CSER & The Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG) are pleased to host a seminar by Dr Luca Mavelli.
Dr Mavelli will present, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’: Climate change and the politics of simulation of the oil industry.
Abstract
In recent years, research on how oil companies have misled the public and deflected responsibilities for climate change has surged. Existing scholarship has shown how, since the mid-2000s, the oil industry has shifted from a strategy of denialism/manufacturing doubt to greenwashing and framing climate change as a consumer-driven risk. I argue that a second shift is happening: the oil industry is re-framing climate change as a collective responsibility that can be primarily addressed by the oil industry itself. Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept of simulation, I contend that the goal is not just masking reality (by questioning climate change, greenwashing, or blaming consumers) but establishing a simulated reality in which oil companies lead the fight against climate change. Moving from Al Jaber’s controversial appointment as COP28 president, I explore how in this simulated reality the existential question of climate change has been dissolved and resurrected in the logic of the market and the impact of this development on extreme climate scenarios.
About Luca Mavelli
Luca Mavelli is a Reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, UK, and a Leverhulme Research Fellow (October 2023 – May 2025) working on the project ‘“We Are All in This Together”: Climate Change and the Politics of Collective Responsibility.’ His research critically engages with neoliberalism, focusing on its intersections with citizenship, religion, infrastructures, digital society, and climate change. He is the author of Neoliberal Citizenship: Sacred Markets, Sacrificial Lives (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Europe's Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular (Routledge, 2012). Luca's work has been published in leading journals including Critical Sociology, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, Political Geography, Citizenship Studies, International Political Sociology, European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, Security Dialogue, Millennium, International Politics, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Journal of Religion in Europe, and Teaching in Higher Education.
