Renewable energy worsens warming – requires unsustainable mining practices and fossil fuel use at every level of the supply chain.

(Alexander Dunlap is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway. His work has critically examined police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development and extractive projects more generally in both Latin America and Europe. Jostein Jakobsen is a doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway. His research focuses on agrarian change in India, food regime analysis, meatification, and the Naxalite movement in India, set within broad interests in political ecology and critical agrarian studies. “The Violent Technologies of Extraction Political ecology, critical agrarian studies and the capitalist worldeater” 105-110) DAH

Ecological crisis, climate change and increasing energy usage are leading to various environmental programs. Despite the proliferation of ecological concerns, high-level negotiations surrounding biodiversity loss and climate change, which includes the resulting (market-based) mitigation practices, appear to be failing at redressing these issues in any meaningful way (Dunlap and Fairhead 2014; Hunsberger et al. 2017). Capitalist growth and the financial economy remain the highest priority, which becomes increasingly apparent in the way extractivism and environmental policy interact. We are witnessing the simultaneous deployment of industrial- scale extractivism and conservation initiatives that appear to be collaborating and complementing each other in methods of land control, commodifying natural resources and extracting value, meanwhile suppressing local opposition and resistance. Highlighting this phenomenon, Büscher and Davidov (2013) reveal the ‘ecotourism-extraction nexus’ that demonstrates how resource extraction and eco-tourism are actually co- constructed, share similar logics and retain multiple forms of collaboration. With this angle, eco-tourism can become complementary to hydrocarbon and mineral extraction, meanwhile extractivism can pave the way to eco-tourism demarcation and revenue extraction (Duffy 2015), leaving communities to negotiate conventional and green extractive industries (Büscher and Davidov 2013; Sullivan 2013b; Hill et al. 2016). Furthermore, the discursive fabrication of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ extraction remains instrumental, as mining engaged in environmental programs and ‘responsible’ mining can become ‘sustainable mining’ or support (market- based) environmental initiatives. Mining fabricated as ‘sustainable’ is based on CSR and the notion of ‘offsetting’. The undeniably ecologically destructive nature of large-scale mines requires them to use the logic of offsetting that is constructed in various ways (see Dunlap and Sullivan 2019). The idea, however, is the same: if you cause damage in one place you will restore and improve nature in another place (See Sullivan 2009; Huff and Brock 2017). As mentioned above, environmental initiatives are further legitimizing and/ or rebranding the images of companies, opening new green economic markets and undermining environmentalists opposing development projects. Offsetting has tried to brand Ilmenite (Seagle 2012), Uranium (Sullivan 2013b) and lignite coal mining (Kirsch 2014; Brock and Dunlap 2018) as ‘green’ and ecologically sustainable. Meanwhile, company offsetting sites, aside from rebranding operations, are then seeking to commodify and make these ‘restored’ or ‘improved’ environments legible to the green economy where biodiversity and carbon storage are then integrated into financial markets (see Sullivan 2010, 2013a; Fletcher et al. 2018; Dunlap and Sullivan 2019). Thus, as Seagle (2012) pointed out, the more companies extract and degrade environments, the more their carbon and biodiversity investments will increase in value. Offsetting can extend to ‘clean’ energy projects such as solar and wind energy development. While solar and wind energy were present in the environmental initiatives of the Hambach coal mine (Brock and Dunlap 2018), we also see wind and solar projects powering the infrastructure and public imagine of mining industries, notable among them is Grupo Mexico (Dunlap 2017a, 2019a). Solar and wind energy projects are themselves paraded as ecologically sustainable, environmentally friendly and an answer to climate change mitigation and energy transition. There is little, however, to suggest that industrial-scale renewable energy can lead to solving, let alone mitigating ecological crises. In fact, it spreads electrical infrastructure across the world (see Fig. 2 of Chap. 2), energizing mass consumption and life into the Worldeater. The socio-ecological costs of solar and wind energy are under-acknowledged, if not willfully ignored, to blindly expand extractive activities and economic or (delusional) ‘green’ growth (see Hickel and Kallis 2019). It may be argued that, while so- called renewables (or fossil fuel+) do not exhaust the resources that they use, the plantation economy does. We disagree. First, as will be discussed below, renewables require extractivism for securing raw materials and thereby risk the possibility of exhaustion via mining, negligent recycling protocols, misleading ecological ‘solution’ marketing and capitalist growth imperatives. Second, and like most technological interventions, people do not know the long-term impact that wind parks have on ‘the atmospheric boundary layer by (a) reducing wind speeds, (b) generating