Introduction*

The intensifying development of western Canada’s fossil fuel resources has far-reaching implications for our economic and ecological well-being, for the trajectory of global climate change, and for recognition of the rights and title of Indigenous peoples. Large corporations play a central role in managing fossil fuel resources, yet the industry’s internal organization and its evolving relationships to other sectors of society are not well understood, nor are they easily visible to scholars, students, and citizens. Drawing on a varied array of empirical research in and around Canada’s carbon-extractive sector, this volume integrates new knowledge of the modalities of corporate control within an overarching perspective that problematizes and dissects the concentrated power of fossil capital.

Our goal is to probe the multifaceted ways in which the organization of corporate power blocks a transition from fossil capitalism to energy democracy. By fossil capitalism we mean a form of capitalism “predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in emissions of carbon dioxide” (Malm 2016, 11). When we speak of energy democracy, we have in mind a double shift of power, from the energy of fossil fuels to the power of renewables (decarbonization) and from social power concentrated in a corporate oligarchy to public, democratic control of economic decisions (democratization). Corporate control of the production of energy—most of it currently in the form of fossil fuels—and the reach of corporate power into other social fields pose the greatest obstacles to addressing the ecological and economic challenges that humanity faces today.

In Canada and globally, such a transition is technically feasible, particularly as new energy-storage technologies are refined. Yet the organization of economic power, concretized in large corporations and extending into political and cultural life in complex, multifaceted ways, presents a set of blockages. To move toward a just transition to energy democracy, we need to understand how these blockages function as a regime of obstruction, rooted in the political economy of fossil capitalism and expressed through a panoply of hegemonic practices that reach into civil and political society and into Indigenous communities whose land claims and world views challenge state-mandated property rights. This book maps the relations and contours of the regime of obstruction as it operates in contemporary Canada.

Fossil Capital and the Climate Emergency

According to leading climate scientist James Hansen, “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming. It is already happening now.” Hansen’s definitive diagnosis was not made last week, or last year. He offered it in June 1988, before a US Senate committee (see Shabecoff 1988). In the three ensuing decades, global warming has become a climate emergency. Rapidly rising carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have enhanced the greenhouse effect, leading directly to increased temperatures and melting polar ice caps. The knock-on effects include sea-level rise, extreme weather (droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, floods, and cyclones), ocean acidification, losses in biodiversity, and the spread of diseases once confined to the tropics (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 2007, 8–9). Certain of these impacts create feedback effects, further amplifying climate change. For instance, the loss of ice caps reduces the planet’s reflective capacity, trapping more heat; rising temperatures near the poles thaw permafrost, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) estimated to be eighty-six times more potent a warming agent over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide; droughts and heat waves fuel wildfires that release CO2 while decreasing forests’ capacities to absorb carbon; and ocean acidification compromises the marine food chain, reducing the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.¹

Carbon dioxide (CO2) remains in the atmosphere for decades after it is emitted. These amplifying mechanisms would therefore drive global warming for some time even if humanity were to choose a path of rapid decarbonization, through renewable energy and overall reductions in energy use. Yet carbon emissions continue to rise—by 2.0 percent globally in 2018, a year when even emissions from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, increased by 1.4 percent.² Thanks to the feedback effects mentioned above, increasing emissions are pushing the Earth system toward multiple tipping points, beyond which catastrophic climate change becomes unavoidable (Steffen et al. 2018). The implications for human lives are dire. We already glimpse them in crop failures and famine, in deaths from heat waves, wildfires, and extreme storms, in growing numbers of climate refugees, and in increasing rates of suicide (Burke et al. 2018; Miller 2018).

If climate science has isolated the primary cause of global warming in human-induced GHG emissions, Richard Heede (2013) has identified the leading social forces behind those emissions. Ninety corporations (including petro-state organizations) have been responsible for the lion’s share of GHG emissions since the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, the global ascent of capitalism as the dominant way of life has been fuelled by carbon energy, which enables capital to accumulate on an extended scale but releases CO2 on the same scale, leading inevitably to climate crisis (Malm 2016).

Capital has always boosted its profitability by appropriating what Jason Moore (2015) memorably christened “Cheap Nature,” including the buried sunshine of fossil fuels, which concentrate enormous quantities of energy. For capital, he argues, nature has been both “tap” and “sink.” From cod and beaver pelts in early colonial Canada to oil and gas in post–World War II Alberta, business has tapped nature’s bounty. At the same time, nature has been a sink, absorbing waste. As long as capital claimed only a small part of the planet, these ecologically destructive tendencies had only local impacts: a ravaged forest here, a polluted river there. But since the closing decades of the twentieth century, with full-fledged globalization and the closing of resource frontiers, the sink has overflowed with GHGs and other pollutants, and the tap has started to run dry—not only in declining agricultural productivity gains (portending the end of “cheap food”) but in depletion of high-grade oil. The latter provokes recourse to “extreme oil”—tar sands, fracked oil and gas, deepwater drilling—carrying greater emissions and ecological risk (Pineault 2018). What Allan Schnaiberg (1980) called the “treadmill of production” spins out of control.

Fossil capital has been deeply implicated in the political and cultural forms of corporate capitalism. Timothy Mitchell (2011, 18) notes ironically that from the 1870s on, the age of democratization coincided with the age of empire: “the rise of coal produced democracy at some sites and colonial domination at others.” Within the core of the world system, coal mining brought workers together at a key point in the commodity chain, enhancing their power and enabling the working class in the Global North to demand concessions that led to “carbon democracy.” In the Global South, however, colonial domination became further consolidated with the twentieth-century transition from coal to oil, as seven oil majors came to control supply, engendering “a geopolitics of domination in which the US figured prominently” (Williams 2018, 237).

