“We invented the Revolution, but we didn’t know how to run it. Look. Everyone wants to keep something from the past, a souvenir of the old regime. So, this man decides to keep a painting; this man keeps his mistress; this man keeps his horse; this man keeps his garden. That man keeps his farm lands; that man keeps his house in the country; that man keeps his factories; that man couldn’t bear to part with his shipyards; that man keeps his army; and that one keeps his King.”

– Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade

At the time of the French Revolution, “substitution” meant the appointment of a replacement or successor. In that spirit, contemporary energy politics (energopolitics as I prefer to call them) could be viewed as a grand epoch of substitution. Although the dominant language is “transition,” a conceptual pivot toward substitution is illuminating because it questions whether the next energy regime will replace or succeed the petroculture that currently dominates the world. To be clear, I am thinking of replacement and succession as qualitatively different modes of substitution.

A replacement regime would step eagerly and smoothly into the houses and factories of the ancien régime. Replacements are very often restorations; things are put back in their rightful place after an unsettled period. This was in fact the original meaning of “revolution” (Arendt 1963). A replacement regime likely wouldn’t part with the luxuries and conveniences that petroculture has gifted the global one percent. And so it would seek, against all reason and mercy, to continue to invest in the ecocidal capitalist growth trajectory that began in colonial plantations and was greatly amplified and accelerated by oil over the course of the twentieth century (Boyer 2023, LeMenager 2014).

A succeeding regime has more potentiality, “function in excess of the original form” as the editors slyly suggest. True, succession might be interpreted as continuation. But it is hard to deny the window of transformation that any process of succession inevitably opens. Successions rarely succeed by maintaining the logic and trajectory of the ancien régime, which, after all, likely perished alongside its relevance to the world. Also, where succession once meant simply the termination of something and the emergence of another, success means a happy resolution. With energy transition, success is what those not paralyzed by petroculture deeply yearn for.

So, what does success look like in transitional energopolitics? For many agents of the petrostate—a transnational infrastructural assemblage that spans everything from petrol pumps and gas stoves to asphalt surfacing, automobiles, and war machines—the game is to deny and defer transition for as long as possible. They will meet any act of reason with unreason. Although hallucinatory and conspiratorial in their beliefs, agents of the petrostate practice an all too realist and sincere necropolitics. Authoritarian regimes around the world organize themselves in mortal defense of oil and the concentration of political authority that fossil fuels permit. Sometimes the defense strategy focuses on guns and bombs (as in the forever war of the Middle East); sometimes (as in Europe) the defense centers on bureaucratic arcana like carbon accounting practices that have required little actual carbon accountability. Either way, if you doubt these regimes’ resolve and that they are prepared to sacrifice millions in defense of petroculture, then you misunderstand the political stakes and dynamics of our times.

Opposing petrostate necropolitics is a global, yet emergent and frayed, ecoliberal consensus. Its ethics of substitution are nuanced and multiple but generally replacement oriented. Ecoliberalism continues to be anthropologically derelict in mistaking petroculture for human nature. Its imagination is often paralyzed with respect to succession—“any alternative to capitalism would be catastrophic,” “people will never give up their cars,” etc.—and so, it dreams instead that the growth-oriented productive and circulatory apparatus of capitalism can be tamed, and its ecocidal trajectory averted, through decarbonization.

Decarbonization means many things to many people but it means rapid, radical electrification for most serious artisans of energy transition. It is easy to lose this thread when encountering the muffled cross-talk of energy transition in all its expert intricacy. But whether someone is advocating solar and storage or nuclear renaissance or even speculative bets on deep geothermal and green hydrogen systems, all of this advocacy points toward a magnitudes-greater embrace of electricity as infrastructural guarantor of the modern dispensation of artificial lighting, heat, appliances, transportation, and all things digital. As things stand, petro and electro exist as parallel but unequal infrastructural ecologies. There are certain vital energopolitical functions of state-ness, like providing steel and fuel for war machines, that only fossil fuels can currently deliver. That will change if ecoliberalism wrests political hegemony from petrocapitalism to bring a kinder, gentler, more “sustainable” green capitalism into the world.

Would-be electroauthoritarians like Elon Musk have already divulged that a replacement-oriented substitution of electro for petro would do little to rein in excessive resource use, injustice, and inequality, especially in whatever new resource frontiers electrocapital creates in pursuit of its own growth mission. We must acknowledge again the prescience of André Gorz who not only coined the term “degrowth” in the 1970s but also warned of the coming of “electrofascism” (1980) as he watched the French state sympoietically ally itself with nuclear power.

Can we wish for better success? I think so. A truly revolutionary process of substitution would ask for more than electrifying the status quo. The key challenge of energy substitution today is electrifying while also succeeding at overcoming the ideologies, habits, and infrastructures associated with petroculture, among them the dispossessive exuberance of petrocapital. Fossil fuels are concentrated energy; fossil fuel infrastructures concentrate authority; fossil fuel consumption precipitates the fantasy of otherworldly powers, whether the ability to ride a rocket into outer space or raise steel buildings hundreds of meters into the sky.

Electromagnetism, by contrast, is not a thing—a resource to be mined, owned, and controlled—but rather an environment, more ambient even than sunlight, and more often than not diffuse and interconnected. All life on earth (as well as many things considered non-living) emit electromagnetic waves and radiation. Electromagnetic fields overlap and interflow, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes disrupting one another. Electromagnetism, in other words, is already so much more pervasive than oil could ever hope to be. In a way, electromagnetism’s ubiquity is its democratic promise. It is always already part of us.

Electro is thus potentially so much more than its instrumentally domesticated form (electricity) and its rudimentary delivery technologies (e.g., power plants, grid), built to serve fossil fuels and thermal generation. Early electric utopians like Nikola Tesla understood this, imagining how tapping wirelessly into the massive electrical potential of the ionosphere could transform everything about the human use of energy. More recent architects of the solar commons like Hermann Scheer (2004) have argued similarly that electricity sourced locally from renewables is the only way to escape the violence of capital.

Electro holds marvelous potential. Why not dream of an electro that leaves the extractivist logic of petro far behind?