blade scale turbulence in the wake of the turbines, and (c) generating shear driven turbulence due to the reduced wind speeds in the turbine wake’ (Tabassum- Abbasi et al. 2014: 281). Moreover, absorbing the sun into solar panels— the skin of the Worldeater—and not the land risks unknown site-specific ecological alterations. Theoretical modeling and now ‘concrete evidence’, according to Tabassum-Abbasi et al. (2014: 273), ‘is emerging that large wind farms can influence local weather but are also likely to influence the climate and can bring in significant changes’. Renewable interventions might be less abrasive than mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, yet they remain co-constructed and are producing an infrastructure intervening into wind and solar patterns on a global-scale to harness and absorb vital energy. This deserves greater consideration and research to say the least. Below we will briefly discuss five criteria—raw material extraction, land control, socio-ecological impact, energy use and decommissioning—to assess the viability of solar and wind energy projects in their respective locations. Where do those fields of solar panels and large-metal wind towers come from? Photovoltaic (PV) solar and wind energy projects require a vast amount of extraction and processes. You will find fossil fuels at every part of the supply chain in mining, manufacturing, transportation and processing of raw materials. This also includes the increasing mechanization of large-scale mining, but consider that according to some sources, ‘PV solar power systems contain approximately 5.5 tons per MW of copper, while grid energy storage installations rely on between 3 tons and 4 tons per MW’ (Strong 2016). Meanwhile, according to Wind Power Monthly, 3.6 tons of copper are used per megawatt in wind energy development (Smith 2014). This includes unknown amounts of various steels (depending on the solar project) for panel frames, while wind turbines use roughly 150 metric tons of steel for reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles and 500 metric tons for the tower (Smil 2016). The production of steel, as it stands, is impossible without burning metallurgical coal—or coking coal—which is a vital raw material in the processing of renewable energy infrastructure (Dıez et al. 2002). The manufacturing of PV requires hazardous materials such as hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, 1,1,1- tricholoroethane, and acetone (UCS 2013; Yang et al. 2017). Thin-film PV cells also contain toxic material such as gallium arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, cadmium-telluride and coolant liquids (Yang et al. 2017). Wind turbines also use a variety of plastics, minerals and rare earth minerals in their permanent magnets, such as dysprosium, praseodymium neodymium, and terbium (Dunlap 2018e). There are numerous variations 5 between type of wind turbines—geared turbines that do not use permanent magnets or direct-drive turbines—and solar panels utilizing different technologies. The list of minerals and processing necessary for use are exhaustive, yet it is important to recognize the extent of the complex fossil fuel and mineral supply chains, and likely accompanying human right abuses that lurk behind so-called renewable technologies (Finley-Brook and Thomas 2011; Kiezebrink et al. 2018), which require further research, public acknowledgment and discussion—to say the least. This collaboration between extractive industries, extracting minerals for renewable energy or using renewable energy for extractive operations, has led Dunlap and Brock (2019, Dunlap 2018e) to calling this ‘the renewable energy- extraction nexus’. This nexus, we would add, aids the Worldeater’s colonizing drive, expanding its grid while remarkably successfully enrolling people into its entrails as it builds public opinion in accordance with selective rational interest. Once raw materials are secured, processed and assembled, or ready for onsite assembly, the next step is to acquire land with abundant solar and wind resources. Solar and wind parks require large tracts of land (Rignall 2016; Yenneti et al. 2016; Siamanta 2017; Avila 2018; Dunlap 2017a), which opens these projects to the same issues associated with land grabbing and control: dispossession carried out by public and private security forces; land contracts dependent on deception/manipulation; acquiring contracts through coercion and, overall, multipronged counterinsurgency style interventions (Dunlap 2018a, forthcoming). Different forms of ‘energy dispossession’ (Baka 2017) offer various and adverse royalties, and socio-economic and ecological benefits. Land deals, and the methods used to acquire land, will depend on the companies and the politico-historical context where conventional and green extractivist projects arrive. The Union of Concerned Scientists notes that there is ‘less opportunity for solar projects to share land with agricultural uses’ than wind turbines, which in theory is true, yet depends entirely on the company in question (Siamanta and Dunlap, forthcoming). Meanwhile, mixing wind turbines with agriculture reportedly has severe negative impacts on agriculture and livestock (see Dunlap 2019b). When land is acquired, the project construction begins, requiring various environmental transformations and/or degradations. Solar and wind projects require the clearing of land, which necessitates, depending on this land, different levels of deforestation, habitat loss and soil