In an astute case study of the United States as epicentre of carbon democracy, Matthew Huber (2013) explores how, after World War II, fossil capital’s hegemony was cemented in the rise of suburbanized consumerism. Through the acquisition of cars, single detached houses, and appliances, certain segments of the working class were “energized, afforded enormous power over machines, space, and everyday life in navigating the practices of reproduction” (159). Within this assemblage, the individual comes to experience automobility as empowering and liberating and the single detached house as a domain of personal sovereignty. The long-range result has been to constrain politics within narrow limits “focused on the family, private property, and anticollectivist sentiments” (79)—the stock-in-trade of neoliberalism. Even if the American Dream is a hoax, however, it continues to carry heavy affective and ideological ballast and poses a great barrier, psychoculturally, to movements for climate justice. Nor is the dream uniquely American. In Canada, automobility and suburbanization have also underwritten popular allegiances to fossil capitalism, although arguably a social-democratic political current, grounded in a more robust labour movement, has to some extent tempered the tendency toward atomized individualism.

Canada as Climate Laggard

Although Canada has long been a producer and exporter of fossil fuels, under the Conservative federal government of Stephen Harper (2006–15) the country was propelled, according to Harper himself, into the ranks of “energy superpower” (Taber 2006). This was accomplished in part through extremely low royalty rates and a host of state subsidies to the oil and gas industry: Canada’s subsidies are the highest per capita among the G7 countries (McSheffrey 2018). With the exception of a few Middle East petro-states and two small Caribbean countries, Canada also has the dubious honour of producing the highest per capita level of carbon emissions in the world (Janssens-Maenhout et al. 2017). It has been a regular recipient of the Climate Action Network’s satirical Fossil of the Day awards, earning a “Fossil of the Year” award at the UN Climate Change Conference in 2009, before garnering a “Lifetime Unachievement” Fossil award in 2013.

In an apparent reversal of this trend (and having just formed a majority government), at the opening of the December 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris Justin Trudeau vowed that “Canada will take on a new leadership role internationally” and declared, “Canada is back, my good friends. We are here to help.” Yet the actual policy framework barely shifted at all. By March 2017, Trudeau was reassuring top fossil capitalists assembled in Texas that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”³ A year later, Canada’s federal government announced that it would purchase Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline, contentiously slated to be twinned by a new pipeline that would triple capacity to pump bitumen to Burnaby, British Columbia. Meanwhile, in November 2016, the federal government released its Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change. But as earth scientist David Hughes (2018, 159) points out, the government’s own projections under the plan will see an overall decrease in emissions of only 0.7 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 (with oil and gas emissions increasing by 46.5 percent). Hughes concludes that oil and gas resources

are non-renewable and finite, and production of oil and gas is the largest source of Canadian emissions, yet current policy is to extract them as fast as possible and sell them at rock-bottom prices with diminishing returns for the Canadian economy. This compromises emissions-reduction commitments and imposes long-term risks for Canadian energy security. (165)

Indeed, a climate action plan that mandates major new oil and gas pipelines, which can only serve to massively expand emissions, is fundamentally incoherent.

Apparent reversals of Canada’s climate-laggard record at the provincial level are equally dubious. Alberta’s vaunted “cap” on tar sands production, initiated by an NDP government in 2016, called for a 47.5 percent increase from 2014 levels before the cap would be reached (Hussey 2017). But, three year later, even this cap was swiftly removed, along with all the rest of the province’s recently enacted climate legislation, by the newly elected United Conservative Party government of Premier Jason Kenney. Such a shift—from bad to worse on the climate action front—simply repeats what has been happening in Ontario, as a Conservative government, elected in June 2018, eliminates virtually all of the modest climate action reforms introduced in 2016 by the Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne. In fact, incoherent as it is, the Trudeau government’s national climate plan may be unravelling, as climate-laggard provinces—notably Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Alberta—refuse to play ball, evidently preferring legal action to climate action.

The Corporate Mapping Project as Public Sociology and Action Research

Canada thus presents the interesting case of a climate laggard and, in some respects, a First World petro-state (Adkin 2016). Although actual jobs in the fossil-capital sector account for a tiny fraction of the national workforce, and although state revenues from that sector have plunged in recent years to negligible levels (Hughes 2018, 164), political and corporate leadership is solidly behind a slightly modified version of “business as usual,” with carbon extraction continuing to increase (even as other measures partly mitigate ever-growing emissions). But the case of Canada is of more than academic interest. The urgency of the situation, globally, demands not only scholarly understanding but effective action. As the authors of a recent study of climate change conclude, if we are to avoid the “Hothouse Earth” scenario of runaway climate change, “a deep transformation based on a fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies, and technologies is required” (Steffen et al. 2018, 7).

This book features research findings from the first three years (2015–18) of a seven-year SSHRC-funded partnership that I co-direct with Shannon Daub, associate director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).“Mapping the Power of the Carbon-Extractive Corporate Resource Sector”—also known as the Corporate Mapping Project (CMP)—involves six western Canadian universities and several civil society organizations, including the CCPA, the Parkland Institute, Unifor, and the Public Accountability Initiative. The partnership is founded in a shared commitment to advancing reliable knowledge that supports citizen action and transparent public policy toward a just transition away from fossil capitalism.

