Climate Catastrophe

Positionality Statements/ facts & figures

• Climate change is 1 of 9 planetary boundaries that if breached, could put Earth's operating systems and life at risk

• 2023: 6 of 9 are in the red zone (climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals, freshwater depletion, and nitrogen use

• Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) in 2023 said that the pace and scale, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change

• Those who have contributed least to CC are being disproportionately affected

• Large drying trends since the 1950s over many land areas

• Not just the Global South, but the Global North e.g. droughts in the West coast of Norh America

• UN high committee on refugees are concerned because "addressing climate chang as a root cause of displacement is crucial to breaking this cycle and finding lasting solutions"

• Via stats it looks like we are enroute to eradicating poverty, but climate change puzzles these stats

• UN refugee policy to add a clause where you can claim asylum if you are displaced by climate change

• Man-made disaster: fast fashion factories

• Pollution, contamination, global north buy the clothes, but we don't pay the health costs

Eco-Socialism

• development v degrowth debate 

• 'rights of the Earth' crimes against the global commons

Eco-Feminism

• link between patriarchal violence and ecological destruction. Climate crisis is not gender neural

There is a connection between the domination of nature and exploitation of women

1) The mechanistic materialist model of the universe that resulted from the scientific revolution and the subsequent reduction of all things into mere resources to be optimized, dead inert matter to be used

(2) The rise of patriarchal religions and their establishment of gender hierarchies along with their denial of immanent divinity,

(3) self and other dualisms and the inherent power and domination ethic it entails,

(4) capitalism and its intrinsic need for the exploitation, destruction and instrumentalization of animals, earth and people for the sole purpose of creating wealth.

Ecofeminists hold that these four factors have brought us to what they see as a "separation between nature and culture" that is the root source of our planetary ills.

• Reproductive care of women is appropriated cheaply if not free, same relationship to nature as it is to care

• Essentialist perspective where women are closer to nature, treated as if they were

• Later generation say you don’t have to be an essentialist to be an eco feminist

• Eco-Feminism is a movement that examines the connections between patriarchal oppression and environmental degradation. It argues that the exploitation of nature parallels the subjugation of women and critiques capitalist frameworks that commodify both.

Potential Solutions

• Binding agreements with legal consequences

• Radical changes at the local level

• Democratic governance does not always belong to the level of the nation-state

• Radical transformation of supranational instiutions - democratisation e.g. African nations have no say over what happens in the UN

• Globalisation of government

• Education

• Grass roots carbon tax

• Military to enforce?

• Party funding: capital has a lot of ways of enforcing its will on a democratic majorty. Capital could move elsewhere, structurally dependent on the state of capital. Not reducible to funding of political parties

•  Social reproduction - playing field is stacked againt any interests trying to move agaisnt cpaital and the capitalist class

• Need divisions between elites, for regular people to be able to have a say

• Not all capitalists are anti-growth

MY positionality statement for essay

• The Earth's ecological crisis is human-made and is a direct result of the global system we live and operate under. By global system, I refer to interlinking social structures, ideologies and institutions that constitute the global order.

Structures within the global system are interlinked but also distinct forces

Combatting climate change requires this or some communities will feel the effects of climate change more over others

Need to be examined with an intersectional lens, whilst also recognising that removing one factor of the climate crisis would not relieve all the others

• Support the arguments of Wright, that a route forward needs to be collective, where social movements that recognise different sociological factors are allies (Wright, 2019)

Main/ Key arguments to make

• Extraction, gender domination, capitalism, white supremacy are all systemically linked to the production and reproduction of the climate catastrophe

• Individualist v systemic solutions

• People feel as though they don't have agency

• Need for education and direct action at the local level

• Cannot have globa governance without local empowerment

• Need a viable and desirable alternative

• Fraser is class reductonist, capitalism would not remove everyhting. Other forms of inequality would persist

• Can capitalism and ecological sustainability go hand-in-hand??

• De-growth: should some places be abel to grow (Hickel) cant cause other problems whilst trying to solve climate change

• THERE IS A DIALECTIC BETWEEN CAPITALISM'S AGENDA AND ENVIRONMENTAL STABILITY

• the capitalist order inevitably protects the interests of capital at the expense of the environment, and this is socially reproduced through institutions

• CLIMATE CHANGE IS MODERN DAY COLONIALISM - disproportionately effects the global majority

Capitalism and colonialism are interlinked and profit from each other

Concurrent: existing, happening, or done at the same time

• patriarchal value systems are a driver of the climate crisis because capital accumulation has depended on both women’s subjugated position in society and nature being constituted similarly

