The Fossil Era
We have a long and messy history with fossil fuels. As you see in the timeline (click to enlarge), the fossil era consists of three distinct eras. From 1849 to 1972, during the great expansion, we dug up more and more fossil fuels. They made steel production cheap, fuelled local and international travel and freight – the world became smaller and the opportunities seemed endless. Milestones such as the first coal-fired power plant, the release of the T-ford and the introduction of plastics provided power, wealth and mobility to the masses.
Then the oil crisis hit in the 1970s; the black gold was suddenly scarce in the west – it was clear that our society was heavily reliant on fossil fuels to function. In addition to that, in the years to come it became increasingly clear that burning those fuels were causing climate change. This second period was in a sense, a mixed bag – Sweden got its first carbon tax, Paris & Kyoto happened but people were still debating whether climate change was even a problem! And plastics were everywhere; in our food, in our oceans, and in our football fields.
However, around 30 years ago, we started to see an accelerated transition. We started to enter “the transition years”. We saw massive mobilisation of social movements – strikes, sit ins, demonstrations. Then carbon bubble burst. Companies that made their revenue from extracting, refining or using fossil fuels were deemed a high-risk venture. Outcompeted by sun, wind and other renewable energy sources their stock plummeted. Owning a coal-plant turned from being an asset, to a liability. And the regulators finally caught up – the common agricultural policy in the EU became the Transitional Agricultural Policy – the Swedish pea and bean industry boomed as a result!
In the 2030s, several landmark victories really gave us hope. We closed the coal plant Belchatow in Poland, the price of crude oil sank below 10 dollars a barrel for the first time since 1986 and we closed the final Swedish blast furnace, which is pictured inside the exhibition. Finally, in 2045, we reached net zero emissions.
But as we’ll see in the exhibition below, the transition was not pain-free – not all species made it and controversial decisions led to conflicts around Europe.
Energy
Energy is the invisible elephant in the room of modern civilisation, and this is reflected in the stories of the other sectors explored in this exhibition. But the energy elephant has also made itself at home in our domestic spaces, powering our devices and appliances, and keeping our houses warm.
Electricity generation in Sweden was largely free of fossil fuels before the end of the 20th Century – but through the use of nuclear power and large hydroelectric installations. The rise of renewables such as wind and solar power in the early 21st Century offered an escape from reliance on these sources. But the re-localisation of energy generation was not without its critics and opponents, leading to waves of protest and long social struggles between different regions and classes.
Domestic warmth had largely been provided by district heating systems from the late 20th Century, though these were at first heavily reliant on burning fossil fuels and waste. A shift to biofuels, and then on to low-temperature systems based on renewable sources and “waste” heat from industry, was enabled by changes to how homes were built, furnished and lived in, replacing the old ways on display in this exhibition.
Black coal. Fossil fuel from Värtaverket, 2020
To the left we have the mother of all fossils: coal! This was the fossil fuel responsible for the most emissions and pollution during the fossil era. This particular piece was collected from the last Swedish coal plant to close, namely Värtaverket near Stockholm: in its final year of operations, it emitted as much carbon dioxide as all the city’s cars combined. Its owners, Stockholm Exergi, were quietly considering postponing the closing date in 2022, but local protesters – inspired by Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, and mindful of the devastation of Australia by wildfires in the preceding year[1] – would not accept any delays. This forced politicians to advance the timeline, and during the winter of 2020, the plant burned its last lump of coal.
Crude oil
Crude oil, also known as petroleum or naphtha, was the resource that besides coal epitomised the fossil era and that fueled industrialization, economic expansion and modernization in the 20th century. Crude oil is an extracted resource from which a range of petroleum products were produced. In oil refineries, crude oil was separated into petrol, diesel, kerosene, paraffin, fuel oil, lubricating oil and bitumen (asphalt), all petroleum products on which much of modern life was built.
