processing state,” a political-economic formation that tied late colonial developmentalism to downstream petroleum refining—a strategy made all the more unstable by the recent confluence of contemporary climatic and neoliberal crises.