• the global capitalist order is gendered because it hides women’s labour and relies on women’s exploitation to fund capital accumulation. Women’s role in capital accumulation is then used to extract from the environment in a similar, if not identical, way to how women are exploited

• (wright) HAVE TO FRAME THE CLIMATE CRISIS IN A WAY THAT PEOPLE CAN RELATE/CARE IN DISCOURSE AND POLICY

Empirical Evidence

• At COP28 the conclusion was to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels

At COP29 many decisions were deferred

COP summits say we are not doing enough, but then push back decisions whilst emissions rise

• COP29: new finance goal agreed, but was a compromise agreement, finalised carbon market agreement, agreement on the rules underpinning bilateral carbon trading, wider progress on mitigation was limited, limited progress on adaption, sectoral coalitions to support delivery through state and private sectors - progress made in key areas of action including tech, energy staorage, methan emission reduction, and forests

• It is hard to have high Human Development and a low ecological footprint

• Current Labour govt's Net Zero Policies: aim for growth and market led changes rather than breaking the status quo

• One of the biggest polluters in the world is the United States military 

• De-growth strategies: This can be seen through strategies positioning themselves as alleviating the climate crisis actually uphold the capitalist order, and this is facilitated by political, juridical, and social institutions. Governments have been introducing strategies of ‘green growth’, which include using more sustainable technologies and renewable energy sources. However, these strategies socially reproduce the climate crisis, since they are not implemented properly, and uphold the logic of capital. Furthermore, these strategies provide an illusion that governments in the Global North are aiming to reduce emissions. This can be demonstrated very clearly through the UK Labour Government, one of their first steps for change when they were elected in July 2024, was to “make Britain a green superpower” and set up renewable energy sources (Labour, 2024). Despite this, the Labour Party and members of the cabinet have taken donations and are being lobbied by oil and gas companies. This includes Chancellor Rachel Reeves, “FGS Global provided her with a campaign advisor between February and May this year, a donation in kind worth more than £17,000. The firm also funded a further £12,929 of “logistical costs” for Reeves at the Labour Party conference in October” (Bychawski, 2024).

• women have less access to resources in natural disasters, and natural disasters cause social and economic stress, which results in an increase in gender-based violence (UN Women, 2025)

• The Trump administration has portrayed the Central American families seeking refuge in the United States as “an unstoppable invasion of social parasites and criminals,”79 and has threatened to close the US–Mexican border (Gonzalez)

• the use of witch-hunts to force the enclosure of women’s food growing lands is still rife in parts of Africa. (Salleh, 2017)

• XR plans to continue to stage rebellions until the government meets their demands to tell the truth about these crises, reduce global resource use and bring carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, and create a democratic citizens’ assembly to decide how to address these existential threats (Extinction Rebellion, 2019).

• In the United States, the youth-led Sunrise Movement has been pressuring members of Congress to support a Green New Deal (GND: House Resolution 109), calling for net zero emissions by 2050. Championed by progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the GND not only proposes extensive mitigation strategies but also targets inequality, racial injustice, and class exploitation.

Point of Evaluation

• Hickel needs to also acknowledge how the climate crisis has a gendered character due to how it disproporionately affects women, and how the treatment of the ecosystem parallels that of women

• symbiotic strategies need to make sure women’s role in reproducing the labour force is accounted for more

• IS intersectionality helpful at the methodological level?

• Interjectionally needs to be articulated in a way that shows how systems of oppression are concurrent, but can’t be reduced to one another

(Guerro)

• UNFCCC have not done enough and have been hijacked by the corporate agenda

• Global warming threatens future generations and the unborn the most, who have little voice in governance

• Wealthy control of the political system

• Negotiations "allow buisness as usual and create corporate profits in the name of combating climate change"

• “The climate negotiations are not generating appropriate solutions that match the scale of the crisis.”  Among the reasons for this is the fact that “the countries that are most affected by climate change, but have contributed the least to it, have very little say to influence climate politics due to the asymmetry of political and negotiating power between the global North and the global South”

• Successive rounds of climate negotiations have “set the trend for consolidating new markets and investment opportunities for big business in the name of climate solutions. These business-oriented and market-controlled climate policies and mechanisms differ widely from the just and sustainable solutions needed by the people and the planet”

(Madgoff and Foster, 2010)

• Capitalism’s need for unending expansion, its short term horizon in determining investments, and its tendency to collective irrationality all contribute to environmental destruction.

