‘The End of the Fossil Fuel Age’? Discourse Politics and Climate Change Political Economy

This paper explores the implications of the reframing of climate change as a question of the ‘end of the fossil fuel age’. This was a common interpretation of the logic of the Paris Agreement in the UNFCCC in December 2015, the implications of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, and in the framing of climate change by the fossil fuel divestment movement. The paper argues that this signifies an important shift in the framing of climate change, away from ones such as ‘emissions reduction’ or ‘decarbonisation’, towards more transformational understandings of climate change. It aims to contribute to attempts to repoliticise climate change by focusing on how this frame helps us re-emphasise the political conflicts inherent to climate change politics, ignored by more technocratic visions of ‘economic efficiency’ or ‘transition management’. But at the same time, it seeks to problematise some attempts to recast climate change as political, by emphasising the tension between articulating climate change as a struggle between heroic social movements representing humanity and fossil fuel corporations and their allies in government, and the complexity of the socio-technical systems within which fossil fuels are embedded, which thus complicate the simplifying effects of the ‘end of fossil fuels’ frame.