NECROPOLITICAL EXTRACTION LINK. The aff’s rhetoric of the benevolent Green New Deal masks the colonial extraction of raw materials from the Global South. The research the 1AC forwards is organized to avoid, normalize, and mask the aff as a necropolitical project that expands state state control over life and death. The impact is ecofascism.

The EGD (EC, 2019a: 2) is explicit that it is ‘a new growth strategy that aims to transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases in 2050 and where economic growth is decoupled from resource use’. Everyone, more or less, can agree with ‘a fair and prosperous society’, while the sleight of hands are performed by proclaiming ‘modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy where there are no net emissions’. Degrowth intellectuals have done well to destroy the myth of ‘decoupling’ (Hickel, 2020; Kallis et al., 2020; Requena-i-Mora & Brockington, 2021), which makes attentiveness to the problem of low-carbon infrastructures and their economy all the more important.

The necropolitical features of the economy are hidden by normality (Mbembé, 2003), technocratic language and ideological entrenchment (Gills & Morgan, 2020). The energy economy offers a framework of management, propulsive purpose and, most of all, establishes its violence implicitly within the planning, extraction, construction and operation of infrastructural systems. The EGD extends this necropolitical economy, which the following subsections demonstrate. The EGD, mimicking Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, relies on the Clean Energy for All Europeans (EC, 2019b) to reveal its energy policy and strategy. The EC (2019b:4) reveals their energy policy logic, saying they will also ensure a more stable EU energy market in the future, by making the electricity market in the EU better suited to variable and intermittent renewable energies. With the new rules, electricity can be traded closer to real time, when weather forecasts are more accurate and renewable plants are able to better predict their production. The new regulations also strengthen price signals and increase cross-border trade to ensure that electricity can always flow to where it is most needed. When we need a lot of electricity in the peak of the day of a cold winter, we must make sure that the clean and cheap electricity from the wind farms of the North of Europe or from the solar farms of the South of Europe can arrive where it is most needed. This is not only good for the environment, it is also good for consumers' pockets, reducing the need for constructing new back-up power plants in each country that would be used only a few hours a year and would eventually be paid by electricity consumers.

The EGD restates the ‘trickle-down-effect’, meanwhile prioritizing consumer choice, in the name of lower-carbon infrastructure intermittency—fluctuations in wind and solar flows—to justify the last wave of energy market privatization. The market, the EC (2019b: 8) exclaims, is ‘better suited for the energy transition’ that is managed through digitalization and energy stock markets. The idea is that the consumers, through digitalization and energy market infrastructures, can choose so-called renewable energy over conventional hydrocarbon sources. The EGD, and corresponding legislation, finalizes the process of liberalizing the European energy market that began in 1996 (Pepermans, 2019). Environmentalism, in short, justifies and intensifies energy market liberalization and growth.