As researchers with the CMP, contributors to this volume see corporate power as a key factor in the chasm between climate science and climate action. The CMP is a case study of the forces that shape Canada’s climate policy, one that partners social scientists with progressive policy researchers, journalists, and activist movements (including environmentalism, labour, and Indigenous leadership). Our approach is centred on a family of techniques that map the organization of power, socially, economically, politically, and culturally. These include analyses of the social networks through which power and influence flow; the commodity chains along which carbon extraction, transport, processing, and consumption occur; and the discursive structures that frame issues and narratives in the struggle to persuade publics, governments, and communities as to the desirability or inevitability of fossil capitalism as a way of life. But the project’s scope extends to counter-power, as popular resistance to the regime of obstruction reveals how corporate power operates while also pointing toward alternatives.

As a community-university partnership, the CMP combines social science research with popular education and democratic advocacy in a continuing program of public sociology and action research. As public sociology, the CMP brings sociology and kindred disciplines into conversation with communities and movements about the obstacles that corporate power and fossil capital pose to ecological well-being, economic justice, and democracy. As action research, the CMP helps to build a transdisciplinary community of practice capable of monitoring and challenging corporate power and influence on an ongoing basis. Our efforts have involved:

• exposing and problematizing corporate power in its various modalities, to various publics
• providing evidence-based ammunition to allies in social justice, Indigenous, and ecological movements, to bolster their counter-power
• offering policy analyses that propose feasible alternatives for a just transition from fossil capitalism—evoked in such projects as climate justice and energy democracy.

As action research, the CMP puts at the centre of its mission the production of critical knowledge that can inform effective political practice. In mapping the carbon-extractive sector’s organization, its political and cultural reach, and the resistance to its power, we offer a relational analysis attuned to both political-economic and discursive structures and practices. At the core of the analysis is the idea that corporate power is wielded through a number of distinct modalities.

Modalities of Corporate Power

In Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works, J. P. Sapinski and I argue that contemporary corporate power is at once economic and hegemonic, manifesting itself not merely as an economic force grounded in accumulation but also as a political and cultural force. As figure I.1 shows, this power stretches across the capitalist economy, the state, and civil society, expressing itself in various modalities within three overlapping spheres (see figure I.1).

In its economic aspect, corporate power is coterminous with the entire process of capital accumulation, from the labour entailed in extraction, manufacturing, and transport through to marketing and finance. The popular imagery of “free” markets obscures the cardinal reality that capitalism is an economic system in which a dominant class of business owners and top executives appropriates the wealth created by a subordinate class of wage and salary earners. The economic surplus that labour generates in production forms the basis for profit, interest, and rent and for the ultra-high salaries of CEOs (some of whom earn in excess of $10 million annually).⁴ Capital’s competitive dynamic means that each firm, including large corporations, must grow or eventually die, as other enterprises overtake it. Thus, most of the surplus that capital appropriates from labour is reinvested, giving capitalists power not only within current economic practices but also over the future. As capital accumulates, giant corporations and massive pools of capital concentrate power in the capitalist class’s top tier—those who own and/or control large corporations. The economic power of corporate capital is reflected in the economic dependence of workers, communities, and states on corporate investments to generate jobs and government revenue.

As figure I.1 suggests, there are several distinct modalities of economic power. Operational power is the power of management, flowing through a chain of command in which the scope of decision making is narrowed as we move from top management to shop floor. Operational power is also wielded along commodity chains, from resource extraction through processes of transport, processing, manufacturing, and distribution. Strategic power, the power to set business strategies for the company, involves control of the corporation itself, often by acquiring the largest bloc of shares. This power is lodged in the board of directors but rooted in the nondemocratic character of corporate capital. Corporate directors are annually “elected” but by shareholders only. The majority of those with a stake in the enterprise—workers, communities, consumers—are thus disenfranchised. Moreover, elections are typically based not on one vote per person but on one vote per corporate share owned, thereby enabling large shareholders to wield strategic control, as Jouke Huijzer and I show in chapter 4. Finally, allocative power stems from the control of credit, the money-capital on which large corporations depend. This power, which accrues to financial institutions of all sorts (banks, life insurers, asset managers, hedge funds), is crucial in expanding or retooling operations, launching takeover bids, or coping with cash squeezes during crises (see Carroll and Sapinski 2018, 39–40).

Figure I.1 also depicts the hegemonic face of corporate power, as it extends into the political and cultural fields of state and civil society. Hegemony can be defined as rule with the consent of the ruled; hence, hegemonic power refers to how that consent is secured, organized, and maintained, from the visceral level of everyday life up to the top tiers of state institutions. Although capitalists themselves dominate in accumulation, within political and civil society corporate power is exercised by capital’s organic intellectuals, “deputies” or members of the capitalist class who are entrusted with the activity of “organising the general system of relationships external to … business itself” (Gramsci 1971, 6). As Giuseppe Vacca (1982) has noted, such intellectuals are “organic” in a double sense. On one hand, they are “organizers” of an advanced capitalist way of life, providing leadership within the core institutions of capitalist society. On the other hand, their efforts are functionally (organically) predicated on the dominance of capital in human affairs and serve to reproduce that dominance. The agency of corporate capitalists as “business leaders” and “business activists” promoting the virtues of one or another aspect of corporate capitalism is an important expression of the organic relationship between the business of capital accumulation and wider world of politics and cultural life. However, most organic intellectuals are not major shareholders or high-level executives but well-placed and highly skilled professionals whose agency legitimates and facilitates the corporate system, through their involvement in areas such as public relations and media, policy formation, lobbying, higher education, accounting, and corporate law (Carroll and Shaw 2001).

