Dr. Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management. He studies Canadian history, with a focus on the tar sands industry and conservative environmental thought. He is interested in understanding what the shift from conventional to non-conventional oil means in terms of how capitalism relates to the Earth, with resources increasingly "made" rather than "found". He is also writing a book on neoliberal environmental thought, titled Business Climate, that will focus on the contribution of Canadian economists to applying Hayekian principles to problems of "externality", which eventually led to the intellectual breakthrough of cap-and-trade in the 1960s.
Dr. Vettese studied history as an undergraduate at McGill University and then completed two master’s degrees at the University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at New York University, which traced the history of neoliberal environmental thought. Since graduating in 2019, Dr. Vettese has held fellowships at Harvard University; the European University Institute; Copenhagen University; and the New Institute, Hamburg. His research has been supported by the DAAD, the University of Chicago, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and the Independent Social Research Foundation. His first book, Half-Earth Socialism (Verso 2022), was co-authored with climate scientist Drew Pendergrass and has been translated into half a dozen languages.
As a Sproul fellow, Dr. Vettese will organize a workshop in the spring of 2026 on the energy transition to non-conventional fossil fuels that will put the Canadian experience into a comparative perspective. Several leading energy scholars will contribute papers to the workshop, which will then be submitted together for a forum at an interdisciplinary journal. The aim of the forum is to reinvigorate energy studies, divine new directions for the field to travel, and relate developments in Canada to a broader global perspective.
