Abstract
With the highest per capita carbon emissions among the G20, Canada presents the interesting case of a climate laggard and, in some respects, a first-world petro-state. In these circumstances, a regime of obstruction, with a distinctive political-economic architecture, has taken shape. This regime is constituted through modalities of power that protect revenue streams issuing from carbon extraction, processing and transport while bolstering popular support for an accumulation strategy in which fossil capital figures as a leading fraction. It incorporates a panoply of hegemonic practices at different scales, reaching into civil and political society, and into Indigenous communities whose land claims and worldviews challenge state mandated property rights. This article first highlights findings from a seven-year collaborative investigation of the modalities through which fossil capital’s economic and political-cultural power is exercised at different scales; then outlines how the passive-revolutionary project of ‘climate capitalism’ is taking shape in the Canadian context as a response to climate crisis; and finally considers how a project of energy democracy might hold the potential to catalyze the formation of an alternative historical bloc.
Highlights
As the 21st Century’s second decade draws to a close, the increasingly severe symptoms of climate change comprise a pivot and perhaps a turning point in the struggle for hegemony, globally and within national formations
Wainwright and Mann (2018) hold that the most likely future scenario is that of Climate Leviathan, a more authoritarian capitalism governed by strong states that manage the climate through technologies and market mechanisms that reinforce
Despite the emergence of a transnational capitalist class and of global governance institutions attuned to crisis management, national formations, and the economic, political and cultural forces centred within them, continue to hold considerable sway (Carroll 2018)
Summary
As the 21st Century’s second decade draws to a close, the increasingly severe symptoms of climate change comprise a pivot and perhaps a turning point in the struggle for hegemony, globally and within national formations. Resistance to (fossil) capital takes many forms, e.g.: shop-floor struggles of workers against the lash of management, protests, boycotts and blockades at key junctures along commodity chains, movements challenging corporate power on the basis of climate justice and Indigenous claims, shareholder activism and divestment campaigns, engaging the power of investors, calls for the private allocative power of finance to be brought under public control, critiques of the concentration of power within old boys’ clubs and corporate elites, demands to remove big money from politics and to end the institutional corruption that infects practices of business lobbying, court challenges to capitalist projects, brought by environmental and Indigenous organizations, media activism pushing to democratize public communication while fostering community-based media, counter-hegemonic projects to transform our way of life – as in the 2015 Leap Manifesto, which proposed to shift from fossil capitalism to energy democracy.. Fossil-fueled consumer capitalism continues to be paradigmatic yet, spurred by the deepening climate crisis, alternatives have been taking shape, portending change in the hegemonic historical bloc
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