Carbon tariffs are used to reinforce the “us” vs “them” via trade protectionism.
Almeida et al 23 — Diana Vela Almeida, Assistant Professor on Political Ecology of Sustainability at Utrecht University, Vijay Kolinjivadi, a Writer with Earth Negotiations Bulletin, post-doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB) of the University of Antwerp , Tomaso Ferrando, Assistant professor of International Economic Law at the University of Warwick Law School , Brototi Roy, executive committee member of the Indian Society for Ecological Economics , Héctor Herrera, climate consultant, Marcela Vecchione Gonçalves , Researcher at Centre for Advanced Amazonian Studies (NAEA), Federal University of the State of Pará,, Gert Van Hecken, associate professor at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB) at Antwerp University, 2023 (“The “Greening” of Empire: The European Green Deal as the EU first agenda,” Science Direct, Aug, Available Online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102925, Accessed on 07-28-23)
Despite historically having a carte blanche for resource extraction, Western European nations are now economically profited off of disciplining economic protectionism to ensure “free and fair markets” that work in their favour (Nelson & Bigger, 2021). Moreover, the EU requires new strategies to (re)assert its hegemony in the face of growing competitors. "Greening" precisely serves this role; it permits protectionism to be jointly justified in the name of acting on a global climate emergency while simultaneously maintaining control over new and emerging markets by disadvantaging emerging economies for their incapacity to be as "green" as the EU is (Mehling et al., 2019; Pasgaard et al., 2017; Zachmann & McWilliams, 2020).
The provisions negotiated in the FTAs, together with carbon tariffs such as the CBAM, illustrate how the empire of carbon-neutrality is reinforced through technical mechanisms of trade imposition. While EU-FTAs get pegged to the condition of primary producers being restricted from adding value to materials exported to Europe and to capitulate to the unfair historical advantage of Europe's industrializing capacities, the CBAM directly punishes non-EU nations due to its carbon-intensive extractive economies in the name of decarbonizing production and “going green”. The dependency on cheap labour and raw material as the very foundation of what ‘green’ technological development requires becomes inconsequential under the terms and conditions of trade demanded by Europe.
The ‘global green agenda’ for a ‘green’ transition generates financial incentives to establish new territories of extraction under the guise of “ecological consciousness”. However, the production of “green” as a process of extraction and “ecological” as relational responsibility have been deliberately confused and the consequences could not be more fatal. Voskoboynik and Andreucci (2021) describe the new strategies of intensifying production under the guise of ‘greening’ mineral extraction, while a report by GRAIN (2021) on digital agriculture highlights the decreasing autonomy that both farmers and non-human kin have to escape production logics under the guise of “climate-smart” agriculture strategies similarly proclaimed to be “greener.” As Zografos and Robbins (2020) claim, the cost-shifting of harmful socio-environmental impacts from economic production away from Europe “is a pervasive rather than exceptional practice for production systems oriented toward increasing profit margins” (p. 544).