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Luymes, Eden

University of British Columbia

Fossil fuels are the primary cause of climate change, yet they remain un-named in the Paris Agreement - the current global climate treaty. Despite international cooperation to address climate change, studies find that state governments plan to increase fossil fuel production and extraction over the next decade. There have been many calls from academic and activist communities alike to address the supply and production of fossil fuels globally – rather than the demand or consumption, which the Paris Agreement and UNFCCC currently focus on. Building on these movements, the Fossil Fuel Non- Proliferation Treaty (FFNPT) Initiative has called for a treaty to end the production of fossil fuels. In calling for a “non-proliferation treaty” this Initiative draws a direct parallel between the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a fossil fuel treaty. This raises many questions about the bold comparison of fossil fuels to nuclear weapons, including the strengths and weaknesses of such a comparison. This paper draws on interviews with FFNPT founders and proponents, as well as the Initiative’s publications, to identify the strategies and limitations of this movement. I identify the Initiative’s key strategies, including rhetorically reframing fossil fuels as an existential threat, building a first-movers club of states, and unifying subnational pressures to end fossil fuel expansion. Moreover, I emphasize the barriers to their approach: realist power-dynamics, the difficulty to secure the interest of great fossil fuel powers, and neoliberal hegemony in international relations. Finally, I turn to cosmopolitan and constructivist theory, and argue that the Initiative is not merely building a treaty – they are seeking to build robust anti-fossil fuel norms based on climate justice appeals in a process I identify and coin as ‘righteous norm-building.’ Drawing on the work of Adam Bower (2017), I explore how this norm-building strategy can bear on great fossil fuels powers that are external to a binding treaty. Additionally, drawing on the work of Lea Ypi (2012), I highlight how this approach builds on and unifies subnational and grassroots climate movements to pressure powerful states from within. Righteous norm-building, though challenging, can help overcome the realist barriers and power-dynamics the Initiative faces.

Text

2023-11-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86689

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/