Event – The Cultural Logic of Energy in a Warming World

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The Cultural Logic of Energy in a Warming World

Friday – 6 March 2026 – 2pm MST – University of Calgary – B1 561

Calgary Institute for the Humanities

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The Energy in Society Working Group invites you to the first Energy Talks lecture, featuring Dr. Caleb Wellum. This talk explores the cultural and political foundations of America’s enduring attachment to fossil fuels and asks why that attachment remains so powerful today.

Despite the accelerating climate crisis, the United States is retreating from green energy in favor of fossil fuels. Some experts have attributed this shift to a populist backlash rooted in disinformation while others have diagnosed a geopolitical realignment in an emerging cold war. Turning into recent history and to the “energy humanities,” this lecture reconsiders how the relationship between fossil fuels and core cultural assumptions and values in America informed the creation of a resilient petroculture—one with a distinct “cultural logic” of energy that continues to shape populist politics, definitions of the national interest, and visions of the future.

Dr. Caleb Wellum is an historian and Senior Research Associate in the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is author of Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America (2023), co-author of The Renewable Normal (forthcoming in October 2026), and co-editor of the new Energy Humanities journal.

Feature Image: “Cromarty Firth Oil Rigs” by joiseyshowaa is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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Caleb Wellum

Caleb Wellum is an Assistant Professor (limited term) in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. In addition to teaching courses in modern history, Wellum is the Editor of Energy Humanities and a co-convener of After Oil 3. He is currently at work on several new projects, among them an environmental history of the New Economy and a study of energy in the philosophy of history.

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