Short Abstract

This roundtable explores how anthropologists can re-politicise energy debates amid green extractivism, technocracy, and rising fossil fascism, highlighting ethnographic voices that challenge authoritarian and neoliberal visions of the climate future.

Long Abstract

As Tornel and Dunlap (2025) brilliantly argue, responses to the climate crisis often fail to generate structural transformations of the economic and political systems sustaining it and are increasingly framed within technocratic discourses that reinforce the dominance of so-called fossil capitalism (idem). Within this context, two opposing poles emerge. On the one side, the same old extractivism, now labelled as “green” (Dunlap et al. 2024), embraces a notion of sustainability that becomes a colonial tool for territorial control (Andreucci and Zografos 2022). On the other side, a more cynical faction of the capitalist elites has abandoned even the pretence of sustainability, taking refuge instead in a fantasy of collapse that justifies authoritarian policies, hyper-surveillance and dispossession (Klein and Taylor 2025). The notion of “fossil fascism” (Malm and Colectivo Zetkin 2024) accurately describes the authoritarian reaction to the end of cheap energy abundance, marked by nostalgic, racist and anti-ecological hyper-nationalism.

Currently, talks about energy pervade both public and academic discourses. Meanwhile, authoritarian policies increasingly undermine freedom of expression and neoliberalism applied to science and universities limits research freedom. We therefore ask: What options do anthropologists have to make an impact on these issues and convey ethnographic voices and visions that are different, alternative and resistant? What spaces and tools exist for anthropologists to re-politicise energy issues, removing them from the exclusive domain of experts and anti-political practices, and to influence policy-makers from a public anthropology perspective?

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