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Trading electricity happens through a derivative market, a spot market and over-the-counter trading (Märkle-Huß et al., 2018). Interestingly, spot markets, rely on electricity exchanges, for example EPEX (see EPEX SPOT, 2020), which comprise an assemblage of digital platforms and monitoring mechanism, ‘to handle the generation uncertainty of intermittent power sources’ (Märkle-Huß et al., 2018: 367). In 2011 and 2014, this includes day-ahead and intraday markets where trading can be conducted between various intervals up to 15 min (Ocker & Jaenisch, 2020). There are, however, already instances of technical error (e.g. partial market ‘decoupling’ in June 2019) and the EC (2021) investigating EPEX Spot for violating anti-trust laws, such as ‘taking advantage of its dominant position to hinder the activities of competitors on the market for electricity intraday trading’ in six member states. This becomes fossil fuel + intermittence, combined with consumer choice and neoliberal political and economic objectives. Transmission System Operators (TSOs), such as RTE and REE, and their publicly funded infrastructures, manage and dictate the size of an energy stock exchange. Energy stock exchanges necessitate fossil fuel + power plants; power lines, transformer substations, ‘smart’ monitoring and market interface technologies; regulatory agencies; and the socio-technical system of TSO administrators. Representatives from Electricity Transmission Network (RTE)7—Frances TSO—stress, ‘we just offer exchange capacity’ between ‘suppliers and generators’,8 where the prices of conventional and lower-carbon power are managed on electricity exchanges (EPEX SPOT, 2020). RTE and REE become trading watchdogs ensuring that energy exchanges are within ‘a 2 or 3% margin’, ‘regulating prices and making sure the [energy] balance’ between supply and demand is reached (avoiding grid collapse).9 ‘When someone buys green energy, we make sure that suppliers of this green energy have produced or bought it’, explains an RTE representative, ‘it is a financial exchange, the buyer will pay for his green energy to the producer, and we just make sure it happens according to the market rules’.10 Central in this conversation, is the necessity of the grid, as RTE representatives remind us: ‘you need the grid, because to reach these amounts of renewable production to compensate for a potential decrease of gas and nuclear, by chance we will have a sufficiently adequate network’ by drawing on low-carbon infrastructures nationally and internationally.11 The ‘Greenness’ and ‘renewability’ is not the preoccupation of TSOs, instead this is relegated to market logics via energy suppliers and certification schemes managed by TSOs (Märkle-Huß et al., 2018; SE, 2017). To claim ‘clean energy’, companies can either (1) directly form contracts with the generators; (2) subscribe to supplier schemes; or (3) purchase energy attribute certificates (EACs), such as guarantee of origin (GO) (SE, 2017). The latter schemes are formed through contracts or energy exchanges, mentioned above, while GO generators create certificates when electricity is produced, and then sold to parties that are subject to renewable purchase quotes on energy markets. Mirroring issues with conservation offsets (Sullivan, 2017), the questionable features of certification schemes are extensive. Certificates can be traded without physical infrastructure connecting it, ‘double’ and questionable accounting requires greater attention, which combines with electricity consumed from ‘a non-renewable source but has a GO assigned to it’ and ‘can be counted as zero emissions electricity’ (SE, 2017: 8). More still, ‘the GO system in Europe, the exact details around attributes carried by these certificates are not strictly regulated’ (SE, 2017: 9), which is a point of concern even for the EU. Testimonies from research participants in TSOs or governmental bodies working closely with them are far from reassuring.12 Two RTE representatives13 in the same interview claimed: ‘Actually all the electricity is mixed in the grid’, making jokes about the difficulty of distinguishing the two and mentioning in passing energy exchange applications and GO certifications. An individual working in RTE transmission,14 explains: making this distinction is ‘[n]ot possible on a technical level … despite the source of the production, the energy ends up in the same grid. So when companies or individuals promote the fact that they are consuming green energy, it is purely a commercial move’. The process of distinguishing whether energy is ‘clean’ or so-called ‘renewable’ is even more questionable—if not completely illegitimate—as it all depends on energy markets and poorly regulated ‘green’ certification schemes.

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‘Proponents of the Green New Deal have it right’, exclaims Hickel (2020: 139),‘we need to pump public investment into building renewable energy infrastructure at a historically unprecedented rate, reminiscent of the industrial retooling that enabled the Allies to win the Second World War’. Caution is warranted here. The EDG is doing this by reinforcing statist governance imperatives, perfecting energy market liberalization and growing energy infrastructure in the name of so-called energy transition. The EGD does employ the flowery rhetoric of socially-oriented hydrocarbon industry and agricultural reform, while simultaneously promoting aggressive neoliberal programs shrouded in ‘green’ propaganda and the ‘renewability myth’. The necropolitical imperatives of the European economy of the EGD materialize in the mines, processing plants and construction sites of low-carbon infrastructures, which we now turn to explore.