Such experts can also be found on the directorates of leading corporations, where they function in an advisory capacity and often help to integrate the corporate elite by serving on multiple boards. Indeed, as I show in chapter 5, a dense network of interlocking directorates among Canada’s leading fossil-capital companies pulls together capitalists and organic intellectuals as an elite within the wider Canadian corporate community (and the even wider transnational capitalist class). Within this elite, power is centralized, as top capitalists and their advisors interact frequently, maintaining a sense of solidarity and common purpose even as they compete over the division of spoils appropriated from labour and nature. The corporate community’s cohesiveness is an important modality of hegemony, as it enables corporate capital to reach a consensus on long-term goals and vision and, on that basis, to speak politically with a single voice and thus to lead.

Complementing elite integration is the reach of corporate power into the public sphere, effectively seeking to dominate the institutions, agendas, policies, discourses, and values that add up to an entire way of life. Doris Fuchs and Markus Lederer (2007, 4) have distinguished three forms of such power. Grounded in the vast resources that corporations control, instrumental power involves investing those resources in order to exercise influence in the political process, as in lobbying and campaign or party finance activities. Structural power, grounded in capitalists’ control of investment, is the power to set the agenda and make the rules, with the threat of possible capital withdrawal keeping some options (such as rapid decarbonization that would threaten immediate profits) off the table. Finally, business wields discursive power, shaping norms, values, and beliefs through image campaigns that trumpet corporate social responsibility and “corporate citizenship,” as well as through the wider promotion of consumer and entertainment culture, the wellspring of popular desires and concerns. These forms often operate in conjunction. For instance, in August 2018, Canada’s federal government, after what was described as extensive “consultation” with industry (a veiled reference to instrumental power), announced that it was walking back its plan for a national carbon tax. Environment minister Catherine McKenna explained, “We don’t want to drive industry out of our country” (an acknowledgement of structural power) (quoted in Rabson 2018). In this volume, we focus on the instrumental and discursive forms, although capital’s structural power is always in the background.

As illustrated in figure I.1, corporate reach is a many splendoured thing. Vis-à-vis civil society, it includes, among other things:

• business leadership exercised by corporate elites as they govern business councils, industry groups, policy-planning organizations, and institutions of higher education and research
• selective allocation of funds to business-friendly think tanks, advocacy groups, political parties, etc.
• public relations (PR) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives
• the framing of news and other media content to privilege business interests (who as advertisers selectively fund that content)
• the corporate organization of communications media, whose goal of profit maximization trumps the public interest.

Corporate funding of organizations and activities in civil society is itself an expression of allocative power reaching into and colonizing the public sphere. Funds accumulated as capital are selectively directed, often through private foundations, to initiatives aligned with corporate business, including policy-planning groups, political parties, lobbies and industry groups, universities and research centres, community organizations, and “astroturf” advocacy groups such as Canada’s Energy Citizens. Corporate power reaches into the state via such relations and practices as

• intensive and sustained lobbying (in the five years ending in early 2016, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers lobbied the federal government on nearly a daily basis)
• regulatory capture (for example, Canada’s National Energy Board rubber-stamped industry proposals for years, leading an investigative panel to observe in 2017 that “Canadians have serious concerns that the NEB has been ‘captured’ by the oil and gas industry, with many Board members who come from the industry that the NEB regulates, and who—at the very least appear to—have an innate bias toward that industry” [McCarthy 2017])
• revolving doors, through which business leaders become political leaders and vice versa.

A final aspect of corporate reach into political society aligns corporations with the repressive arm of the state, as co-managers of dissent and surveillance. Although it is business as usual to govern with popular consent, when hegemony fails—when dissent becomes well organized and potentially effective—the state turns to more repressive strategies of social control.

In the realm of fossil capital, this began to happen under the Harper regime, as coalitions of Indigenous, environmental, and social justice activists rose up in opposition to proposed pipelines such as Northern Gateway and Keystone XL (both first proposed in the mid-2000s). In response, the state mobilized its security agencies in order to protect “critical infrastructure,” working in collaboration with fossil fuel corporations (Crosby and Monaghan 2018). In 2014, in its Action Plan for Critical Infrastructure, Public Safety Canada recommended that “private sector stakeholders” be granted special security clearance “to enable increased sharing of sensitive information” (Public Safety Canada 2014, 6). Then came Bill C-51, introduced by the Harper government in January 2015 (and passed six months later). Otherwise known as the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015, the bill included “interference with critical infrastructure” in its definition of activities that undermine the country’s security. That “critical infrastructure” included pipelines and other oil and gas industry facilities was clear from a January 2014 RCMP report, “Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Assessment: Criminal Threats to the Petroleum Industry,” in which “violent anti-petroleum extremists” were essentially tagged as terrorists (Linnitt 2015). Although the Trudeau government’s Bill C-59, introduced in June 2017 (and passed two years later), softened the language of Bill C-51, it continues to target “significant or widespread interference with critical infrastructure” as a threat to national security and to allow authorities to detain or arrest someone if they have reasonable grounds to believe that doing so “is necessary to” prevent the occurrence of terrorist activity.⁵

These various modalities can be placed within an even wider framework that recognizes that power implies resistance (Barbalet 1985). Resistance can take different forms, including

• shop-floor struggles of workers against the lash of management
• protests, boycotts, and blockades at key junctures along commodity chains
• shareholder activism and divestment campaigns, which engage 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 among corporate elites
• demands to remove big money from politics and to end the institutional corruption that infects practices of business lobbying
• media activism pushing to democratize public communication while fostering community-based media
• counterhegemonic projects to transform our way of life—as in the 2015 Leap Manifesto, which proposes to shift from fossil capitalism to energy democracy.⁶

Although the Corporate Mapping Project has focused on domination, issues of resistance (and even transformation) are never far below the surface of our investigations, and they figure prominently in this collection’s third part.

