Lukas Slothuus is a political researcher at the University of Sussex whose work explores the intersection of climate change, energy policy and political power. His research focuses on the political economy of fossil fuels, the challenges of phasing out their production and the broader relationship between climate politics and the rise of the far right. In this conversation with Fritzmag, Slothuus discusses why the transition away from fossil fuels requires more than technological change, how economic interests shape climate policy, and whether the left can offer a political alternative capable of addressing both the climate crisis and growing support for the far right.
Could you tell us about Lukas?
I was born and raised in provincial Denmark where I lived until I won a scholarship to Red Cross Nordic United World College on the Norwegian west coast. I then moved to the UK for university, studying politics at the LSE. I did my PhD at the University of Edinburgh but moved back to London for postdoctoral work at LSE and later the University of Sussex, which is where I am currently based.
My research concerns the politics and political economy of climate and energy. I’m currently part of a research project called ‘SUS-POL: Supply-side policies for fossil fuels’ where we look at attempts to phase out or at least curb fossil fuel production in real world cases: From Denmark to Colombia and from Ecuador to the UK. We try to understand how and why states unilaterally might decide to implement such policies and what their limitations are. I also have broader research interests in the relationship between far right politics and climate, imperialism and climate, and just green transitions.
In your work, you particularly emphasize that fossil fuels are not just an energy source, but also create economic and political power relations. When a city tries to move away from fossil fuels, does it actually have to transform not only its energy system, but also the economic interest groups and political relationships that have formed over the years?
It’s clear to me that fossil fuels dominate not just because they are useful but also because they are valuable. These are two different things. It’s true that fossil fuels are immensely useful, partly due to their material properties: oil is transportable and energy dense, but it is also geographically concentrated in often remote places which weakens the power of workers to challenge corporations. The work of Andreas Malm, Tim Mitchell, and Adam Hanieh has been really influential in making these sorts of arguments.
And like other economic sectors, the fossil fuel economy has produced incumbent actors who protect their power almost by any means necessary – whether as mercenaries in sub-Saharan Africa or through advertising and sponsorship in Northern Europe, or universally through lobbying and political campaigning.
A recent study from Norway showed that Norwegians think the massive fossil fuel company Equinor has around 30% of its energy production from renewables when in reality it’s less than 1%. You cannot achieve this level of distortion of facts without extensive advertising and greenwashing.
Fossil fuel companies will not simply hand over their power, but also that they try to reconstitute themselves in ever-increasingly creative and pernicious ways. We see this with their rebranding from fossil fuel companies to energy companies, the immense efforts to emphasise their miniscule renewables activities, and the attempts to prolong the fossil era through techno-fixes such as carbon capture and storage.
“What we need is a reduction in the total material throughput of economic activity“
You also address the debate between “green growth” and more radical social transformation. In your view, can the capitalist economic growth model truly be made compatible with a way out of the climate crisis, or does the problem itself lie in the logic of growth?
A common misunderstanding is that the end goal is just decarbonization. What we need is a reduction in the total material throughput of economic activity. One version of this is degrowth, which can mean many things and is often straw-manned into a caricature, whereby all economic activity across the globe must shrink. Degrowthers do not advocate this. Jason Hickel for example repeatedly reminds detractors that this is simply not what degrowth implies. It means that certain kinds of economic activity in certain parts of the world must shrink. This is why some degrowthers have shifted to advocating for post-growth, marking a break with the imperative of growth rather than the misnomer of wanting to shrink without qualification.
Take the transport sector for instance. Politicians of all stripes have thrown huge sums of public money at electric cars, whether through infrastructure investment, tax breaks, or other subsidies. Now it’s clear that petrol cars need to be phased out rapidly as they are one of the main culprits of emissions. But what happens with this transition from petrol to electric is way more pernicious, because what we are seeing is not just a one-to-one replacement of petrol cars with electric cars. In fact, this case is a good example of the Jevons Paradox. The Paradox states that efficiency gains are often eaten up by disproportionate increases in consumption. So low-carbon technologies, because they are often more efficient, can lead to an explosion in usage, leading to an increase in total emissions or materials.
Indeed, this is what’s happening with cars. Electric cars are getting bigger and bigger, thereby using more materials, even if their emissions from usage are much lower because of the switch from petrol to electricity. And it’s true that even a large electric car has a smaller total emissions footprint than a small petrol car. But what’s happening is also that we see more and more cars being bought. So at the national sectoral level, we are not seeing the drop in emissions we need. This is a decarbonization fallacy – the idea that all we need to do is decarbonize isolated elements of the economic system. We cannot grow ourselves out of this mess, no matter how much such growth is embellished with the label ‘green’. The point is that even if an electric car is much less destructive than a petrol car, it’s still very destructive. And we cannot let efficiency gains drive an explosion in consumption.
