UniSysCat PostDoc Benjamin Steininger has been interviewed for the January 2025 edition of the German magazine GEO. Steininger speaks about petromodernity, the era of fossil raw materials, the end of which is now approaching. He talks about our strong dependency on oil, its deeply ambivalent character and explains why phasing out fossil fuels will be more difficult than many environmental activists claim.
“Much of what we experience as the beauty and achievements of modernity would not be possible without fossil fuels. Freedom, for example. Yes, really!“ This does not hold just for mobility, but even more general to the political and scientific culture of modernity. In the interview, Steininger recalls the achievements of petromodernity, which were only made possible by the use of fossil raw materials: “Fossil resources have made a diverse cultural and scientific landscape, democracy and co-determination possible - and quite banal, a life with leisure time and paid vacations.”
However, he very clearly emphasizes our ambivalent relationship with oil: it enables us to live a modern life - but at a high price. “The oil penetrates our cells and reaches us in the form of pharmaceutical products or cosmetics.” The beauty and horror of oil lie close together: “Oil is changing natural history. [...] Not to mention oil disasters and climate change.”
Fossil raw materials have shaped the 20th century, Steininger continues. He describes the transition to a post-petromodern age, in which we humans overcome fossil fuels, as a “planetary system change”. In the face of climate change and species extinction as consequences of the petromodern way of life, this transition cannot only take place when fossil fuels run out. Rather, the international community must manage the transition together in a global act of strength. And this is where Steininger still sees major difficulties: “If the global community can barely agree on the basic building blocks of humanitarian law, how can it succeed in achieving such a planetary system change?”
And yet Steininger dares to look to the future: “When we get away from oil, we will not forget the standards of what is feasible that were established in the petromodern era. […] However, energy will never again be as cheap as it was in the 1960s.” Finally, he leaves open the question of whether it will ever be possible to find other forms of energy so that everything can stay the same. “What is more interesting is what this dream suggests - and what it ignores.” Even with new technologies such as clean nuclear fusion, it is highly unlikely that everything will stay the same, Steininger said at the end of the interview.
In the world of energy use everything is connected, the smallest and the biggest, all branches of society and technilogy, hard facts as well as dreams as desires. If parts of the system change, the whole system changes. This is one of the lessons that we learned in petromoderny and to which chemical science and industry contributed more than we regularely reflect.
Dr. Benjamin Steininger is a cultural theorist, historian of science and technology and curator. He works as a PostDoc at UniSysCat and at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena. His main research fields are the history and theory of industrial catalysis, history and theory of fossil resources, the project of a "chemical cultural theory", and a "critique of fossil reason." One focus lies on the petromodern era, the age of fossil raw materials, and the role of catalysis in this period and the post-petromodern era into which we are currently embarking.