Structure of the Book

In the chapters that follow, we show how these modalities of corporate power in and around Canada’s fossil-capital sector comprise a regime of obstruction. The analysis is presented in three parts:

• “The Organization of Fossil Capital,” through networks and commodity chains in which a few large corporations dominate the scene
• “The Struggle for Hearts and Minds,” as corporate power reaches into political and civil society and into Indigenous communities, via various instrumental and discursive relations
• “Resistance and Beyond,” as counter-power builds, opening space for transformative policies and practices that can move toward energy democracy.

The Organization of Fossil Capital

Part 1 highlights the structure and dynamics of Canada’s fossil-capital sector, its internal organization and links to national and transnational capitalist structures and agencies, its extractivist logic of accumulation by dispossession, and the business strategies that carbon-extractive corporations are adopting in the current era of decreased fossil fuel prices and increasing risks (to fossil-capital investors) of stranded assets.

Two chapters focus on the core of fossil capital in Canada and the exercise of operational and strategic power within the accumulation process. In “Boom, Bust, and Consolidation: Corporate Restructuring in the Alberta Oil Sands,” Ian Hussey, Éric Pineault, Emma Jackson, and Susan Cake present comparative case studies of the “oligopolistic bloc” that dominates Canada’s tar sands and the wider fossil-capital sector. They show how, amid the wild swings of the commodity cycle, five companies have pursued accumulation strategies that reproduce fossil capital by building up and deploying organizational power over material resources, labour, and spaces of circulation. The normalization of ramped-up bitumen extraction and the revenue streams issuing from it have become central to Canada’s regime of obstruction.

James Lawson’s “Lines of Work, Corridors of Power: Extraction, Obstruction, and Counter-obstruction Along Fossil Fuel Production Networks” presents a complementary analysis of the corporate strategies and practices that maintain and enlarge the flow of fossil fuels from the point of extraction to ports and processing facilities. Lawson focuses on flows of material along commodity chains, noting that the capacity to block and unblock flows also underwrites disruptive counter-power. In effect, obstruction cuts both ways: fossil capital obstructs the political and economic changes that might jeopardize its self-expansion, while anti-pipeline campaigns strive to obstruct the flow of carbon energy that is the basis for that self-expansion.

Mark Hudson’s “Landscapes of Risk: Financial Representations of Catastrophe” shifts the focus to the financial sector and its entwinement with fossil capital. Hudson interrogates how the climate crisis, an ecological phenomenon, gets “digested” into the logic of capital and thereby transfigured from a lived, heterogeneous, and qualitative phenomenon into a homogeneous, fictitiously commensurable stream of quantitative values. Moving away from overt climate change denialism, financial institutions have come to construct climate change as a set of risk factors manifested in changing commodity prices, which inspire new financial commodities that recalibrate finance’s allocative power. The financial industry’s practical responses to climate change depend on a reliable (or at least credible) means for distilling climate change mitigation efforts into quanta. The chapter explores financial capital’s early efforts to produce such numbers and raises questions about the implications of this digestion for both capitalism and how we conceive of nature.

The final chapters in part 1 offer social network analyses of the organization of corporate power within fossil capital. In “Who Owns Big Carbon? Mapping the Network of Corporate Ownership,” Jouke Huijzer and I take up the issue of strategic power, charting the patterns of share ownership surrounding Canada’s carbon-extractive sector. We identify ownership interests—corporate, personal, institutional—and we map the key ownership relations that tie corporations in Canada’s fossil-capital sector into networks of national and transnational corporate power. These networks include the global carbon majors that reach into Canada through their subsidiaries, the financial institutions and asset managers that own slices of many companies, and the wealthy Canadian families that own significant stakes in key firms. The substantial holdings of Canada’s top five banks create a close symbiosis between fossil capital and financial capital, giving the latter an interest in the vitality of the entire sector and in obstructing efforts to wind down fossil capital before fixed-capital assets are fully valorized.

In “Canada’s Fossil-Capital Elite: A Tangled Web of Corporate Power,” I map the interlocking directorships through which the directors and top executives of fossil-capital firms are integrated into a Calgary-centred elite and the additional interlocks that link that elite into the financial sector and other segments of corporate capital, both national and transnational. A few dozen well-connected corporate capitalists and their advisors provide much of the network’s “inner circle” (Useem 1984), further concentrating corporate power. The architecture of corporate power resembles an entrenched oligarchy. In corporate boardrooms, decisions affecting communities, workers, and ecologies are made by small, often interlocked groups of men prioritizing short-term private profit over public and ecological concerns.

The Struggle for Hearts and Minds

Part 2 of this volume focuses on the struggle for hearts and minds: the practices and relations through which fossil capital strives to secure popular consent and to co-opt, disorganize, or marginalize dissenting perspectives. Integral to obstruction, these practices include the reach of corporate power into Indigenous communities, who have suffered the worst environmental and health impacts from carbon extraction as part of ongoing colonization, and whose land claims and collectivist traditions often stand in the way of oil and gas infrastructure. In many cases, however, these communities face the dilemma of participating in fossil capitalism or forgoing badly needed income and jobs (a quandary not unfamiliar to non-Indigenous workers).