Petrol
Petrol, a liquid fuel refined from crude oil, predominantly used for internal combustion engines in automobile cars, became the dominant transport fuel in the 20th century for personal car transportation. Petrol use was phased out due to rapid electrification of personal transportation since the 2020’s. Sales of petrol motors and vehicles were prohibited in Sweden and other EU countries in 2030, and global petrol demand peaked the same year. Petrol production fell drastically in the coming decade, partly substituted with renewable transport fuels such as biomethanol, cellulose-based ethanol and biogas.
Barsebäck nuclear power plant. Decomission electricity provider, 2005
Nuclear’s role in the energy transition was a contentious topic for much of the transition years, and it did experience something of a global resurgence. Growing economies, especially in Asia, saw nuclear as an efficient alternative to coal- and oil-based power generation. In Sweden, the Barsebeck plant became an important symbol for nuclear power. It was closed around the turn of the century, and the other Swedish reactors followed in the decades to come. However, switching off a nuclear reactor is only the first step of a long, long process: the decommissioning of Barsebeck was finally finished in 2037, and we won’t see the full remediation of the Forsmark or Oskarshamn sites for another decade or so.
Lund Cathedral. Prototype for roof-mounted solar cells, 2022
In 2023, the altar of Lund cathedral was set to celebrate its 900th anniversary. The parish of Lund wanted to show their commitment to solving climate change by mounting solar cells on the roof: an energy self-sufficient cathedral would surely dispel the image of the church as an antiquated institution!
In front of you is a prototype image developed for their proposal, which was eventually shot down by various government agencies and conservative parish members for reasons of cultural preservation. But where there is a will, there is a way – and just in time for a *second* 900th anniversary, this time of another altar within the cathedral, it was decided to replace the leaky lead roof itself with solar tiles! That’s why the cathedral still looks the same as it did a century ago: only if you look real closely on a sunny day can you see the extra shimmer from the roof.
Photo: Akademikern, Lunds fria studenttidning
Alum Slate. Battery mineral from Andrarum, 2030
Alum slate contains Vanadium, a mineral that is used primarily in the making of high-capacity batteries, which help us balance our electricity distribution and power our electric vehicles. It’s also used in high-strength steel, and in bicycle-grade titanium. This sample was given to us by the Österlen Mining Cooperative, who run the mines in eastern Skåne. Their operation was an early example of “least harm mining”, with the cooperative company first conceived as a response to protests in the 2020s that opposed foreign large-scale mining operations in the area.
Eudialyte. Electric motor mineral from Norra Kärr, 2046
This sample of Eudialyte was retrieved from the now infamous Norra Kärr mine, located just east of the Vättern lake. The area holds the only known reserves of rare earth metals within the EU. It also contains high amounts of neodymium, which is used in the electric motors and generators that allow electric vehicles and windmills to function. The mine in Norra Kärr is infamous due to the environmental disaster that occurred there seven years ago in 2046. A massive downpour – a genuine 50-year rainstorm, which was itself the result of a changed climate – caused the mining dam to burst, leaking toxic chemicals into the lake. The area is still being remediated today.
Transport
In some respects, not much in the world of transport changed during the transition years: most technologies now in use were available four decades ago, if not earlier. The true transition has been the reconfiguration of the relationship between vehicles, infrastructures, and people – as anyone old enough to have once owned an internal-combustion vehicle will surely recall.
The decline in car ownership begun only once the subsidies and policies that favoured them were removed by governments reacting belatedly to the undeniable effects of climate change. Once the ultimate symbol of individual freedom and convenience, cars became an expensive anachronism*, unwelcome in (if not actively excluded from) ever-greater sections of cities and towns, and multi-lane highways were torn up to be replaced by tramways and the “linear parks” that are now an urbanist’s cliché.
Those policies were pushed through to accommodate the backlash from “Generation Zero” (sometimes referred to as “the slowing”) which created a demand for neighbourhoods where travelling – whether for shopping, recreation, education or business – was not just unnecessary, but unwanted. This was enabled by the refactoring of global, regional and local logistics, as well as by substantial reforms in agricultural production, resulting in a world where mass is expensive to move.
