Fossil Capitalism

Historical Context

The roots of fossil capitalism stretch back to the Industrial Revolution, when coal, and later oil, transformed manufacturing, transportation, and daily life. The logic of endless growth—fueled by cheap, concentrated energy—enabled new forms of wealth, imperial expansion, and technological innovation. Throughout the twentieth century, fossil fuels became the lifeblood of the global economy: cities, armies, supply chains, and financial markets all depended on their relentless extraction and combustion.

As the planet warmed and environmental crises intensified, critics like Andreas Malm (in Fossil Capital) have argued that fossil capitalism is not a historical accident, but a deliberate system of power. It is perpetuated by states, corporations, and financial institutions that profit from, and enforce, continued dependency on fossil energy.

Everyday Presence

Fossil capitalism is omnipresent, even if often invisible. The electricity powering our homes, the plastics wrapping our products, the logistics moving goods across continents—all depend on fossil energy. Highways, skyscrapers, smartphones, and even food systems are tied to oil, gas, and coal. Modern life’s convenience and speed are subsidized by the geological past, made liquid and combustible.

The patterns of consumption, waste, and mobility promoted by fossil capitalism shape desires and dreams—car culture, global tourism, suburban expansion, and the ideology of perpetual growth.

Social and Political Dimension

Fossil capitalism structures not only economies, but societies and geopolitical orders. It generates vast inequalities: oil-rich nations and corporate elites accumulate immense wealth, while extraction sites and marginalized communities bear the brunt of pollution, displacement, and violence. Energy security and access become sources of conflict, shaping alliances, wars, and international policies.

Climate change, the defining crisis of the twenty-first century, is inseparable from fossil capitalism. Efforts to transition to renewable energy confront the entrenched interests, financial systems, and cultural logics that sustain fossil-fueled economies. Greenwashing, carbon trading, and technological fixes often serve to mask or delay the structural transformation required.

Philosophical Reflection

Philosophically, fossil capitalism challenges our understanding of time, value, and responsibility. It compresses geological epochs into the instant gratification of economic growth, turning ancient sunlight into fleeting profits. The system externalizes costs—environmental, social, existential—while naturalizing the belief that progress and prosperity must come from extraction and expansion.

Fossil capitalism exposes the paradox of modernity: the power to remake the world is won at the price of destabilizing the very conditions for life.

Hybrid Collapse Perspective

Within Hybrid Collapse, fossil capitalism is the engine of both utopia and catastrophe. It powers biopolitical regimes, aestheticizes destruction, and turns energy into a symbol of status, beauty, and control. The system seduces populations with speed, comfort, and spectacle, even as it exhausts bodies, ecologies, and futures.

Art, ritual, and resistance within the Hybrid Collapse universe grapple with the shadow of fossil capitalism: the world built by oil is a world haunted by entropy, loss, and the impossible dream of endless extraction.

In Hybrid Collapse, fossil capitalism is not just an economic system, but the mythic logic beneath the architecture of power, beauty, and planetary decline.