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Abstract: In Energy and Equity (1973), Ivan Illich made a powerful case for a threshold beyond which the amount of energy expended has an inverse relationship to collective flourishing–a sentiment that reflected contemporary debates around the biophysical limits of economic growth. In this paper, I revisit Illich with the hindsight of decades of political struggle against the forces of a planetary “petropatriarchy” lately emboldened by renewed calls to “drill baby drill.” I then turn to speculative fictions, such as those collected in Elly Blue’s Biketopia series, that imagine a post-oil horizon neither powered by invisible labor, nor beset by scarcity.

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