Membership Card. Loyalty scheme for aviation, 2012
These so-called frequent flyer cards were actually intended to encourage the use of aviation! The more you flew, the more perks you got: reduced prices on your next flight, maybe, or skipping the queue for boarding, or perhaps sitting in a special private lounge, eating steak and guzzling champagne. For many of the people who held a card like this, being a frequent flyer meant you were a big deal – an important, high-status member of society.
This specific card belonged to a climate scientist who worked at Lund University. Originally from the US, she regularly crossed the Atlantic by plane to visit her family. But by combining those sorts of trips with travelling to academic conferences and doing fieldwork in remote locations, she – and many researchers like her – flew up to six times more than the average Swede. Given what she knew from her research, she was unable to ignore the implications. She decided to radically reduce her flying, becoming a pioneering champion of the ‘Flying Less’ movement among researchers. She saw her family less often as a result, of course – but a few years after her decision, she and her partner sailed across the ocean to return to the US. She has lived a life free from flying ever since.
Concrete. Drill core from Malmö, 2031
My grandpa used to talk about the 2014 floods as the turning point for the city of Malmö’s work on climate adaption. The way his generation related to water changed fundamentally, and so did the city’s approach to urban planning. Green spaces were expanded, and more and more of the city’s concrete surfaces began to resemble Swiss cheese, as large holes were drilled into them to allow water to flow back into the soil. You can see one of the drill cores in front of you; most of them were reused in other building projects around the city.
The overall use of concrete decreased during the transition years, because the massive emissions footprint of concrete production made developers fearful of the consequences of increasingly tough environmental regulations. Today we only use a fraction of what they used during the concrete
Plastics
A legacy of resistance to plastics can be traced back to the peak of the petrochemical hegemony around a century ago. However, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s, when the annual mass of plastics produced exceeded the mass of humanity itself, that their toxic effects – environmental, biological and psychological – became impossible to ignore. Symptoms previously ascribed to stress and poor self-care were shown to have direct causal links with plastics exposure from countless vectors, including clothing, water and food.
Despite the scientific evidence, it took the tireless work of activists, often suffering from the pathologies in question, to turn the tide of public opinion against the producers of “convenience”. The group called THERMOSET were the most dramatic, staging public interventions where they would encase their bodies in plastics in public spaces, but there were many others.
It is hard to grasp the ubiquity of petrochemical artefacts during the early decades of the 21st Century. Even for those who lived through them, the extent of the iconoclasm is almost incomprehensible. Hence the artefacts in this collection evoke a kind of inverse nostalgia, a retroactive revulsion at the extent to which we once surrounded, covered and penetrated ourselves with the by-products of the Great Extraction.
Oil platform. Made from fossil LEGO, 2053
This object is made from perhaps the most iconic material of the fossil era: plastic. This LEGO set is on loan to us from the local toy library, since we were keen to display LEGO from the time in which it was still made from oil. As more and more parents engaged with climate change, they looked around their homes for things that were causing it – and right there were their own children, playing with the very materials that endangered their futures.
As a result, LEGO became controversial. Parents and activists protested outside the LEGO offices, and almost drove the company to bankruptcy. The images of children, dressed in white gowns, with their hands covered in thick black sludge, transfixed the whole population of Denmark – and many people beyond. In the end, the Danish government had to step in to support LEGO in their transition to bio-based plastics. Today, the company stronger than ever – especially since they started renting out their products.
Stockings. Leg apparel made from fossil fuels, 2022
It took a long time until people started to feel awkward about dressing up in fossil clothes. This lovely pair of Nylon stockings is an example of how fossil fuels were to be found everywhere - even licked to our skin. Nylon was invented more than 100 years ago and presented by the chemical giant DuPont in 1939 at the world exhibition in New York.
