Finance and fossil capital: A community divided?

Abstract

One of the most obvious, but perhaps academically overlooked, communities engaging in the politics of extraction in Canada is the “business community.” While some attention has been paid to the political influence of the Canadian fossil fuel industry—particularly through the work of the Corporate Mapping Project—less has been paid to the broader network of capitalists, through which a political community might arise. Adopting a Poulantzian view of the state as a social relation, this paper explores the degree to which such a community exists in opposition to aggressive climate policy in the Canadian context. This research focuses on the extent to which fossil and financial capitalists form a cohesive network, capable of sharing perspectives and preferences on climate change and the future of oil and gas extraction, and mobilizing collectively to pursue them. The paper draws on a network analysis of connections (shared ownership, lending, and director interlocks) between and within major fossil-fuel based corporations and major financial corporations in Canada, in order to see whether or not relational ties across the sectors are sparse or dense, and whether they are broadly diffused across companies or concentrated among a few key players. The resulting analysis shows that fossil capital is structurally tied to finance, and the sectors are joined through lending, holdings and directorships, with some financial institutions playing more important structural positions within the network than others. As activists are already targeting financial institutions as part of their ongoing resistance efforts against fossil extraction and financial corporations, the findings from this study suggest continued social movement pressure and we provide some finer grained suggestions for which actors to target. The current conjuncture indicates that policy pathways to zero emissions will in part depend on breaking the load bearing joints in the fossil-finance capital network.