• Policies think in the short term

• Incentive structures are built into the capitalist system

• Acknowledge that capitalsim has many characteristics that conflict with the environment

• Due to capitalism's focus on expoential growth, and how capitalism "fashions a political, judicial, and social system to support the system of wealth and accumulation"

• The most exploited areas of the world and their inhabitants will prove most vulnerable

• Emphasis on profits to be obtained from fossil fuel consumption and from a form of devlopment geared the auto-industiral complex largely overrides longer-term issues associated with global warminf

• most of the critical environmental problems we have are either caused, or made much worse, by the workings of our economic system. Even such issues as population growth and technology are best viewed in terms of their relation to the socioeconomic organization of society.

• Environmental problems are not a result of human ignorance or innate greed. They do not arise because managers of individual large corporations or developers are morally deficient. Instead, we must look to the fundamental workings of the economic (and political/social) system for explanations. It is precisely the fact that ecological destruction is built into the inner nature and logic of our present system of production that makes it so difficult to solve.

• Capitalism must continually expand, expansion leads to investing abroad in search of secure sources of raw materials, cheap labour, and new markets, must evntually come to terms with fintie natural resources, will inevitably trangress planetary boundaries, not just an economic system (political, judidical and social system to support wealth and accumulation)

• Characteristics in conflict with social justice: disparity in wealth and income, goods and services rationed according to pay, system marked by recurrent economic downturns

• The transition to an ecological—which we believe must also be a socialist—economy will be a steep ascent and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of “storming the Winter Palace.” Rather, it is a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system. The struggle is ultimately against the system of capital. It must begin, however, by opposing the logic of capital, endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth.

(Fraser, 2021)

• Capitalism has an environmental contradiction

• Capitalist production is dependent on nature while dividing the economy from it ontologically, disowning ecological costs and destabilising ecosystems

• We need a counter-hegemonic bloc

(Gramscian idea)

Need a big intersectional coalition 

With anti-capitalism as the central organising motif of a new commonsense

e.g.  Green movements should turn trans-environmental, centered on anti-capitalism

• Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racialimperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’.  (ecologism is a focus on human-nature relation)

• Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis.

• Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively”

• "But capitalism … is also deeply implicated in seemingly non-ecological forms of social injustice—from class exploitation to racial-imperial oppression and gender and sexual domination. And capitalism figures centrally, too, in seemingly non-ecological societal impasses—in crises of care and social reproduction; of finance, supply chains, wages and work; of governance and de-democratization."

• Capital commands accumulation without end.

• Eco-politics, in a word, has become ubiquitous. No longer the exclusive property of stand-alone environmental movements, climate change now appears as a pressing matter on which every political actor must take a stand.

 

Turning, finally, to the political level, I contend that eco-politics today must transcend the ‘merely environmental’ by becoming anti-systemic across the board. Foregrounding global warming’s entwinement with other pressing facets of our general crisis, I claim that green movements should turn trans-environmental, positioning themselves as participants in an emerging counter-hegemonic bloc, centred on anti-capitalism, which could, at least in principle, save the planet.

 

• It is well understood in many quarters that capitalist societies institutionalize a dedicated ‘economic’ realm—the realm of a peculiar abstraction known as ‘value’—where commodities are produced through privately owned means of production by exploited wage labourers and sold on price-setting markets by private firms, all with the aim of generating profits and accumulating capital.

• To gain a critical perspective, we must understand capitalism broadly—as an institutionalized social order that encompasses not only the economy but also those activities, relations and processes, defined as ‘non-economic’, that make ‘the economy’ possible

 

• Here, in effect, is an ecological contradiction lodged at the heart of capitalist society–—the relation this society establishes between economy and nature. Grounded deep in the system’s structure, this contradiction is encapsulated in four D-words: dependence, division, disavowal and destabilization. In a nutshell: capitalist society makes ‘economy’ depend on ‘nature’, while dividing them ontologically. 

• The system’s built-in tendency to ecological crisis is therefore tightly linked to its built-in tendency to create racially marked populations for expropriation. In this case too, eco-critical theory cannot adequately understand the first apart from the second.

• That conclusion vindicates my principal thesis: an eco-politics aimed at preventing catastrophe must be anti-capitalist and trans-environmental. If the rationale for the first of those adjectives is already clear, the justification for the second lies in the close connection between ecological depredation and other forms of dysfunction-cum-domination inherent in capitalist society. Consider, first, the internal links between natural despoliation and racial/imperial expropriation. 