4.2. Necropolitical extraction

The World Bank, European Commission and other researchers radically underestimate the rates of natural resource extraction, necessary for the ‘green energy transition’. The economic and modelers' gaze, and its prevailing epistemology—positioned in profit oriented material and energy intensive institutional cultures—represent research deficiencies that depend on and enable extractive capitalism. Antti Silivast and colleagues (2020: 5) remind us that ‘all models are approximations’, and notoriously reduce the complex social, ecological and cultural issue in order to manufacture ‘data’ (see also Sullivan, 2017). ‘Measurement is never neutral’, Marina Requena-i-Mora and Dan Brockington (2021: 4) remind us, debunking numerous environmental indices, showing us that ‘[o]ne of the tricks in the Environmental Performance Index is exposed: not taking material effects of relocation of resource intensive production into account’. In other words, extractive impacts to create conventional and low-carbon infrastructures and devices are not properly registered in the (high-income) countries driving their demand. Information, moreover, on energy and rates of extraction for so-called ‘transition metals’ (Lèbre et al., 2020) depend on approximations. The anticipated reductions, omissions and assumptions embedded in data—frequently acknowledged by modelers themselves—entail detrimental socio-ecological consequences, which is a reminder that models and data collection are political. Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) assessments, World Bank and other international bodies produce research, ideologically embedded with liberal governance objectives (e.g. assessing the possibility of resource access and mining-site governability), which includes implicitly affirming capitalism as a constant developmental force (Annex, Bolger et al., 2021). Even among the strongest studies (Lèbre et al., 2020), offering the highest levels of transparency, 24 different indicators based on publicly available data still have severe limitations. Speaking to data on mining for ‘transition metals’, a researcher explains: ‘[W]e are not saying what is being done by a mining project. What we are able to do is to characterize the context around that mining project: The social context, environmental context, (…) and what the governance cultures are around that point’.15 This can provide useful data points for ESG measurements, but it fails to address qualitative features: soil, air, water and body toxification; human rights abuses/political violence; cultural degradation; interpersonal or ethnic conflict and so on. This means numerous socio-ecological harms, like structural racism, authoritarianism and toxic waste leakages are frequently ignored, minimized or rely on questionable environmental impact assessments (Dunlap, 2020e; Le Billon & Spiegel, 2021; Shapiro & McNeish, 2021; Bolger et al., 2021). Epistemic negligence or narrowness (Lennon, 2021), then builds on top of science purposely organized to conceal socio-ecological issues (see Kirsch, 2014). Data modeling are approximations, drawing on publicly available data and already primed with ideological bias that shape research questions, which further combines with the sheer difficulty of accounting for mining supply-webs. This in itself leads to serious limitations and underestimations.

Promoting the rapid deployment of wind and solar energy generation, high-voltage power lines (HVPLs), digital (or ‘smart’) technologies and electric-mobility is considerably material-intensive. While still celebrating ‘energy transition’, the World Bank (Hund et al., 2020: 37) claims that: ‘The clean energy transition is expected to be much more mineral intensive than fossil-fuel based electricity generation’. The rapid deployment of wind and solar projects will require enormous amounts of non-metallic minerals. Based on the ‘ambitious scenario’ of limiting global temperatures ‘well below 2 °C’, the World Bank (Hund et al., 2020: 21, 72) provides alarming estimates. ‘[D]emand for aluminum, indium, and silver are expected to increase by more than 300 percent by 2050 from the [2018] base scenario, while the demand for copper, iron, lead, neodymium, and zinc is expected to increase by more than 200 percent’ (emphasis added). The situation, however, is radically underestimated. In the EU alone, unlike projections by Hickel (2019, 2020b) and the World Bank, solar and wind technologies will (under a ‘high demand’ scenario) increase the EU's demand for lithium, dysprosium, cobalt, neodymium and nickel by up to 600% in 2030 and up to 1500% in 2050 (Bolger et al., 2021). Batteries for electric vehicles, wind and solar technologies will drive the EU's demand for lithium up by 1800% and cobalt by 500% by 2030, and in 2050 demand will increase by almost 6000% for lithium and 1500% for cobalt (Bolger et al., 2021). These approximations, however, still do not take into account many infrastructures and digitalization devices, not to mention the increasing demand of electric vehicles in non-EU countries like Norway (Klesty, 2021), which surpassed earlier predictions.

