This paper documents the perennial role of energy in geographic thought. The science of thermodynamics initially challenged geography's evolutionary and geological precepts. This incommensurability was overcome by the development of organismic theories of statehood. Energy went on to provide a means to make determinate statements about the relation between climate and society. With the rejection of such determinism, energy slowly regained eminence, particularly in post-war French geography. This work encouraged economic geographers to draw on new national records of energy use to describe and analyse growing industrial economies. Concurrently, physical geographers showed renewed interest in energy as means of explaning the natural world. However, in both branches, a nascent energy geography was subsumed by a more general systems approach. It took the energy crises of the nineteen-seventies to affirm the need for applied energy geography. Today, it is clear fossil energy use has transformed Earth's atmospheric and biogeochemical cycles, requiring studies which address new and complex relations between energy and society. While encouraging such work, it is argued that new geographies of energy have much to learn from the old. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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