Buying Time: Climate Crisis and the Politics of Deferral in India

Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 5:00–6:30pm

Classics 110, 1010 E. 59th St.
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Politics, in Lasswell’s famous definition, is who gets what, when, how. Environmental politics, we might say, is who pays for ecological damage, how, and when those costs come due. Scholars have long recognized that carbon-intensive energy infrastructure has proved dangerously durable, often explaining this as the result of its functional importance for capital accumulation. This talk proposes an alternative, anti-functionalist explanation of such carbon lock-in as grounded in deferral, the improvised and costly postponement of a contradiction that cannot be resolved. Drawing on her forthcoming book on the energy history of India, Chatterjee argues that the postcolonial Indian state faced a predicament: it had to underwrite economic development while securing legitimacy through the provision of cheap energy. Unable to reconcile these two mandates, the state could only postpone the choice between them. Such deferral followed no strategic design. The social, fiscal, and ecological costs of India’s rising energy consumption were nonetheless displaced outward to the peripheries and forward into the future, draining aquifers and ravaging coal-bearing forests. Far from being a pathology unique to the world’s largest democracy, the category of deferral may illuminate the durability of fossil fuel infrastructures across Asia despite their visible dysfunction.

Elizabeth Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of Environmental History and the College. Her work focuses on India from 1900 to the present, exploring how non-Western energy histories disrupt conventional understandings of capitalist development and the social dynamics of climate change. Chatterjee holds faculty appointments in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Committee on International Relations. She also serves on the board of the UChicago Center in Delhi.

Presented by 3CT and co-sponsored by the Committee on the Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS)

This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.