• A similar proposition holds for social reproduction, which is closely imbricated with natural reproduction. For most people, most of the time, ecosystemic damages add heavy stresses to the business of caregiving, social provision and the tending of bodies and psyches—occasionally stretching social bonds to the breaking point

(Fraser) - 2021 her view of degrowth

• Finally, degrowth activists tend to muddy the political waters by conflating what must grow in capitalism—namely, ‘value’—with what should grow but can’t within capitalism—namely, goods, relations and activities that can satisfy the vast expanse of unmet human needs across the globe. A genuinely anti-capitalist eco-politics must dismantle the hard-wired imperative to grow the first, while treating the question of how sustainably to grow the second as a political matter, to be decided by democratic deliberation and social planning. Equally, orientations associated with degrowth, such as lifestyle environmentalism, on the one hand, and prefigurative experiments in commoning, on the other, tend to avoid the necessity of confronting capitalist power.

Anti-capitalism is thus what draws the line, necessary to every historical bloc, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Unmasking carbon trading as the scam that it is, it pushes every potentially emancipatory current of eco-politics to publicly disaffiliate from ‘green capitalism’. It pushes each current, too, to pay heed to its own Achilles heel, its inclination to avoid confronting capital, whether by pursuing (illusory) delinking or (lopsided) class compromise or (tragic) parity in extreme vulnerability. By insisting on their common enemy, moreover, the anti-capitalism piece of the puzzle indicates a path that partisans of degrowth, environmental justice and a Green New Deal can travel together, even if they can’t now envision, let alone agree on its precise destination

(Moore)

• World Ecology Approach

• Capital supposes infinite expansion within a finite "web of life"

• A dichotomous split between nature and society

• World ecology seeks to interpret the dynamics of capitalism as a danger "web of life"

• At the core of the argument is the importance of the dichotomus split between Nature and Society, a split associated with the rise of capitalism

(Bookchin)

• The very idea of dominating nature has its origins in the domination of human by human

• We need to critique hierarchy and hierarchical forms of domination

• "we have to know how hierarchy arose if we are to undo it"

(Stuart et al)

• The need to dismantle capitalism

• More policies that prioriise climate stabilisation

• Mobilisation comes from below

• Akcnowledge the importance of symbiotic strategies to prevent the climate crisis

"symbiotic strategies focus on collaboration or positive 'class compromise' through social reforms. This involves working within the political system to reform policy"

• Fully meeting the demands of these three climate movement organizations would require restructuring the economy, redistributing power, and transforming governance. Proposals from these groups have been called ‘socialist’ because they represent a shift away from capitalist and neoliberal ideologies, and toward deepening democracy, pri oritizing well-being, and addressing inequality.

• several unintended consequences are combing to create new openings for social transformation.

• Symbiotic strategies focus on collaboration or positive ‘class compromise’ through social reforms. This involves work ing within the political system to reform policy. Wright explained how symbiotic trans formation largely depends on pressure from social movements. ARGUES THAT WE NEED SYMBIOTIC STARTEGIES BECAUSE REVOLUTIONARY TARNSITIONS TODAY ARE UNLIKELY P.437

• Apply Wright for theorising social change:

Reps in congress receive significant money from fossil fuel companies

ROLE OF IDEOLOGY: ideology has been used to conceal the relationship between capitalism’s growth dependency and GHG emissions and how the promises of ‘green’ technology, markets, and growth are false…exposing ideology related to the climate crisis can open up increasing possibilities for social transformation

• vested interests are actively working to undermine climate action as well as exposing ideologies are critical steps to support transformation

• Gorz (1967: 4) argued that openings for social change can occur when it becomes clear that people’s needs are not being met and this can increase awareness that ‘society must be radically transformed.’

• While we presently see both unintended social consequences and purposeful social movements combining into unprecedented conditions, social transformation will ultimately depend on specific transformational strategies.

• Climate organisations have different approaches

Interstitial, ruptural, and symbitotic

Interstitial = demonstartaing alternatives

Ruptural = pressuring the state

Symbiotic = working with the state

Wright (2016) predicted that climate change would necessitate increasing the role of the state in mitigation and adaptation, the end of neoliberalism, and would ‘open up more space for broader, socially directed state interventions.’ This ultimately depends on whether move ments can successfully push forward ‘non-reform reforms.’

e.g. transition to renewables, but also keeping remaining fossil fuels in the ground through buying out or nationalising fossil fuel companies

(Stuart et al) - Focus of movement

• Socializing energy systems through community energy initiatives supported by local and national governments can also help with a transition to renewables and reducing total energy use (e.g., Gunderson et al., 2019; Kunze and Becker, 2015). Economic democ racy, e.g., worker-owned cooperatives and public banks, can open up spaces for com munities to address climate change (e.g., Boillat et al., 2012; Johanisova and Wolf, 2012)

• it supports community-based energy and climate-focused initiatives including building ‘wealth and community ownership’ and ‘investments for community defined projects and strategies.’ The promotion of economic democracy is clear in the GND

• Wright (2019) explained that together all of these strategies can be used to erode capitalism. Eroding involves both the top-down and bottom up actors and strategies. It is building the alternatives and making the political space for them to grow and become the new norm. These strategies together can help to transcend the current system. In the case of the climate crisis, we see the actions of cities and states demonstrating alternatives as well as the actions of the three movement groups highlighted here (Sunrise, XR, and Fridays for Future), demanding state action from within the politi cal system and outside of it.

