Exploring the production of climate change through the nomosphere of the fossil fuel regime

Abstract

Addressing climate change demands a reconfiguration of often taken-for-granted social relations, especially with respect to the power structures undergirding our energy systems and the associated extraction and accumulation regimes. Social science on the extractive industries and energy sector has burgeoned over the last decade. Much of this research, notably that informed by Marxist analyses, points to the large, entangled structural forces in play, forces that reveal how entwined the mining and energy sectors are with other sectors, including the public sector (e.g. Baer 2016). Other research focuses on particular cases and groups of decision-makers (e.g. Snell 2018), including local groups involved in, for example, contesting a new coal mine or establishing a new renewable energy project by negotiating externally imposed legal requirements and policy settings (e.g. Moffatt and Baker 2013). While both of these areas of research that on broad-scale structures and that on local cases are important, they tend to leave intact a major blind spot: the everyday social processes, practices, dynamics and systems, and the individuals and local interpersonal interactions, which imagined high-level structures actually consist of.