In “Fossil Capital’s Reach into Civil Society: The Architecture of Climate Change Denialism,” Nicolas Graham, Michael Lang, Kevin McCartney, Zoë Yunker, and I map the Canadian network of fossil-capital corporations whose boards interlock with key knowledge-producing civil society organizations, including think tanks, industry associations, business advocacy organizations, universities, and research institutes. We find a pervasive pattern of carbon-sector reach into these domains of civil society, forming a single, connected network that is centred in Alberta yet linked to the corporate elite of central Canada through hegemonic capitalist organizations, including major financial companies. The many threads of communication and collaboration in civil society afforded by interlocking governance boards enable the fossil-capital elite to define, defend, and advance its profit-driven concerns as “common sense,” in the “public interest.” This structure thus provides the architecture for a “soft” denial regime that acknowledges climate change while protecting the continued flow of profit to fossil-fuel and related companies. What obstructs serious action are corporate interests, expressed in part through the intricate elite network that reaches from fossil-capital boardrooms to civil society.

In “‘Our Oil’: Extractive Populism in Canadian Social Media,” Shane Gunster, Robert Neubauer, John Bermingham, and Alicia Massie explore how the Canadian fossil fuel industry and its proponents are increasingly using social media to mobilize core constituencies of supporters, to attack industry critics, and to position the sector as a national public good. Their study analyzes the Facebook posts of seven groups active in the promotional and advocacy social media infrastructure for the Canadian fossil fuel sector. The rapid growth of extractivist groups on social media marks a shift away from advertising campaigns that address the general public toward targeted mobilization that aims to convert passive industry stakeholders into engaged issue publics. These groups combine conventional pro-capital tropes (such as jobs versus environment and free market fundamentalism) with more innovative discourses to construct a coherent, accessible, appealing, and easily shared set of legitimating narratives and frames. Concurrently, as they circulate the content of more established commentators, extractivist groups create online “echo chambers” that further insulate industry supporters from the wider world. As Ferguson (2018) points out, the proliferation of such echo chambers accentuates the public sphere’s fragmentation, impeding the public conversations that are crucial to democracy.

Our next two chapters map the reach of corporate power into the state and the shaping of public policy. In “Episodes in the New Climate Denialism,” CMP co-director Shannon Daub, Gwendolyn Blue, Lise Rajewicz, and Zoë Yunker illustrate the contradictory logic of a policy paradigm that acknowledges fossil capital’s central role in the climate crisis while denying the need to decarbonize energy systems at a pace commensurate with what we know from climate science. As a hegemonic intervention, new denialism advocates technological and market-based fixes that leave corporate power intact while creating new profit-making opportunities. In the lead-up to the 2015 Paris Agreement, when the world’s carbon majors first embraced this perspective, and in the 2016–17 “climate leadership” efforts in Alberta and British Columbia, when industry submissions to advisory panels underlined the overriding need for fossil-capital “competitiveness” in climate leadership, we witness the capture of climate policy by industry and its use in legitimating continued extraction and burning of carbon. The strategic gambit is to win a measure of popular support, or “social license” (Thompson and Boutilier 2011), while neutralizing opposition to pipelines and tar sands expansion. The Trudeau government’s 2016 announcement of the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, nine days after federal approval of two major pipeline projects, is a third recent episode in the new denialism and reminds us that governments are not simply passive conveyors of corporate power but active participants. The regime of obstruction is, in this sense, a “power bloc” that takes in core positions of economic and political power, with the capitalist class and the state forming a “partnership between two different, separate forces, linked to each other by many threads, yet each with their own sphere of concerns” (Miliband 1983, 65).

The following chapter, “‘Doing Things Better Together’: Industry Capture of Climate Policy in British Columbia,” can be read as a companion piece in which Shannon Daub, Chuka Ejeckam, Nicolas Graham, and Zoë Yunker show how corporate reach into key state organizations leads to regulatory capture and institutional corruption. The mechanisms range from the vast funds that fossil capital contributed to the BC Liberal Party (in power from 2001 to 2017), through the thousands of lobbying contacts between fossil capital and BC public officials (averaging fourteen contacts per business day between 2010 and 2016), to the institutional capture of climate leadership as the BC government and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) co-organized a secret, parallel process, at CAPP’s Calgary offices, in which leaders from oil and gas companies crafted the actual policy, even as official public consultations were underway in British Columbia. These examples are a measure of the chasm between the current regime of obstruction and what most people would recognize as a functioning democracy. Yet Daub and her co-authors rightly insist that, however much corporate power has captured and corrupted political processes, the state remains a terrain of struggle, and the outcome of that struggle is indeterminate.

One might say the same about the Alberta-based research universities that preoccupy Laurie Adkin in “Petro-universities and the Production of Knowledge for the Post-carbon Future.” Here again, the regime of obstruction operates through a number of mechanisms, sometimes grouped under the rubric of “corporatization” (see Brownlee, Hurl, and Walby 2018), but does not go unchallenged. Fossil-capital interests have become entrenched, both within state agencies that provide funding for university-based research and within universities themselves. Even state funding of so-called environmental and clean technology initiatives, such as carbon capture and storage, chiefly support (and legitimate) fossil capital, rather than pointing toward a future energy system. In mapping the flows of funding to the Universities of Alberta and Calgary for energy-related research and development, Adkin illuminates another aspect of the allocative power that corporations wield vis-à-vis the state and civil society while demonstrating how the former, through its own funding bodies, underwrites technological improvements that subsidize the ongoing accumulation of fossil capital. Corporate-state largesse extends to research centres and research chairs, many of them endowed by fossil-capital “partners.”