• Attention has been placed towards institutions that fund fossil fuels and the role of banks

• Moving forward, climate movement organizations will need to focus on forming alli ances with other groups experiencing the harms of capitalism.

• The climate movement will also have to maintain momentum and grow.

• Along the way, climate movements will need to avoid cooptation. Marcuse (1972) and Debord (1983) both warn against the cooptation of creative and potentially liberating projects that can be transformed into additional ways to perpetuate capitalism. Cooptation has already occurred in the environmental movement as seen through pro-growth ‘green’ initiatives and the commodification of alternatives. p.450

• Need to be globally coordinated

• Climate organizations need to keep their momentum and expand; however, many people are inhibited from participating or may lose momentum due to fatalistic and cyni cal views.

• Instead he states that individuals must channel their anger, fears, hopes, and visions into meaningful action for social change.

(Wright, 2010)

• 4 interlined components of a theory of social transformation

• (1) social reproduction, (2) gaps and contradictions, (3) the trajectory of unintended social change, and (4) transformational strategies.

• social reproduction maintains the current system and constrains both individual and collective action.

• Social reproduction serves to maintain the current social order, yet social transforma tion can occur due to the formation of ‘cracks and openings in the system of reproduc tion’ often based on the ‘exposed limits and contradictions of reproduction’ (Wright, 2010: 291, 297). Gaps and contradictions are important to identify and politicize because they can ‘open up spaces for transformative strategies’ (Wright, 2010: 290).

• A critical addition in Wright (2019: 119, 121) is a discussion of what he called ‘the most vexing problem’ and ‘the biggest puzzle’ for emancipatory transformation: the cre ation of collective agency to drive forward change. The most important question remains: ‘who is going to participate in such struggles? Where is the collect agent capable of sustaining struggles to erode capitalism?’

• Wright (2019) emphasized the role of identity, interests, and values in creating the collective agency needed to bring about emancipatory transformation.

• Unintended consequences and collective action together ‘ripen the conditions’ for transformative strategies (Wright, 2010: 299).

(Bhambra and Newell) - Colonialism and the cliamte catastrophe

• Colonialism and capitalism are distinct forces, but are also interlinked due to how colonial extraction is integral to capitalist expansion

• Green-growth strategies reinforce colonial logic

• Word 'colonialism' only entered over 30 years after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

• Need to acknolwedge colonia histories

• Understanding climate change in the context of colonial histories implies more than the payment for loss and damages experienced today as a result of accumulated emissions.

• The language of colonialism is increasingly invoked to describe a variety of acts of domination and control associated with the injustices produced by climate change and responses to it

• For example, ‘colonialism’ is invoked as a metaphor for expansionism (occupying atmospheric space, seizing resources such as land and minerals) and accumulating ecological debts to the South and to the planet.

• There is little analysis, however, of the systematic processes of colonialism involved in these phenomena. Instead, colonialism is often understood as deriving from the logic of a system defined separately from it, specifically, the logic of global capitalism and its core relationships.

• The modern worlds is a colonial modern world - colonialism is continuous with the reproduction of hsitory

• Yet rising real incomes in the West and the establishment of welfare provision have depended on colonial extraction to a very significant extent. This has created a fateful ‘social democratic’ politics where economic growth is understood as the condition for redistribution, but fails to recognise the wider processes of colonial extraction within which that ‘national’ redistribution is located

• . Not recognising the patterns of political economic development that produce the global inequalities associated with climate change undermines the possibility of developing effective and socially just political solutions to the problems we face.

• that ‘colonialism by corporation’ gives way to various kinds of ‘national colonialism’, culminating in the organisation of global political economy among competing empires. In this way, we do not see empire as a late stage of capitalism, but rather as the framework within which capitalism secures its development.

