Chelsey Ancliffe is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. She is interested in the political economy of fossil fuels and energy production. Her research currently looks at the development of carbon capture projects in Alberta, Canada and their entanglements with the climate crisis, finance capital, subjectivity, and land dispossession. She also worked on the Unearthing Justices project, where she helped assemble and analyze over 500 Indigenous grassroots initiatives and resources. More broadly, she is interested in the contradictions between the throughput necessary for expanding circuits of consumption and ecological limits.
Project statement :
Beyond the Carbon Horizon: Desire, Capital, and Energy Futures in the Alberta’s Oil Industry.
This dissertation examines the intersection of capitalism, energy production, and ecological crisis through Alberta’s Oil Industry. The project analyzes how the oil industry navigates tensions between environmental imperatives and economic growth, focusing on carbon capture technologies that simultaneously greenwash extraction and create new frontiers for capital accumulation through the financialization of decarbonization. These are the contradictions inherent in fossil capitalism’s response to ecological collapse.
Drawing on Marxist theory, the research investigates how capitalism’s growth imperative drives environmental destruction while shaping both infrastructure and subjectivity. By juxtaposing capital—which incorporates the climate crisis into its own logic—with individuals transformed by capital’s shifts, the research reveals the dialectic in capital’s reproduction as it attempts to resolve its contradictions. The goal is to identify transformation possibilities within the current crisis while exploring how individuals might imagine alternative energy futures beyond capitalism’s horizon.
The project ultimately challenges the false promises of green capitalism by uncovering how the climate crisis becomes incorporated into capital’s logic while simultaneously identifying emerging pathways toward more just energy futures.The methodology combines historical research and content analysis of corporate and government documents with fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation among several carbon capture project stakeholders.