Adkin’s detailed analysis of corporate involvement in university governance extends the network analysis in chapter 6, completing a picture of multifaceted corporate influence in shaping knowledge and technology. Yet her recounting of the Suzuki affair again points to contested terrain. In April 2018, the University of Alberta’s decision to honour acclaimed environmental scientist David Suzuki with a doctorate of science was met by shrill protest from the deans of both the Faculty of Engineering and the School of Business, as well as from astroturf advocacy groups and CAPP, and by open threats from fossil capitalists to cancel future donations to the university. Despite the moral panic, senior administration held fast to their decision, illustrating that it is still possible for universities to define and serve a public interest distinct from the private interests of capital but also that this requires principled leadership.

Much less contestation can be found in rural prairie communities dependent on fossil capital, the subjects of Emily Eaton and Simon Enoch’s chapter. “The Oil Industry Is Us: Hegemonic Community Economic Identity in Saskatchewan’s Oil Patch” offers ethnographic insights from small towns where oil is part of the everyday fabric of life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the residents of three such municipalities, as well as on a content analysis of local newspapers, Eaton and Enoch show how fossil corporations have instilled a sense of “psychological identification” as community members embrace the frames and narratives of the petroleum industry on a range of issues. In these instances, hegemony is deeply lodged in identity and community, as the allocative power of corporations to fund local amenities combines with the discursive power of industry-propagated frames. As communities come to see their fate as inextricably linked to industry’s fate, they not only turn to oil companies as the authority through which energy issues are understood, but they also rise to the defence of those companies against threats posed by climate-activist outsiders.

Community also figures strongly in Angele Alook, Ian Hussey, and Nicole Hill’s “Indigenous Gendered Experiences of Work in an Oil-Dependent, Rural Alberta Community.” Focusing on the experiences of Indigenous workers and their families in Wabasca, Alberta, the authors examine how precarious employment in carbon extraction shapes family and community life. Grounding their analysis in a series of “life story” interviews, they explore the contradiction between the Cree vision of miyo-pimatisiwin—a holistic understanding of living the good life—and precarious employment within the boom-and-bust cycle. Their research supports Eaton and Enoch’s observation that fossil capital gains community support in part by providing the dominant source of employment. However, companies owned by First Nations bands and private businesses owned by Indigenous capitalists also have a stake in the game, often competing with one another for subcontracts from Big Oil. In addition, the division of labour is highly gendered. Oilfield work is male dominated, while women’s paid and unpaid care work, even as it strives to maintain the balance integral to miyo-pimatisiwin, marginalizes Indigenous women in the labour market. The study uncovers racist stereotypes that are internalized by some Indigenous workers and resisted by others, while also registering concern about the development on reserves of capitalist class relations, which could divide communities against themselves, co-opting them into extralocal relations of ruling. All these elements comprise a complex articulation of corporate power within Indigenous communities struggling to terminate and recover from a colonialism that is still very much intact.

In “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Canada’s Carbon Economy and Indigenous Ambivalence,” Clifford Atleo offers a nuanced analysis of settler colonialism and fossil capitalism in Canada, refusing the romantic (and racist) binary that positions Indigenous peoples on the side of “pristine nature.” Indigenous struggles for self-determination coexist with capitalism’s powerful capacities to invade “every corner of both the earth and our imaginations.” Settler capitalism was founded on accumulation by dispossession (Coulthard 2014), and as their land was stolen many Indigenous people lost their livelihoods and migrated to urban settings, where land-based sensibilities may weaken. This has led some, including some Indigenous leaders, to internalize the logic of neoliberal capitalism. Within advanced settler colonialism, one version of self-determination now envisages Indigenous peoples as sovereign participants in a capitalist way of life, garnering the benefits of resource extraction within “a despiritualized world understood simply as a business opportunity” (Coburn and Atleo 2016, 190). Unsurprisingly, First Nations bands are often pulled in two directions. As Atleo notes, in the case of the Trans Mountain Pipeline project, some First Nations joined the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion (Meyer 2018), while others chose to sign “mutual benefit agreements” with the project’s proponent, Kinder Morgan. The struggle for hearts and minds, ever at hegemony’s core, is no less salient among Indigenous peoples than among the non-Indigenous.

The chapters by Atleo and by Alook, Hussey, and Hill highlight the deep settler-colonial legacy that continues to shape the political ecology and economy of carbon extractivism in Canada and that must be addressed and remediated in any just transition to a post-carbon world.

Resistance and Beyond

Although this collection centres on the reality of corporate power, we strive not to reify that power and to consider prospects for the dual shift in power required for energy democracy—toward the decarbonization of energy and the democratization of control. Part 3 takes up these issues.

In “From Clean Growth to Climate Justice,” Marc Lee, director of the Climate Justice Project, presents two alternative pathways for climate action. “Clean growth,” which has become the mantra of both the federal government and the environmental mainstream, proposes market-based measures, chiefly in the form of carbon pricing, designed to shift the full cost of the damage done by carbon emissions onto those who contribute directly to them, as producers and consumers, thereby creating a negative incentive that will steer the accumulation process toward decarbonization. As a hegemonic project, clean growth parallels financial capital’s “digestion” of the climate crisis (see chapter 4). Premised on the fantasy of endless economic growth, this vision of green capitalism frames climate solutions as new business opportunities. But it also ignores the contradiction between economic growth and ecological health, discounts the increasing inequalities that accompany capital accumulation, and underestimates the scale and scope of the energy transitions actually required to reduce Canada’s carbon footprint. In contrast to this new, corporate-friendly version of denialism, a “climate justice” framework combines decarbonization with the integration of social justice principles into climate change policy. Lee reviews a range of research findings from the Climate Justice Project, emphasizing how such integration offers a more inclusive and effective approach that seeks to achieve deeper changes in living patterns and economic structure.

