From Carbon Democracy to Carbon Rebellion: Countering Petro-Hegemony on the Frontlines of Climate Justice

Theo Lequesne

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2019.905

Abstract

This essay combines salient instances of climate justice activism in key battlegrounds against the fossil fuel industry in the United States and Canada with theoretical interventions in studies of corporate power, grassroots democracy, and counter hegemony. It explores Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy and the term’s relevance to understanding the conditions in which climate justice activists must combat the entrenched interests of fossil fuel companies. It suggests that Carbon Democracy is a helpful concept for understanding how fossil fuel dependency both shapes and distorts democratic governance. Drawing upon insights in three case studies - activism against Chevron in Richmond California, the Water Protectors and the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, and the First Nations-led fight against the Trans Mountain Pipeline in British Columbia - the essay supplements Carbon Democracy with two more terms: Petro-Hegemony and Carbon Rebellion. These reveal three power relations, namely consent, compliance, and coercion, upon which fossil fuel companies depend and in which climate justice activists must strategically intervene to move beyond conditions of Carbon Democracy. I show that dual power is a logic of strategic intervention that climate justice activists are successfully using to intervene in all three of these relations to reign in corporate power and assert their own sovereignty.

Highlights

This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
Synthesis and Praxis This analysis has significant implications for the broader question of corporate power, its influence over democracy, and how local grassroots campaigns connected to a global movement might take on global capitalism
Climate justice campaigns to keep fossil fuels in the ground reveal the symbiosis between contemporary democratic states and fossil fuels, and the relations of power upon which the fossil fuel industry itself depends

Summary

Introduction

This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. With a focus on dual power, this essay examines one of the logics of intervention climate justice activists are using to reclaim and reshape democratic institutions while asserting community and/or Indigenous sovereignty outside those I have found that strategic intervention through the carbon rebellion framework often operates according to the logics of dual power, while the fossil fuel industry’s interventions through petro-hegemony are dependent upon dynamics contained within Mitchell’s carbon democracy.

Results

Conclusion