• The Anthropocene, then, began with the birth of the colonial modern world; a modern world that was characterised by colonial processes including processes of dispossession, elimination, settlement and extraction

• Solutions lend themselves to the entrenchment os patterns of socially and ecologically uneven exchange rather than resolving these in a globally just manner

e.g. Carbon reductions in the Global North, outsourcing more carbon intensive processes to the South

Dominant neoliberal logics combine with scientific rationality. Carbon trading to pay poorer communities in the Global South to reduce emissions on its behald

e.g. need for cleaner fuels comes at the expense of food security farmers in the Global South whose ladns is set asisde to cultivate biofuels

'decarbonization divide'

 

(Gonzalez)

Racial Capitalism and the Anthropocene

• The global majority face disproportinate effects of the climate crisis since capital accumualtion would not have been possible wihtou the subjugation of the global majority through slavery, genocide, and colonialism

• Extraction, processing, transportation, refining, and combustion of fossil fuels has placed disproportionate envioronmental burdens on racilaised communities in both the Global North and Global South

• The most susceptible to climate-realted disasters and slow-onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as non-white

• Indigenous communities are often displaced by measures to tackle climate emissions and face poverty and criminalisation when they become migrants 

• The colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade established the material and ideological foundations of capitalism.

• The “slow violence” inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on racialized and poor communities throughout the world remains a central feature of contemporary capitalism.

• Fossil fuels are concentrated in particular countries and regions, such as the Middle East, that have been targeted over and over for invasion, occupation, and exploitation.

• Racialized communities in the Global South are being displaced not only by climate change, military interventions, and neoliberal economic policies, but also by the measures deployed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

• Racialized persons displaced by poverty, conflict, and environmental degradation face death, detention, and deportation when they attempt to migrate to the Global North.

• Racism as the dehumanization and objectification of human beings

Racialization is the process through which specific bodies are classified as superior or inferior on the basis of the distinct set of markers adopted in a particular region or nation at a particular time.

• Robinson uses the term racial capitalism to denote this symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism.18 He argues that capitalism emerged from a feudal order thoroughly infused with racial hierarchies, and then evolved into a world system that transforms regional and cultural differences into racial forms of domination

• Quijano introduces the term “coloniality of power” torefer to the Eurocentric racial and cultural hierarchies and institutional forms of domination (such as the nation-state) imposed through colonialism that constitute the contemporary capitalist world system– including the North–South divide

• The abyssal line operates on a global scale between centers and peripheries - racialising and impoverishing the Global South and rendering much of its population surplus disposable

• Climate change and the Anthropocene: race-conscious decolonial lens reveals the ways that race is inscribed in the history of capitalism and in the sacrifice zones of both the fossil fuel economy and the emerging green economy

• Early marker of the anthropecene was the importation of enslaved Africans to extract gold, silver, and copper in the Americas

• Slavery, genocide, and colonialism were thus central rather than peripheral to the Industrial revolution, the birth of carbon capitalism, and the beginning of the anthropocene

• 78 The Trump administration has portrayed the Central American families seeking refuge in the United States as “an unstoppable invasion of social parasites and criminals,”79 and has threatened to close the US–Mexican border.

Gonzalez - Way forward

• Way forward:

• International law is deeply complicit in the project of racial capitalism. Depicited Southern peoples as primitve, savage, uncivilised, backward, and underdeveloped. Cultures as unworthy of protection

• Despite these limitations, international law has also been used in counterhegemonic ways by social movements in the Global South. Plaintiffs in environmental cases have harnessed the power of national and international human rights law to achieve important victories

• we should also identify the beneficiaries of this injustice and the mechanisms that sustain their wealth and privilege.109 Confining our analysis to the poor and marginal ized obscures the role of domestic and international law in maintaining racialized systems of exclusion.

(Tuana)

Climate Apartheid

• We must be attuned to the injustices buried beneath the differential impacts of anthropogenic climate change as well as those that are the unspoken ground of the choices made and ignored on how to adapt.

• Apartheid, Nancy Tuana emphasizes, “involved deeply held systematic beliefs and dispositions regarding racial superiority that not only impacted individual beliefs and practices, but were infused into and supported by the interactions of various social institutions, such as education, labor, and policing, and the practices and dispositions they authorized” (p.5). 

• By analogy, “[t]o appreciate the nature and import of climate change apartheid, then, requires attention to the more subtle, normalized, and often muted ways in which systematic, institutional racism circulates in societies, as well as the ways in which it is impacted by other forms of systemic oppression such as those due to gender, sexuality, or class” (pp.5-6). 

• In sum, “[c]limate apartheid emerges from complex exchanges between racism and environmental exploitation.” 

• The sensibility that Tuana urges us “to develop is one that is attuned to the injustices buried beneath the differential impacts of anthropogenic climate change as well as those that are the unspoken ground of the choices made and ignored on how to adapt” (p.6).