![Artificial grass. Fake grass made of oil, 2024As you may have guessed, this is no ordinary grass – and it’s not just artificial, [1] it’s actually made from oil! It once had the space-aged name of “astro-turf”, and was mainly used for football pitch…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b114372710699291a3c3ea2/1556799052450-JD8O7W7M6KSRY3DGGIEI/CarbonRuins_0054.JPG)
Artificial grass. Fake grass made of oil, 2024
As you may have guessed, this is no ordinary grass – and it’s not just artificial, [1] it’s actually made from oil! It once had the space-aged name of “astro-turf”, and was mainly used for football pitches here in the northern hemisphere, which allowed allowed players and their clubs to leave both mud and lawnmowers in the past.
However, time took its toll on the plastic, slowly shredding it into smaller and smaller pieces. Combine that with the small rubber granules in the grass, and you have an environmental disaster at your hands: the resulting particles of microplastic ended up in places where they were not wanted, from local streams and rivers to the brains of fish. It wasn’t until certain municipalities, clubs and players attacked the issue head on that any progress was made to ban this material. Footballers For Future campaigned with the slogan “Put the ref in the sea, not the plastic” and Helsingborg’s football club sent seeds for quality pitch-grade grass to all their competitors.
Finally, the Swedish Football Association took a stance, and asked for government support in their fight to remove the plastic fields. In Lund, we were among the first municipalities to stop using astro-turf. Instead, we pioneered grass pitches using biochar – which sequestered carbon as the same time as making the grass more durable!
Road refuge. Grass made from fossil fuels is overtaken by grass, 2019
In this picture for the 10s, we see a true testament of the times - man tries to tame nature, bury her beneath petrol grass impostors. Just like Chernobyl was reclaimed by moose, wolf and deer - our abandoned airports, petrol stations and oil rigs were quickly overgrown with thriving nature as the transition accelerated.
Agriculture
To a historian, recent reconfigurations of agriculture could be seen as less of a revolution than a reversion to the norm, with the 20th Century’s profligate long-distance distribution of regional produce – not to mention its waste, subsidies and stockpiling – appearing as an aberrational episode.
Monoculture farming practices are in retreat worldwide, but the reduction in the beef and dairy systems that dominated Europe and the Americas is perhaps the most profound. Provoked in part by the rising cost of long-haul logistics and refrigeration, the impetus came mostly from below, as the spread of vegan and vegetarian lifestyles provoked a higher standard of quality and ethics among those who were still unwilling to entirely forgo animal products.
While the worst excesses of militant vegan terror-cells in the 2020s came close to provoking a backlash, the work of a new generation of farmers and chefs in producing and promoting healthy, locally-sourced foods untainted by refrigeration, preservatives and plastic packaging did much to normalise diets in which meat, dairy and exotic produce play a far smaller role. The adjustment of subsidy regimes toward rewilding and carbon sinks have resulted in the resurrection of landscapes last seen before the dawn of the industrial revolution.
The last fast-food hamburger. Animal-based food item, 2038
It was the epitome of the ‘energy glut’: fast, cheap & delicious. As critique grew of industrial meat, the slice of protein shifted, first to plants & legumes, then to in vitro meat. But there was no saving it, displayed before you is the last fast-food burger ever served in 2038. People still put slices of protein between buns - but golden arches and burger royalties are no more. Preserved and donated by Tobias Linné.
Cookbook. Early example of in vitro-recipies, 2014
The red book on display is an example of how people in 2013 imagined our diets might look today. As society sought ways to reduce meat consumption, some people looked to technology for the answer. In the early days of in-vitro meat, this cookbook – containing fifty recipes for lab-grown meat – was written by a team of Dutch designers. Some of the dishes eventually caught on: the “painless foie gras”, for example, is now favoured by gourmands, and of course there are IKEA’s infamous basement-grown “magic meatballs”.
Other dishes were less of a success… such as the in-vitro kebab. Many restaurants experimented with it, this spinning spear of never-ending meat – it was one hell of a weird business model! But customers were apparently repulsed by this “living” meat being harvested right in front of their eyes – and to be honest, I can’t imagine eating it myself. However, we have heard rumours that there a few places left in Malmö where you can still buy homegrown kebabs… if you know who to ask.