While data is reductive and limited—ignoring toxification and human rights abuses—there are just flat-out omissions. The socio-ecological cost is unknown, and lacks even relative approximations. Europeans, on average, own close to 44 electrical and electronic products (phones, light bulbs, washing machines, electric bikes, smart technologies, kettles, etc.). Smartphones contain around 62 different types of metals, including rare earth elements, copper, lithium and cobalt, and conflict minerals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold (Bolger et al., 2021). ‘25% of all the silver mined around the world goes into electronic products’, explains the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) report, continuing that ‘collectively, smartphones have consumed 107,000 tons of copper, 38,000 tons of cobalt and 157,000 tonnes of aluminium and thousands of tons of other materials, and use around 10% of global primary palladium and cobalt production’ (Bolger et al., 2021; 3, 15). The EGD is promoting the expansion of transnational high-voltage power lines (HVPLs), their reinforcement and the digitalization of urban infrastructural systems to manage and integrate fossil fuel + technologies. Digital infrastructure requires enormous amounts of extraction. This extractive trajectory is expanding with ‘smart city’ digitalization. Sensors require tin, tungsten, tantalum and platinum; Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags use silver, copper and aluminum. In 2014, 6.3 billion tags (Pilgrim et al., 2017) were sold and, overall, ‘[a]lmost the entire periodic system of elements can be found in digital technologies’ (EC, 2021c: 12). In 2016, Hannah Pilgrim (2017: 9) contends, ‘the needed raw materials and energy for the ‘future technologies’ (e.g. RFID-Tags, chips, displays, etc.) have not yet been taken into account’. Even if life-cycle assessments exhibit severe modeling limitations (e.g. socio-ecological reduction & model assumptions), they—according to David and Koch (2019)—have not been accounted for in the development of smart city infrastructures. There is an untold, and likely enormous, extractive cost, associated with electronic devices and digitalization. This is an issue for the EGD, but also all mainstream GND advocates. Extreme caution should be exercised, to avoid assuming that digitalization and ‘smart’ technologies are ‘green’, ‘clean’ and environmentally friendly.

The absurdity of electric vehicles as an ecological solution is a display of violent cynicism and extractive disregard. ‘There are today about 8 billion electric motors in use in the EU’, according to the EC (2020b: 34), ‘consuming nearly 50% of the electricity EU produces’. Decarbonizing the economy, according to the Work Bank (Hund et al., 2020: 30), includes attempting to provide electricity to 840 million people without access, meanwhile building ‘the motors and chassis to electrify 135 million electric vehicles’ anticipated over the next 10 years. The situation, however, is much worse. Summarizing available numbers, Sovacool et al. (2020: 3) document:

[T]he number of electric vehicles (EVs) needs to jump from almost one million in 2015 to one billion cars in 2050 (more precisely from 1.24 million passenger cars to 965 million passenger cars); from 200,000 electric buses and trucks/lorries to 57 million; and from 200 million electric scooters and bikes to 2.16 billion. The amount of battery storage similarly needs to climb from 0.5 GW hours (GWh) to 12,380 GWh.

Cobalt demands alone in EVs, will increase by ‘200% between 2018 and 2020, and again by 500% by 2025’, while lithium ion's demand will quadruple between 2018 and 2028 (Sovacool et al., 2020: 3). EVs, it is estimated, use ‘four times as much copper as fossil fuel cars’ (Bolger et al., 2021: 14). This raises the issue of battery capacity, recyclability (see Fig. 1) and decommissioning waste. ‘[G]lobal solar panel waste amounted to 250,000 tons in 2016’, reminds Sovacool et al. (2020: 4), which can reach up to ’60 million tons of solar waste in 2050’. This combines with ‘11 million tons of spent lithium ion batteries’ and 3.1 MW wind turbine, which creates between ‘772–1807 tons of landfill waste, 40–85 tons of waste sent for incineration and about 7.3 tons of e-waste per unit’ (Sovacool et al., 2020: 4). These numbers again do not account for the various forms of toxification, horrendous living conditions and the systematic human rights abuses these extractive, processing and dumping activities imply.

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While deserving greater attention than outlined here, the EGD—which is similar to mainstream GND proposals (Sanders, 2019)—in reality is a necropolitical program continuing and intensifying existing patterns of capitalism and (colonial) extractivism. The streets of every city continue to be filled with e-bikes and scooters under the name of ‘environmentalism’ and ‘going green’. While this also entails the enclosure of public space by businesses, this proliferation of plastics, tires, wires, batteries and digital applications through e-mobility, which are ‘not considered’ for e-bikes, scooters and other devices in the extractive accounting above (EC, 2020a: 35). This means more energy use, less walking and more (critical) raw materials for riding e-bicycles. More copper, neodymium and other rare earth metal mining and processing. This suggests research and environmental policy failure, which extends further, and is particularly relevant to the next section. The EC (2020b) and World Bank (Hund et al., 2020: 11): ‘[D]o not include the associated infrastructure needed to support the deployment of these technologies (for example, transmission lines)’. Despite being instrumental to the EGD project—which promotes reinforcing and expanding national and transnational interconnections— the mining and processing necessary for transformer substations, high and medium voltage power lines remain unaccounted for.