(Mellor)

• The Biosphere is not gender blind

• “Just as the capitalist mode of production treats natural resources and eco-systems—fossil fuels, water systems, forests, soils, the atmosphere, the climate system—as inexhaustible, ‘costless externalities’, so also it relies on the ‘costless externality’ of the work, historically assigned to women in the gendered division of labour, of producing healthy, adaptable members of the labour force, whose needs for bodily and emotional sustenance are met outside the workplace”

(Hickel, 2020)

• Crisis is not being caused by human beings but a particular economic system

• Capitalist economies focus on 'growth', which means consuming and doing more, thus materials and energy

• Growth is the "core tenet of capitalism's cultural hegemony"

• Argues for de-growth in the economy, which is " a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.. Degrowth is not about reducing GDP, but rather about reducing throughput"

• people pursue growth not in order to increase an abstract number (GDP), but because they want to consume or do more, which of course requires using more materials and energy. So when economists and politicians talk about growth they really mean an increase in materials and energy (and specifically an increase in commodified materials and energy), even though this is not stated outright. 

Growth is a propaganda term in politics

• Policies: Greater distribution of wealth, universal public goods and services, and reduction of ecologically destructive production

• Argues that de-growth should be enacted differently in the Global South

• Excess consumption relies on patterns of colonialism

• De-growth strategies in the North should still allow for developmentalist reforms in the south, where economics can be built on sovereignty and self-dtermination

• His analysis indicates that formerly colonising countries (those he calls the Global North) are responsible for over 90 per cent of excess emissions. This would probably increase further if the ‘national’ share attributed to those countries during the period that they were colonised was also included in the total for the state that colonised them.

• because degrowth is focused on reducing excess resource and energy use, it does not apply to economies that are not characterized by excess resource and energy use

• degrowth in the North represents a process of decolonization in the South, to the extent that it releases communities in the South from the press ures of atmospheric colonization and material extractivism.

• Absolute decoupling of GDP from emissions can be achieved simply by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy; but this cannot be done quickly enough to respect carbon budgets for 1.5°C and 2°C if the economy continues to grow at usual rates

Degrowth policies

planned to reduced ecological impact, expand socially important sectors and scaledown ecologically destructive ones, includes polices to prevent unemployment, reduce inequality and global income, expand universal goods, transition to renewable energy

(Bowman, 2025)

• The use and transition towards electric vehicles relies on the production of cobalt in the democratic republic of Congo

• This requires the exploitation of labour, including child labour, and paradoxically causes envrionmetal damage to the region

(Salleh, 2017)

• Eco-feminists argue that society-nature relations in the dominant global economy are fundamentally sex-gendered in both material and ideological senses

• The environment and women are both objectified as a resource

• The system is underpinned by an ideological dualism of racial and sexual metaphors that has justified the social marginality and economic resourcing of so-called lesser others at serious cost to all life on Earth

• Embodied debt: women face a direct physiological appropriation of human energy and well-being 

• Eco-feminsits reject the linear logic of consumerism and energy-wasting free trade, favouring a cyclic economy, locally engaged in permanent regeneration of the humanity-nature metabolism

• Ecofeminism reflects women's experiences of everyday care-giving labour

• Ideological dualism (sexual and racial metaphors)

Patriarchal othering extends to nature and is energised in Eurocentric masculine consciousness

• Feminisation of poverty and distributive justice

• Most Marxist accounts fall shrot of an integrated social ecology

• An ecofeminist embodied materialist lens, on the other hand, makes clear that there is also a thermodynamic extraction from the body of the worker. The labour theory of value downplays that reproductive dimension, just as it under-theorises the theft of value from nature-at-large

• Embodied debt: sex-gender violence, bodily intimidation and psychological harassment are variously applied to ensure their labour compliance

• Women's domestic laboru is a input of biological time

• Reject the commodification of nature

• Pharmaceutical patents on indigenous genetic knowledge are described as another facet of ecological debt owed to the geopolitical periphery

• Techno-policy: governments, multilateral agencies and mainstream environmentalists, treat women as equally culpable for climate change.

• Ecofeminist arguments are based on materialist claims, not on an identity politics. On the one hand, they are about socially constructed institutions, discourses, norms and practices and, on the other, an epistemology grounded experientially in meta-industrial labour.

(Klein, 2008)

I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism.”

• For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the “reforms” permanent.

  In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as the shock doctrine. He observed that “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

• And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the “tyranny of the status quo.”

