Text

theses

ETD doctoral

The western states of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota produced only a small fraction of American coal until the 1970s. But by the 1990s, they accounted for more than half. Today the region’s coal mines and power plants rank among the largest carbon polluters on the planet. This dissertation examines the rapid energy industrialization of the region’s Powder River Basin in the late twentieth century. As national politics, global energy crises, and corporate profit-seeking spurred the westward migration of acquisitive energy firms, local townspeople, ranchers, workers, and Northern Cheyenne and Crow Nations fought to defend their lands, workplaces, and ways-of-life. But by the mid-1980s, fossil-fuel companies had largely overcome that resistance and embedded themselves deeply into the social and political fabric of the region. This study asks how these energy conglomerates amassed political and economic power from the ground up. How did fossil fuel capitalism come to prevail? By closely examining corporate strategies to win over the hearts and minds of workers and communities—be it hardball tactics or financial largess—and the operation of these industries within the West’s fractured sovereignties and landscapes of power, this dissertation shows how energy conglomerates earned a social license to operate. It argues that the creation of an energy frontier, out-of-sight and out-of-mind of most consumers, emboldened the corporate power of the coal industry in the late-twentieth century, and extracted not only commodities from the earth, but also political allegiances and social loyalties from the people who lived there.

ETD_11046

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-vse2-rp06

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