Facing a fossil free future through the past: The importance of history for understanding fossil fuel phaseouts

Abstract

The study of policies limiting the production of fossil fuels must be appropriately historicised. Contextualising these policies within a longer-term historical and wider geopolitical perspective helps illuminate the political dynamics and trajectories that variably give rise to, or prevent, such supply-side policies. Attention to this longer history furthermore helps understand the origins of the long-standing, powerful resistance to moving away from producing fossil fuels and how it might be overcome. In this article, I make the case for historicising fossil fuel supply-side policies following broader moves toward historicising the climate crisis. I contribute both conceptually and methodologically to the emerging literature on fossil fuel supply-side policies and broader politics of energy and climate. I chart the limited short-term past and present scope of the academic literature on these policies. I outline the necessary resources and tools, conceptual and practical, for better incorporating a historical dimension, both temporally and geopolitically. These include archival research, analysis of historical policy documents, interviews to construct oral histories and testimonies, as well as engagement with the secondary history literature. I illustrate these points with reference to the prominent supply-side example of Denmark, the first significant oil and gas producer to implement a phaseout policy, before reflecting on how to apply these lessons of historicization to other examples.