Swedish human ecologist, associate professor in Human Ecology at Lund University, and the most intellectually serious contemporary attempt to fuse Marxist political economy with climate analysis. Malm's 2016 Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming — drawn from his doctoral research — is the book that made his reputation. It argues, against the conventional Anthropocene story of humans-as-such driving climate change, that the fossil-fuel economy was not a response to scarcity or technical necessity but a capitalist choice: steam power defeated water power in early-19th-century Britain because coal-fired factories could be sited near labor supplies and disciplined more tightly, not because they were more efficient or cheaper. Fossil combustion, on this reading, was from the start an instrument of class power — what Malm calls fossil capital — and climate change is its consequence.
The later books extend the argument. The Progress of This Storm (2018) is a combative philosophical intervention against the strands of green theory (new materialism, hybridism, Latourian actor-network approaches) that Malm reads as dissolving the agency — and therefore the responsibility — of specific human actors. Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency (2020) reads the pandemic as a rehearsal for the permanent ecological crisis. How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021), his most controversial, argues that the climate movement has been too committed to absolute nonviolence and that strategic sabotage of fossil infrastructure has historical precedent in every successful liberation movement. The book was adapted into a 2022 feature film.