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is a collective term that encompasses all the variation between species, within species and habitats on earth. More different species and varieties of species make natural environments less vulnerable and increase nature's ability to cope with sudden changes, for example in climate. During the 20th century, agriculture was intensified. As a result, many species became extinct and biodiversity declined sharply. Two of the most diverse environments in Sweden are unfertilised pastures and old-growth trees.
Insects are threatened both directly by a changed climate, and indirectly when we change land-use to grow more crop for renewable fuel, allow encroachment of trees and shrubs in pastures without grazing or mowing, and plant pastures with forest. Many wild bees, butterflies and other insects depend on pastures and many beetles depend on old trees and dead wood, environments that are lost in intensively used agricultural and forestry landscapes. Insects play key roles in ecosystems, and drastic changes in the number of insects and species composition can lead to major changes to our ecosystems, and threaten our food production.
Stag beetle, black-veined white & shrill carder bee. Victims and opportunists from the transition years, 2052.
When it comes to other creatures, like the insects here, some of them were favoured by climate change and some of them have had to struggle. The big insect you see in the left corner is the Lucanus cervus, or the stag beetle. It had to struggle quite a lot even before climate change accelerated because of the way we've managed our forests here in Sweden. The stag beetle needs old trees, with hollow middles, or dead trees to live. With the large focus on using forests for biofuels and other biomaterials to replace fossil fuels and create so-called 'negative emission' solutions, much of the little land left were oak thrived was also planted with fast growing tree species like spruce and pine, making it even less likely that we are going to have enough of these old, half-dead trees for insects like the stag beetle to live in. The last years a more diversified forests industry seem to be developing and perhaps we will soon see a shift in the century long conflict between those who wants to see a larger utilisation of biomass and those who wants to keep the forest standing.
Other insect species fared better during the fossil era. The butterfly you see here, the Aporia crataegi, or the black-veined white has benefitted from the warm and dry summers we've mostly have had in Sweden the last 25 years and nowadays it is common also in the far north and not only in southern Sweden as it used to be.
A species that struggled but is now an example of how things can go well is Bombus Sylvarum, the shrill carder bee. We are now beginning to see the effects of TAP, one of them being more semi-natural pasture lands (naturbetesmarker) which provided safe havens for this and other wild bees.
Steel
The dominant uses of steel were always hidden in plain sight, embedded in the equally eco-cidal material known as concrete. While the high-rise buildings of the early 21st Century are only now beginning to be deconstructed, their rebar and girders earmarked and pre-sold to fund their replacements, the decline of thrusting vertical architectural forms in recent decades is testament to a turn toward renewable materials in construction and development, and the renaissance of wood in particular.
In the consumer sphere, the search for alternatives to steel was a response to various forms of activism, such as “rust-shaming”, the tagging of steel objects with corrosive chemicals. But banishing steel entirely would be impossible, with many vital infrastructures relying on its unmatched strength and versatility. That necessity, combined with the increasing economic and ecological costs of carbon-based fuels, helped push clean production methods, recycling, and more efficient utilisation practices to the fore.
The consumer objects in this collection are durable anachronisms, as valuable for their steel content by mass as for their status as antiques; they never became objects of loathing in the manner of plastic products. But behind the scenes, steel’s story continues, with all Swedish production now entirely fossil-free.
Water bottle. Recycled fossil steel, 2034
The anti-plastic movement was spreading rapidly around the world during the twenty-teens, and so these steel water bottles could be found everywhere. However, during the steel crisis in the 2030s, brought on by the closure of polluting blast furnaces, steel objects like these became more and more controversial. There simply wasn’t enough scrap metal available for recycling, to replace the virgin steel made from iron ore. Campaigners sought to remedy this by collecting ‘unnecessary’ steel. This popular movement, dubbed ‘Circular Steel’, used the water bottle as a symbol for all the non-essential steel products in circulation.
And there were plenty of consumer products made from steel. Did you know that they had ‘filing cabinets’ made from steel, which were used to store hundreds of sheets of wood-pulp paper? What a waste! This was less due to steel’s strength than to its aesthetic properties. Luckily, most of these objects were collected and recycled into infrastructure and windmills during the 2030s.
