Strengthening Supply‐Side Climate Policy With Social and Cultural Analyses of Fossil Fuels

ABSTRACT

Supply‐side climate initiatives, now considered essential to achieving Paris Agreement goals, are proliferating. Diverse policies, bans, campaigns, and clubs all propose frameworks for restricting the extraction and production of fossil fuels at national and international levels and are accompanied by a robust scholarly literature that tracks the emergence and evaluates the significance of such policies. Simultaneously, a wide range of social and cultural theory offers essential interpretations of how the consumption and production of fossil fuels have reorganized political and economic infrastructures and everyday lives. These literatures make crucial arguments around the competing temporalities of energy transition, the social construction of an individual, consuming subject, and the imbrication of fossil fuels within wider political economic arrangements but have engaged relatively little with the production or supply‐side of fossil fuels. Here, after reviewing how existing supply‐side climate policy, theory, and action have operated with a simplified conception of the social and cultural, we consider how the insights of energy humanities, petrocultures, and social scientific analyses might strengthen, complicate, and expand the methods, objects, and political reach of supply‐side initiatives, both theoretically and practically. With reference to Canadian examples—Canada being a central obstructionist to phase out policies—we argue that supply‐side climate strategies must be grounded conceptually in the “impasse” of production, employ a set of methods and objects between and beyond the individual and nation‐state, and engage with wider political debates over a future without fossil fuels.

This article is categorized under:

Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance