Corporate power, fossil capital, climate crisis: introducing the Corporate Mapping Project

The three essays in this theme section are from the Corporate Mapping Project (CMP)— a partnership of universityand community-based researchers and activists who, together, investigate the power of Canada’s fossil-fuel extractive sector. Launched in 2015 amid a collapsing oil price and during the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, our work to date has been conducted during a period of tremendous political–economic churn, sharpening conflict and resistance, and worsening climate impacts. Together, the three essays starkly reveal the imperative to wind down fossil fuel production by mid-century, as well as the tremendous barriers confronting Canada as a producer-country whose political, economic, and cultural character has been defined so heavily by resource extraction. Indeed, it is this quandary that the CMP seeks to illuminate and help break. The CMP (which we codirect) combines a critical political economy/ecology of fossil capital with action research, public sociology, and policy-analysis initiatives that support activist communities in the urgent and intensifying struggle for a just and sustainable postcarbon future. Hosted by the University of Victoria, and led jointly by the University of Victoria, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (BC and Saskatchewan offices), and the Alberta-based Parkland Institute, the CMP: