Powerless is a film about India’s energy poverty and the people’s desperate measures to create functioning infrastructure. Electricity “thieves” divert power to homes and small businesses and come head-to-head with electricity supply companies.

In case studies ranging from the Early Modern secondhand trade to utopian visions of human-powered vehicles, the contributions gathered here explore the historical fortunes of bicycling and waste recycling—tracing their development over time and providing valuable context for the policy successes and failures of today.

This article examines the energy transition in the iron industry and studies the consequence of this switch to coal-fueling technology upon forests.

Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.