<p>Energy, Security and the State: A Hobbesian Critique of the Social Contract in the Climate Era</p>

The deepening climate crisis has revived fundamental questions about the purpose of the state, the reach of political authority, and the conditions under which citizens owe obedience to public power. This article revisits Thomas Hobbes' social contract theory as an analytical framework for evaluating contemporary state obligations in the governance of energy and climate security. It argues that the Hobbesian security covenant, premised on the exchange of natural liberty for sovereign protection, generates a normative standard by which states may be assessed when they fail to address existential environmental threats. Applying Hobbes' foundational concepts of natural insecurity, the state of nature, sovereign authorisation, and the protection-obligation nexus, the article examines how the climate emergency reconfigures the terrain of political legitimacy. Three core claims are advanced: first, that unchecked climate change reproduces the structural logic of the Hobbesian state of nature at both domestic and global levels; second, that the sovereign's foundational duty of protection extends to foreseeable environmental threats, making inadequate climate governance a failure at the level of constitutive political authority; and third, that while the Hobbesian framework provides a compelling diagnosis of the global governance deficit, its weak account of rights against the sovereign and its domestic orientation require supplementation by stronger accountability mechanisms. The article concludes that a reconstructed Hobbesian approach, one that preserves the security imperative while insisting on minimum rights constraints and multilateral institutional accountability, offers a productive lens for evaluating the obligations of states in the age of energy transition.