But the larger contributions Malm’s work makes are in the ways that the future figures into the past and present as a space for possibility in both positive and negative registers. These particular characteristics of Fossil Capital and The Progress of This Storm respectively are, to be sure, significant and productive lines of thought. Taken together, Malm’s works are not only compelling for the ways in which they develop an account of energy as a social relations through intricate research of past transitions or for how he builds a vision of the relation between society and nature that provides the foundations for moving beyond the political and agential deadlock that he asserts is the consequence of much contemporary thinking of nature. In doing so, Malm ultimately argues for a renewed attention to historical materialism and radical politics as a means through which to confront what he calls the “warming condition.” The Progress of This Storm broadens the scope of Fossil Capital, interrogating conceptions of relations between humans and nature in a warming world while taking to task popular theoretical movements such as constructionism, new materialism, hybridism, and posthumanism. In this transition, he finds a reorganization of the forces of production that strengthened capitalist relations and established the foundations for the fossil economy we know so well today.

Turning his attention to the energy transition that offered the bedrock for the energic relations of today, Malm’s Fossil Capital investigates the transition from the use of water power in industrial production to coal-fueled steam power, or as Malm understands it, from “flow” to “stock” - terms Malm employs to describe animate and inanimate energy forms more precisely. This thesis is the kernel around which Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso 2015) and The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (Verso 2018) are shaped. To confront and alter this course of history, we must think historically and we must think materially. We can feel it we will continue to feel it. In the wake of intensified anthropogenic climate change, the result of centuries of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, history is made present, if it indeed ever left us the first place. Decades after Fukuyama’s declaration of the supposed end of history, the sentiment could not be farther from the truth. In a warming world, the past materially invades the present and future.

The thermometer can be legitimately suspected as a barometer of the rolling invasion of the past into the present.

Malm fossil capital