Energy Ethics 2026: Infrastructures of Energy

Confronted with the climate crisis coupled with ambitions for first-mover positions in new Net Zero markets, many countries have embarked on energy transitions that move away from a reliance on fossil fuels towards more decarbonised energy systems. At the same time, we are seeing policy u-turns on climate policies and targets, societal challenges to energy transitions, and investors’ return to fossil fuel prospects.

Energy transitions have now become intense and urgent topics for debate.

While fossil fuels and nuclear have long been associated with the deepening of structural inequalities and injustices, there is also a growing critical engagement with renewables, due to their continued reliance on resources, capitalist circuits of investment, and links to mining via the critical minerals they require. Some scholars emphasise how the language of ‘transition’ unhelpfully communicate a fallacious idea of a break, moving from one kind of energy source to another. Other scholars highlight how our infrastructures of energy embed choices and decisions, value and values.

At the same time, the political positionings of anthropologists have become stronger, perhaps related to heightening political polarisation, the vulnerabilities laid bare by Covid-19, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the enrolment of social scientists into large energy infrastructure projects, popularist politics, and much more. Recognising infrastructures of energy’s extensive and multi-dimensional entanglements in contemporary life, it is ever-more urgent that we reflect on our interlocutors’ and our own ethical imaginations and politics of energy.

EE2026 asks: What is at stake in our infrastructures of energy? How can change come about? What visions of human and other flourishing are favoured in our infrastructures of energy?