UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation explores the power of the fossil fuel industry and the strategies narratives and tactics climate justice activists in frontlines struggles to keep fossil fuels in the ground are using to challenge that power. It asks how might the climate justice movement better understand the power of the fossil fuel industry and through that understanding develop strategies and tactics that can respond to it? It deploys a Gramscian theoretical framework to assess, explore, and critique social movement and industry interventions in hegemonic power relations. It offers a rereading of hegemony and argues that rather than emphasizing relations of consent to the exclusion of other power relations, scholars and activists might understand hegemony as synthesizing and balancing relations of consent, coercion, and compliance. Counter-hegemonic social movement strategy must, therefore, intervene in each one of these power relations.

This reformulated version of hegemony is developed in and applied to community led struggles against the fossil fuel industry in the context of climate justice with two more concepts: petro-hegemony and the carbon rebellion. Petro-hegemony synthesizes petro-culture, petro-capitalism, and the petro-state to organize interventions in relations of consent, compliance, and coercion, to maintain and advance the interests of fossil fuel industry. The carbon rebellion is the counter hegemonic formation through which the climate justice movement could organize strategies and tactics that intervene in each of the hegemonic relations of power to challenge petro-hegemony. Between petro-hegemony and the carbon rebellion exist three terrains of struggle, each characterized by a different relation of power. The dissertation argues that if climate justice activists are to counter petro-hegemony they must challenge the fossil fuel industry at different points of intervention existing on each one of these terrains.

The dissertation places this theoretical strategic framework in conversation with empirical field work and analysis in two case study sites: the First Nations-led resistance to the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline in Coast Salish Territory, British Columbia, and a grassroots community uprising for climate and environmental justice in the wake of confrontation with Chevron and its plans to expand its oil refinery to process heavier crude oil in Richmond, California. The fieldwork included 10 weeks of participant action research, 27 key informant interviews, the curation of an online archive of over 1500 articles, Tweets, Facebook posts, videos and memes, and in-depth discourse analysis. Developing this theoretical framework in conversation with fieldwork yields three further conceptual categories that could advance counter hegemonic strategies for climate justice. These are intersectional populism, the spectrum of strategy, and aggregating to scale. This dissertation concludes that each of these conceptual advances are critical to facilitating the emergence and flourishing of carbon rebellion as a counter hegemonic formation capable of defeating petro-hegemony.