‘With great power comes great responsibility’: climate change and the politics of simulation of the oil industry

Abstract

Research on how oil companies have misled the public and deflected responsibility for climate change suggests that, since the mid-2000s, the oil industry has shifted from traditional to new denialism regimes, including greenwashing and framing climate change as consumer-driven. I argue that a more profound transformation is underway: the oil industry is embedding itself within climate leadership not merely to circumvent the barriers posed by climate change to fossil capital accumulation but to remove them by reshaping reality through simulation. Drawing on Baudrillard, I show how this simulation reframes climate change as a techno-capitalist challenge and socio-economic opportunity, recasting the oil industry from main culprit to ultimate saviour. Prompted by Al Jaber’s controversial appointment as COP28 president, I examine how, in this neoliberal simulated reality, the existential question of climate change is ‘dissolved’ and ‘resurrected’ within a market-driven logic that advances fossil capitalism no longer despite but through climate change.