Complementing Lee’s policy perspective, our final three chapters focus on the counter-power of social movements as protagonists in the struggle for climate justice and energy democracy. Karena Shaw’s “Flashpoints of Possibility: What Resistance Reveals About Pathways Toward Energy Transition” focuses on flashpoints along carbon commodity chains—sites at which resistance becomes visible in ways that challenge the legitimacy and power of the fossil fuel industry. It is in this challenge that fossil capital is exposed as a self-interested actor and its influence is problematized. Shaw’s reading of one such flashpoint—popular mobilization in 2018 against the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion, as refracted through various news outlets—distills both the obstacles and the more promising developments that may prove critical to the future of climate justice. These include, on the one hand, the hegemonic position of fossil capital in political processes and news discourse, as well as the framing of political issues and identities around federal-provincial and interprovincial conflict, and, on the other, the migration of First Nations claims from the margins to the centre of political contention and the evolution of environmentalism beyond single-issue politics. Perhaps most importantly, the flashpoint reveals the struggle “for a collective public imagination” of life beyond fossil capital, an imaginary that needs to be built in tandem with post-fossil alternatives at community, regional, and national scales.

In “Toward a Typology of Fossil Fuel Flashpoints: The Potential for Coalition Building,” Fiona MacPhail and Paul Bowles also interrogate the roots and meaning of flashpoints. With the intention of creating an analytical framework that could contribute to the building of successful resistance campaigns, they advance a typology of these episodes of heightened public contention. The typology identifies three axes of contestation that shape flashpoints at distinct junctures along fossil-capital commodity chains: the distributive axis (how are a project’s material benefits to be distributed?), the procedural axis (has the approval process been fair?), and the ecological and recognition axis (what are the environmental risks, as well as the risks to non-capitalist economies?). The successful campaign, which ran from 2010 to 2016, to put a stop to the construction Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline illustrates how all three axes of contention can be activated synergistically in a broad oppositional coalition. However, because the underlying reasons for contestation may differ greatly from one node in a commodity chain to another, such convergence is not easily achieved. Understanding the nature of contestation at the local level and how different strands of opposition can be braided together in coalitions can strengthen strategies of resistance, thereby contributing to a move toward energy democracy.

As the climate crisis has deepened, campaigns to persuade institutional investors to divest from fossil capital have proliferated on university campuses and elsewhere. In our final chapter, “Fossil Fuel Divestment, Non-reformist Reforms, and Anti-capitalist Strategy,” Emilia Belliveau, James Rowe, and Jessica Dempsey put divestment into critical conversation with André Gorz’s concept of a non-reformist reform. Whereas traditional efforts at reform are constrained by what is possible within a given system, the struggle for non-reformist reforms is “determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be” (Gorz 1967, 8). For Gorz, non-reformist reforms are steps along the path toward system change: they disturb the capitalist status quo in ways that build popular power. Divestment’s apparently reformist orientation has evoked a lukewarm reception from anti-capitalist critics, who view divestment as a co-opted politics that accomplishes no more than a shift in investment portfolios. Intriguingly, interviews with divestment campaigners across Canada reveal a gap between their anti-capitalist commitments and the movement’s pragmatic external messaging. The gap may be a productive one, however, strategically designed to reach broad publics through mainstream media that eschew anti-capitalism. To the extent that it opens conversations that challenge the legitimacy and economic viability of big carbon as a leading economic sector, while attracting new activists (on campuses and off) to climate justice, divestment can serve as a non-reformist reform. Divestment’s specific targeting of the fossil fuel industry and its climate obstructionism is a crucial step, but only a step, in the transition to energy democracy and climate justice.

Indeed, the various policies and campaigns discussed in these four chapters add up to a set of non-reformist reforms, not a full-blown project of system change. This reflects the political reality of contemporary Canada, within which capital’s hegemony is intact, even if carbon-extractive corporations are increasingly under critical scrutiny. Corporate control of the financing and production of energy, along with the legitimation of that control through the modalities of power that we map in this book, poses the greatest obstruction to our dealing effectively with the ecological and economic challenges we face today. Understanding how that power is continually secured and reproduced—the primary remit of this volume—needs to be conjoined with coordinated efforts, within the accumulation process, in civil society and vis-à-vis the state, to “build a politics on the scale necessary to dismantle fossil capital” (Kinder 2016, 24).

The concept of energy democracy neatly condenses the combination of energy decarbonization and economic democratization that is so urgently needed. Energy democracy comprises a bundle of sectorally targeted non-reformist reforms that push toward even broader democratization and decolonization of economic, political, and cultural life. In such a transformation, the various modalities of corporate power we map here would give way to popular power and participatory planning in production, environmental stewardship, public communication, and inclusive community development.

C ontemporary struggles for energy democracy offer alternatives, but their viability depends largely on the extent to which an effective mass political base can be built. Building such a base will require a clear and thorough understanding of Canada’s fossil fuel complex and the regime of obstruction it currently constitutes. The chapters that follow offer intellectual resources for that socio-political construction project, opening onto broader possible transformations. In the face of climate crisis, the struggle for a world beyond fossil capital may be the leading edge of convergent movements to create a socially and ecologically just world beyond capital itself.