In this guest post, Sakari Säynäjoki and Otto Snellman discuss the research from their recently published article in Environmental Politics: Fossil complacency: reorienting climate hypocrisy and system change.
Holding a plastic protest sign and arriving by car to rally against fossil fuels—you hypocrite!
You’re delusional to oppose the industry making your living standards possible!
Climate activists, and especially fossil fuel phaseout campaigners, regularly face this kind of derision from opponents of climate action. According to this obstructionist line of critique, often propagated in the form of sarcastic cartoons or memes, climate advocates who are demanding a fossil fuel phaseout are naïve, incoherent, and hypocritical. Climate activists cannot honestly wish to see an end to all the progress and wellbeing enabled by fossil fuels, the obstructionists claim. Instead of childish and hypocritical pipe dreams of a fossil phaseout, the criticism continues, we should be “climate realists” who accept that the fossil industry – though polluting – is the foundation of our wellbeing and won’t disappear anytime soon. Thus, the obstructionists = especially the far-right – may claim rational and pragmatic “realism” as their own while discrediting the hypocritical alarmists.
The charges of climate hypocrisy are in general easy to refute for their individualism. Phasing out fossil fuels has nothing to do with individual complicity, and one can perfectly well oppose a structure in which one lives. Yet the obstructionist fossil hypocrisy charge, outlined above, includes a kernel of truth worthy of attention for climate movements demanding an end to the planet-devastating fossil industry. The obstructionists exploit an important issue in their propaganda: Lifestyles in the Global North truly are saturated and enabled by fossil fuels. Indeed, contemporary societies are characterized by thoroughgoing fossil entanglements. Our infrastructures as well as cultures are entangled with fossil fuels, far beyond simple energy use. But the fossil entanglements are easily disregarded in climate activism and research; it’s not so much hypocrisy but fossil complacency we ought to be wary of.
The Challenge of the Fossil Entanglements for Political Climate Action
It is indisputable, received knowledge that fossil fuels are the single largest environmental problem today. Despite unceasing and long-standing attempts at energy transition, the use of fossil fuels still continues to increase, in tandem with the rapid growth of renewable electricity production. However, fossil fuels penetrate societies much deeper than the electrical grid. The stability and systemic peak-readiness of vital infrastructures are fossil based. So are the production and distribution systems of food, nearly all materials, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals, to list only a few. This is why the political struggles around fossil fuel phaseout are not simply issues of “keep it in the ground” versus “drill, baby, drill”, or building up versus opposing renewables. Instead, the very foundations of contemporary life truly are at stake, as the obstructionists love to remind us.
In addition to vital infrastructures, our very cultures, ways of thought, and prevailing practices have coevolved with fossil fuels. Many socially accepted standards, expectations, identities, and lifestyles are conditioned and enabled by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are often perceived as energy simpliciter, i.e., unconditioned and abstract energy. Yet they have, for instance, made possible mundane experiences of independence from visibly varying surrounding circumstances such as the weather and daytime.
The fossil entanglements of vital infrastructures of reproduction and quotidian culture are regularly exploited by the obstructionists to support their anti-climate-action politics. Perhaps partly due to this instrumentalization, the fossil entanglements are too often ignored by climate movements and advocates of fossil phaseout. This raises the problem of fossil complacency and conditions the struggle on what constitutes realism in climate politics. As long as climate advocates leave aside the fossil entanglements, the bleak obstructionist version of “climate realism” gains leverage and seeming plausibility. So, the question becomes: How could climate advocates become realists about the entanglements in order to support just, equitable, and transformative climate politics?
Avoiding Fossil Complacency Means Facing Fossil Entanglements
In our article, we propose the concept of fossil complacency as a critical tool to grapple with fossil entanglements in climate activism and politics. Avoiding fossil complacency means becoming a realist about the fossil entanglements in industrial agriculture, energy infrastructure, cultural norms, and beyond, and reorienting system change agendas accordingly. In this sense, the far-right obstructionist “climate realism” is disarmed by reappropriation of its underlying kernel of truth.
We should move beyond demanding, for example, nationalization of the fossil industry (the majority of which is already nationally owned) or portraying the fossil phaseout chiefly as a question of propping up renewable electricity production (which usually merely supplements but does not supplant fossil fuels). Instead, climate struggles should focus more on undoing the specific fossil entanglements in various sectors. Food production provides a clear and crucial entry point for non-complacent politics, given the dependency of industrial agriculture in the North on petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, thorough motorization, and global logistics. Indeed, agriculture and food production are currently being increasingly targeted by popular, prominent environmental movements also in the North. This is a welcome development geared towards avoiding fossil complacency and disarming obstructionist “realism”.
However, much work remains in reorienting the agendas of system change towards undoing the fossil entanglements – without reducing them to an issue of the energy industry. Granted, renewable electricity is and will be a crucial part of de-fossilizing contemporary societies. But it is merely one aspect of the fossil-fueled civilization in which we live. By grappling with the more-than-energy fossil entanglements of contemporary lifestyles and culture, climate advocates can avoid fossil complacency, disarm the obstructionist “climate realism”, and offer viable alternatives.
Bios:
Sakari Säynäjoki is a doctoral researcher in the Doctoral Programme of Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences (Practical Philosophy) at the University of Helsinki. He is finalizing his PhD dissertation on the implications of the fossil-fueled civilization for environmental social theory. He has published earlier on social metabolism and critical theory, Marxist philosophy, and the Anthropocene.
Otto Snellman is a doctoral researcher in Practical Philosophy and the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science at the University of Helsinki. His PhD dissertation addresses hypocrisy in the environmental politics of the Global North. He loves nature and forests.