Why all this steel antagonism? During the fossil era, steel was one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, since you had to burn coal or fossil gas to reduce the iron ore. Sure, there were products made from recycled steel back then, such as this water bottle on display here, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Now that we are seeing hydrogen-based steelworks opening up around the world, perhaps we will have a steel bottle renaissance – who knows?
See also image of the last Swedish Blast furnace, to the left, closed in 2042.
From the newspaper archives
From the archives: Nylon Nightmares (2030)
In 1939, the first nylon stocking was displayed at the World’s Fair as an object of desire; as the Smithsonian Museum put it in its online magazine, the nylon stocking changed the world: ‘one humble pair of lady’s stockings in the Smithsonian collections represents nothing less than the dawn of a new age – the age of synthetic.’
But while in 2019, the nylon stocking could be celebrated with a kind of nostalgia, by 2049, the tale of the seductive nature of synthetic clothing had become almost entirely cautionary. How did this happen?
By the turn of the 21st century, nylon tights had fallen out of fashion, but synthetic clothing had taken hold across the board in the development of functional technical clothing of all kinds. And again, this worked with the ideas of luxury, functionality and desire – just as, in their day, the nylon stocking had done.
However, there were signs of dissatisfaction with these forms of clothing as reports began to emerge of pollution of the seas with microfibres that, in turn, entered the food chain. This led to a broader concern with the kinds of plastics that were to be found in the human body. Donna Haraway’s cyborg took on a new urgency.
By 2003/2004, it had already been established in a US-based study that human bodies contained BPA. Over the next decade, this was further developed in academic and medical studies of different kinds.
A real breakthrough took place in 2029, when a new device became readily available that enabled people to have their plasticity levels checked and monitored. Along with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, a high plastic count became another issue to be diagnosed and treated. This led on the development of new medications to reduce / breakdown plastic residues in the population, resulting in bonanza for the pharmaceutical and wellbeing industries, and placing in question common health practices such as the use of plastic sealants on the teeth of children.
Soon after, as part of an exhibition on plastic bodies, a memorable artwork was produced by a celebrated Swedish artist which depicted a dark vision of bodies being slowly strangled from the inside out by a nylon stocking turned serpent. The object that was once the stuff of dreams had become the stuff of nightmares. This work became the emblem of activists in the way, earlier, that Chris Jordan’s photographs of birds at Midway Atoll had done.
Clothing went through many iterations, always stressing seduction. But when did that seductive edge take a turn for the sinister?
From the archives: An alien within (2028)
Today, a committee of the national scientific council has released a report with damning conclusions regarding hundreds of deaths previously seen as unexplained. All these fatalities, the committee concludes after an extensive review of the available evidence, are plastic-related. The report condemns government authorities for ‘failing in what once would have been seen as their primary task; protecting the health and safety of their citizens.’
They suffered from fatigue, rashes, hair loss, joint and muscle pain, memory loss – in short, from that ill-defined cluster of symptoms that most GP’s will diagnose as stress-related. The question we should have been asking, but didn’t: stress from what?
This is perhaps the most shocking aspect of the report: our inability to see what was so obviously coming. We all knew the pictures of birds and whales suffocated by plastic. We were used to the suffering of others, non-human or otherwise. When in the 2010s the controversy surrounding breast implants erupted, the public was quick to condemn women driven by ‘vanity’. They had allowed alien substances such as silicon, epoxy resins, polyvinyl chloride and other substances into their bodies, trusting naively that this toxic mixture would remain safely contained within the implants themselves. According to a commonly heard comment, this was a ‘pathetic’ group for relying on the state to spell out the risks of plastics.
Meanwhile, invisible microbeads found their way into all our bodies. Unnoticed, they crept into our blood, lymph nodes and livers, which ultimately led to the fatalities that have only now been explained. Blame can no longer be shifted towards irresponsible consumers. Unless we acknowledge that all of us, without a single exception, belong to that group and have done so for years. The alien is now in all of us, and it is here to stay.