From Denial to Delay: Defending Fossil Fuel Hegemony Against Critique

Abstract

The rise of new social movements, as well as the experience of unprecedented weather events, appears to represent a renewed and reinvigorated momentum for action on climate change. In Australia, however, even as public concern grows and business organisations recognise the climate emergency, there remains a reticence to implement any kind of climate change policy. It is well-documented that this is a result of the ongoing hegemonic position of the fossil fuel industry. In this paper, we develop current understandings of the ways this hegemony has been maintained and extended. We elaborate previous theorisations of moral and intellectual leadership by showing how the fossil fuel industry embeds particular technical claims into the climate change discourse. Second, we expand knowledge of political strategy to show how corporate discourses aimed at maintaining hegemony are extended through the state as an ideological promoter. Finally, we recall the contingent nature of hegemony, and argue that recent manoeuvres by the state to intervene represent a new level of antagonism which may well indicate the hegemonic power of the industry is weakened. In this regard, the paper offers perhaps one of the few more positive means of looking at the current state of climate politics.