• First came the war, designed, according to the authors of the Shock and Awe military doctrine, to “control the adversary’s will, perceptions, and understanding and literally make an adversary impotent to act or react.”16 Next came the radical economic shock therapy, imposed, while the country was still in flames, by the U.S. chief envoy L. Paul Bremer—mass privatization, complete free trade, a 15 percent flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Iraq’s interim trade minister, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, said at the time that his countrymen were “sick and tired of being the subjects of experiments. There have been enough shocks to the system, so we don’t need this shock therapy in the economy.”

• When Iraqis resisted, they were rounded up and taken to jails where bodies and minds were met with more shocks, these ones distinctly less metaphorical.

  I started researching the free market’s dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq.

• By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and the nexus of Republican politicians, think tanks and land developers started talking about “clean sheets” and exciting opportunities, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.

• The Bush administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the “War on Terror” but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering U.S. economy. Best understood as a “disaster capitalism complex,” it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all “evil” abroad.

• To kick-start the disaster capitalism complex, the Bush administration outsourced, with no public debate, many of the most sensitive and core functions of government—from providing health care to soldiers, to interrogating prisoners, to gathering and “data mining” information on all of us. The role of the government in this unending war is not that of an administrator managing a network of contractors but of a deep-pocketed venture capitalist, both providing its seed money for the complex’s creation and becoming the biggest customer for its new services.

• The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message.

  One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail.

• In scale, the disaster capitalism complex is on a par with the “emerging market” and information technology booms of the nineties.

• From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade. But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic.

• The stakes are high. The corporatist alliance is in the midst of conquering its final frontiers: the closed oil economies of the Arab world, and sectors of Western economies that have long been protected from profit making—including responding to disasters and raising armies.

(Klein) - Relevant case study example

• ,Israel has been experiencing its own miniaturized Davos Dilemma: wars and terrorist attacks have been increasing, but the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has been rising to record levels right alongside this violence.

• economy is resilient in the face of major political shocks such as the 2006 war with Lebanon or Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza

• Israel has crafted an economy that expands markedly in direct response to escalating violence.

• Years before U.S. and European companies grasped the potential of the global security boom, Israeli technology firms were busily pioneering the homeland security industry, and they continue to dominate the sector today.

• Seeing the explosion of “emerging markets” around the world, Israeli corporations were tired of being held back by war; they wanted to be part of the high-profit borderless world, not penned in by regional strife. If the Israeli government could negotiate some sort of peace agreement with the Palestinians, Israel’s neighbors would have to lift their boycotts, and the country would be perfectly positioned to be the Middle East’s free-trade hub.

• demographic transformation upended the agreement’s already precarious dynamic. Before the arrival of the Soviet refugees, Israel could not have severed itself for any length of time from the Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank; its economy could no more survive without Palestinian labor than California could run without Mexicans.

• Roughly 150,000 Palestinians left their homes in Gaza and the West Bank every day and traveled to Israel to clean streets and build roads, while Palestinian farmers and tradespeople filled trucks with goods and sold them in Israel and in other parts of the territories.16 Each side depended on the other economically, and Israel took aggressive measures to prevent the Palestinian territories from developing autonomous trade relationships with Arab states.

• Then, just as Oslo came into effect, that deeply interdependent relationship was abruptly severed. Unlike Palestinian workers, whose presence in Israel challenged the Zionist project by making demands on the Israeli state for restitution of stolen land and for equal citizenship rights, the hundreds of thousands of Russians who came to Israel at this juncture had the opposite effect. They bolstered Zionist goals by markedly increasing the ratio of Jews to Arabs, while simultaneously providing a new pool of cheap labor.

• One related to the rise of Israel’s tech economy. In the early nineties, Israel’s economic elites wanted peace for prosperity, but the kind of prosperity they then built during the Oslo years ended up relying far less on peace than they had originally assumed.

• When Israel’s niche in the global economy turned out to be information technologies, it meant that the key to growth was sending software and computer chips to Los Angeles and London, not shipping heavy cargo to Beirut and Damascus. Success in the tech sector did not require Israel to have friendly relationships with its Arab neighbors or to end its occupation of the territories. The rise of the tech economy was only the first phase of Israel’s fateful economic transformation, however. The second came after the dot-com economy crashed in 2000, and Israel’s leading companies needed to find a new niche in the global market.

• With more and more countries turning themselves into fortresses (walls and high-tech fences are going up on the border between India and Kashmir, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), “security barriers” may prove to be the biggest disaster market of all.

• The Israeli business sector’s shift in political direction has been dramatic. The vision that captivates the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange today is no longer that of Israel as a regional trade hub but rather as a futuristic fortress, able to survive even in a sea of determined enemies.