Now the problem with this is the political and economic implications. Let’s start with the political. Which politician is going to advocate restrictions on consumption and expect to win elections? Perhaps a small pocket of voters, most likely those who already have a very high standard of living, might stomach a sufficiency approach where they need to give up some forms of consumption. This is lifestyle environmentalism, which aligns with certain kinds of Protestant ethic. I see this across Northern Europe, where many middle class friends and family members definitely would be happy to support obstacles to further consumption even for themselves. But that cannot be the basis of a mass politics that is also trying to improve society. In a society where a third of children live in poverty, such as the UK, it is not just an electoral own goal but even offensive to advocate for such policies. This suggests that what is needed is a different approach. The trouble is that unequal exchange drains wealth from the global south to the global north, which means that combating the structural domination of some countries by others implies a loss of value capture too, implying a drop in living standards in the global north. But all of this runs up against the economic implications. Why would capital voluntarily give up on profit-seeking? That’s a contradiction in terms.
“It’s clear that the status quo cannot continue forever“
“Power” is an important concept in your work on the phased abandonment of fossil fuels. In climate policy today, who really holds the decision-making power: governments, energy companies, the financial sector, voters, or international markets?
Essentially, states have the power to phase out fossil fuels when there is no conflict with fossil capital. Such conflict can be avoided or overcome if the beneficiaries of production are willing to agree to a phaseout, for instance if trade unions can see just transition pathways to alternative employment for workers, if fossil fuel companies’ profits are declining, if there is popular resistance to the industry which increases liabilities and raises risks, and so on. The alternative option is for unilateral political decisions to restrict the fossil fuel industry, like what we’ve seen in Denmark or Colombia. But these are vulnerable to future change unless they align with some of the economic aspects I just mentioned.
How do you see the direction the world is heading? Can the rise of the far right be stopped? This will, in a sense, also have implications for your own field of work — unfortunately, many people don’t find the climate crisis credible.
The world is a scary place right now. The alliance of big tech and far right political leaders is particularly worrying. In some cases, I think the far right is its own worst enemy. Infighting, factionalism, corruption scandals, and poor quality of representatives all stand in the way of seizing political power. Look at Reform in the UK for instance, where controversial donations and splinters between the more moderate faction and various extremist factions and even the breakaway party Restore shows that political headwinds can very quickly change.
The other point is that climate change denying parties like Reform will begin to suffer from their own failure to develop climate policy – some of their heartlands are in the most flood-prone constituencies in the UK. As the climate crisis escalates, the idea of doing nothing will seem increasingly unappealing. Although, as we saw with the floods in Valencia, the far right might also be able to articulate a different narrative about the failures of establishment to protect people from disasters, by framing these in different ways than as produced by climate change.
What’s clear is that the global north is in a form of secular stagnation, with economic growth almost non-existent in Western Europe, and even declining in China too, for instance. This is why capitalists are pouring unfathomable sums into AI, to find a way to revive capitalism in deep and protracted trouble. There’s a big risk of a terrible fallout from all of this.
In your view, how can the left find its way back to a resurgence in politics?
It’s clear that the status quo cannot continue forever. There is widespread appetite for a different kind of politics and a different kind of society. Poll after poll show widespread support for nationalization of key economic sectors across many countries, from water to rail. The genocide in Palestine has mobilized millions to struggle for freedom for Palestinians.
The most effective answer to the failures of the status quo has been from reactionary forces on the far right – whether it’s AfD, Farage, Trump, Modi, or Bolsonaro. A lot of people are drawn in to this. But I’m always reminded of Walter Benjamin’s words that fascism seeks to give the people a voice without affecting the property structure. The point has to be to change the property structure. Voice is important but ultimately the left needs to develop a coherent set of politics anchored in material change. That means taking on the power of the big fossil fuel interests, multinational corporations, and tax havens.
There is no simple recipe, but the movement around Zohran Mamdani in New York has opened a path: focusing on concrete improvements in people’s lives, even something as simple as fixing potholes, while shifting control of economic activity out of commodification and profit-maximisation into public utility and benefit.
The major challenge is to find a way to fold climate policy into this. But the trouble is that in a global capitalist system that has penetrated almost all aspect of human activity, even socialist governments are severely constrained in what kind of policies they can pursue. Just look at Gustavo Petro in Colombia once again, he was punished by finance capital and the US, with all his reforms now under threat. China shows some promise in disciplining capital to serve state interests, including in climate and energy policy. It is clear we need muscular states that are willing to fight capital interests, but any individual state attempting this – unless it is the US or China – will be viciously attacked and destabilised. A non-capitalist future can therefore really only sustain itself if it is international. That’s the task ahead of us.
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