2020 Annual Conference

Fossil Fuel Authoritarianism:

Climate Change, Carbon Economics, and the Rise of the New Right

January 31, 2020

At the Malamud Room at the Institute of the Americas

Donald Trump rose to power on the back of his promise to ‘End the War on Coal.’ Hours after taking office, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro transferred the regulation of indigenous reserves to his agriculture ministry, making protected lands available for logging, farming and other projects. Vladimir Putin has suggested that climate change would benefit Russia by opening up the Arctic for shipping. These are just some of the most prominent examples of the contemporary alliance of far-right, authoritarian politics with anti-environmentalism. All these regimes are united in their desire to postpone the energy transition and keep the ‘carbon bubble’ inflated through climate change denial and greatly accelerated extraction of fossil fuels.

This workshop seeks to understand the geopolitics of what we are calling ‘fossil fuel authoritarianism.’ The term ‘authoritarian’ denotes these governments’ populist invocations of ethno-nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, and white supremacy. It is our hypothesis that beneath and beyond these governments’ far-right rhetoric lies a shared commitment to perpetuating systematic misinformation on the most urgent of environmental issues.

Schedule 

 9:10 Land Acknowledgment and Introduction by Cathy Gere

 9:30 - 11:30: Panel 1: Black Gold
Informed by the simple insight that surplus value is extracted from the earth as well as from human labor, the first session will investigate the past, present and future of fossil fuel economies. We will open the workshop by investigating the links between earth science and extractive colonialism and modeling the climate dynamics of industrial capitalism. We will then think through global commodity flows, examining how the movement of oil looks from Equatorial Guinea, one of its nodes in the Global South. Moving, finally, to the fast-changing cultural and political terrain, we will speculate as to the possible futures of neo-fascist climate denial.

 9:30: bt werner: Colonial Dynamics of Earth Science in Support of the Fossil Fuel Industrial Complex

10:00: Hannah Appel: The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea

10.30: Andreas Malm: Futures of Denial: How Long Can it Go On?

11:00: Panel discussion

11:30 – 12:30 Lunch

12:30:- 2:30 Panel 2: Rolling Coal
Session 2 will analyze the way petro elites sell their agenda to electorates. Does Trump’s invocation of ‘beautiful coal’ have a gender politics? What is the connection to the Christian Right? How does Cold War paranoia about socialism, multiculturalism, and sexual liberation continue to inform anti-environmentalist rhetoric in Brazil? What legacies of the Soviet period influence climate politics in Orban’s Hungary?

12:30: Ben Cowan: “Environmentalist psychotics” and “Green is the New Red”: Arch-conservative Monarchists, Anti-Environmentalism, and the Fate of Brazil

 1:00: Benedek Jávor: A sovereignist energy dependency: Hungary's doubtful climate skepticism

 1:30: Robert Horwitz: Oil, Climate Change, and the Christian Right in the U.S.

 2:00: Panel Discussion

 2:30 – 3:30: Coffee Break

 3:30- 5:30 Panel 3: The Planetary Commons

Finally, we will be identifying sites and strategies of resistance. From the achievements of indigenous resource management to the building of green cities to the vision of a Green New Deal, we will be celebrating the way in which people continue to mobilize successfully against the combined forces of racism, homophobia and environmental degradation. Using recent analyses of common pool resource management, we will think through some of the myriad forms of practical environmental stewardship that offer hope for a more equitable and sustainable future.

 3:30: Kyle Whyte: Claiming Indigenous Energy Systems

 4:00: Hanna Garth: Interrogating “Justice” in the Los Angeles Food Justice Movement

 4:30 Yuval Baharav: UCSD Green New Deal

 5:00 Panel Discussion and Final Remarks

 5:30: Refreshment Mixer