Format/Structure

Panel discussion between scholars, legal professionals and activists.

Long Abstract

As pressures to tackle climate change intensify globally, the fossil fuel industry strategically deploys the narrative to be “part of the solution” to the climate crisis (Llavero-Pasquina & Bontempi, 2025). However, the industry is promoting "false solutions" - technologies and narratives that maintain their hegemonic position while appearing to address climate concerns (Fortin et al 2025). Planned ‘green’ energy infrastructures, such as hydrogen corridors, carbon capture schemes, carbon offsetting and biofuel investments, enable corporations to maintain economic power and perpetuate extractive, colonial Global North-South relationships while legitimizing continued fossil operations through technological solutionism.

This process of social legitimation is reinforced by various dynamics: on one side, greenwashing, social washing and facade transformationism to conceal the underlying impacts of fossil corporate practices. On the other side, the industry’s attempt to maintain its traditional cultural hegemony, for instance, by activating nostalgias in fossil development, national pride, and traditional class and gender relations. Fossil fuel industries continue to market themselves as multi-energy providers, weaponizing their hegemony as "technological expertise" and advertising new technologies with not much to show for.

At the end of the day, they are not general energy providers, they are fossil fuel producers (Llavero-Pasquina & Bontempi, 2025). These interventions reveal sophisticated strategies of power reproduction that maintain fossil business-as-usual while neutralizing demands for systemic change by resistance movements advocating for energy democracy and climate justice (Fortin et al 2025).

This panel examines how fossil fuel companies obstruct climate solutions through a political ecology lens, revealing power dynamics, discursive strategies, and infrastructural investments that guarantee a carbon lock-in under the guise of energy transition and fossil essentialism. The panel examines three interconnected dimensions:

(i) ideational power through climate narratives and corporate discourse;

(ii) material infrastructure of "false solutions"; and

(iii) institutional capture of policy arenas and research agendas.

The panel will be an occasion to build synergies and a strategic agenda between scholars, activists, and legal professionals campaigning against the misbehavior of the fossil fuel industry.

References

Fortin, Marie-Félixe, Annabelle Olivier, Sarah-Jane Vincent, Naomi Laflamme, Rebecca Soland, and Alexandre Gajevic Sayegh. 2025. "A Typology of Climate Obstruction Discourses: Phenomenon, Action, Source" Climate 13, no. 9: 190. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli13090190

Llavero-Pasquina, M. & Bontempi, A. (2025). Oil and gas industry’s marginal share of global renewable energy. Nature sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01647-0

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