It is tempting to see fossil energy systems through a technical lens: emissions, efficiency, and reliability. But these technologies are also political. They are shaped by an array of political decisions, and structure our lives and political possibilities in return. Today’s fossil energy systems centralise wealth, concentrate power, and demand both protection and expansion. In doing so, they cultivate the very conditions in which authoritarianism thrives.

Authoritarianism did not begin with coal. Empires, monarchies, and dictatorships predate both steam engines and oil fields. But fossil fuels have reconfigured political power in ways that make more concentrated forms of domination possible and profitable – especially compared to alternate energy systems. In Fossil Capital, human ecologist Andreas Malm traces how 19th-century British industrialists shifted from water power to coal not because it was initially cheaper or more efficient, but because coal offered control. Early hydropowered factories were constrained to rivers. Coal power, rather than harnessing the natural, seasonal ‘flow’ of river or wind power, was based on ‘stock’ that could be owned, hoarded and transported – burned anywhere, any time. It freed industrialists from natural rhythms and from the bargaining power of workers who had to be coaxed to riverside company towns.

Coal allowed capital to concentrate production in urban centres, to circumnavigate workers’ organising with cheap labour, and to accelerate output beyond ecological limits. Fossil power, Malm argues, did not simply fuel capitalism; it reshaped it. 19th century Western notions of political power and fossil power evolved together. Industrialists and politicians could suddenly conceive of making and doing more than ever – of reshaping the world. They could dream of unlimited economic growth because theoretically, generating more profit meant adding more engines and fuel to generate more power. If capital annihilates time and space, as Marx and later David Harvey argue, fossil energy systems have been a primary mechanism.[1]

Do Technologies Have Politics?

Much has been made of technology’s ability to steer society. For decades, theorists have pushed back against the idea of ‘technological determinism’ – that technologies develop according to their own internal logic and, in doing so, mechanically determine the development of social and political life. That critique is important. Technologies do not act on their own. Even automated technologies are designed, financed, governed, maintained, operated and contested by people. Still, rejecting technological determinism does not mean technologies are politically neutral.

Technologies do structure the world in which we exist and our behaviour within it, and at scale, they structure the range of political possibilities. Technologies are shaped by the cultural contexts they emerge from and into – by political decisions. They are also constantly being adapted, and people constantly push back, using technologies in ways they were not initially designed for.[2] The question, then, is not whether technology determines politics in some simplistic, mechanical way. It is whether certain technologies, within particular historical and political contexts, are more structurally compatible with certain forms of power than others.

Langdon Winner’s influential essay Do Artifacts Have Politics?[3] explores the idea that some technologies actively require particular social arrangements, while others are simply more compatible with them.[4] Nuclear power, for example, might require centralized control, security, and a techno-scientific elite due to its scale, complexity, and dangerous materials. Solar, by contrast, does not require democracy, nor automatically produce it, but it is more compatible with decentralized and participatory forms of social organisation because it can be built and managed at smaller scales, with less dangerous materials.

Fossil Authoritarianism

Fossil energy systems could be read as highly compatible with authoritarianism according to Winner’s framework. When energy is dense, storable, and transportable, it lends itself to centralisation. Today’s fossil energy systems – with their oil fields, rigs, mines, pipelines, terminals, refineries, and power stations, require huge economies of scale, massive capital outlays, and coordinated management. Put another way, efficient large-scale fossil energy systems require large accumulations of power, and in turn, facilitate the further concentration of power. As nations’ industrial and domestic lives evolve alongside and come to depend on fossil energy, the result is a system where power – in the form of wealth, as well as broader strategic, productive, and political leverage – accumulates in the hands of those who coordinate this extraction, controlling key ‘choke points’.

Political scientists observe a ‘resource curse’ – countries dependent on fossil revenues tend to exhibit more corruption, authoritarian governance and weaker democratic institutions. The logic is structural: when governments are funded through resource rents over taxation, they are less accountable to citizens. In Russia, fossil revenues have underwritten a centralised executive, financing domestic repression and foreign aggression. In Saudi Arabia, petroleum wealth has sustained a repressive absolute monarchy. In Venezuela, dependence on oil exports has contributed to cycles of economic volatility and executive overreach. These countries differ dramatically in history and ideology, but share energy systems that concentrate wealth and power.

Where large corporations form the backbone of fossil energy systems, power accumulates in these companies, which enter into symbiotic relationships with states and shape governance through regulatory capture, lobbying power, and revolving doors.

For the last century, nations – whether outright petro-states or ‘merely’ fossil-reliant states with strong fossil energy lobbies – have been incentivised and encouraged to maintain and defend these systems, with the state often providing that protection. The powerful incumbents necessitated by fossil energy systems have every incentive to resist transition, and any efforts to constrain them. Disruption, especially that which threatens this fossil energy backbone, becomes existential. Around the world, Indigenous Land Defenders and environmental activists face crackdowns, criminalisation, and violence from companies and states for their opposition, leading to the normalisation of surveillance and further expansion of executive authority at home.

The militarisation required to defend these interests is turned both inwards and outwards. Securing access to oil and gas abroad, to ensure a functioning society, and for further enrichment and accumulation of power, has regularly justified coups, invasions, and military expansion. Trump's celebration – ‘the oil is beginning to flow’ – after intervention in Venezuela offers a strikingly unvarnished example. Threats to supply justify further concentrations of power. With entire economies hinging on fossil-fuel supplies, when prices crash, as with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the American-Israeli war on Iran, inflation surges, social programs collapse, and volatility justifies emergency powers and further centralised decision-making.

The politics of renewable energy systems

Renewable energy systems, fortunately, offer the possibility of organizing power differently. Critically, they lend themselves to decentralization. We can power homes without the same economies of scale (and concentrations of power) that large fossil fuel systems necessitate. Renewables provide intermittent, though fairly predictable power. They ask societies to adapt to the places and times when energy wells up, using and storing it accordingly. It is much more difficult to hoard and trade flows of renewables than stocks of fossil fuel – they can be stored in batteries, but do not accommodate the same hoarding, speculation, and profit concentration that underpin fossil energy markets. Solar and wind also forgo dirty, expensive fuel. Their copper, silicon, and steel carry ecological costs, but are less harmful and more abundant – and so do not require the same dependencies and related militarism.

If tomorrow’s world is to include energy-intensive hospitals and industries, for example, larger scale wind and solar farms will remain necessary. It is more difficult for entities to accumulate profit and power from larger renewable projects than large centralised fossil infrastructure, but it is still possible. Choke points can be designed. Renewables occupy stolen land, or be imposed without consent. While renewable systems require far less mining than fossil systems,[5] today's dominant storage technologies, batteries, rely on heavily extractive lithium and cobalt industries. It is still possible to bend technologies to a particular political and cultural context. The point is not that renewables guarantee democracy – merely that they remain more compatible with it. Questions over who owns renewable infrastructure, who provides the materials and who benefits, are political, not technical, and must be fought for.

As we confront climate breakdown, we are not only choosing between energy sources but political possibilities. To dismantle fossil infrastructure is to loosen the grip of systems of power built on command and control. The transition is not predetermined. It will require conscious design. Energy technologies have always been political. The question now is whether we allow the politics of fossil power to define our future, or whether we design a renewable energy system that facilitates alternative forms of power.