Racial capitalism accumulates surplus capital via the exploitation and elimination of minority populations. Green capitalism is merely the latest frontier of neoliberal expansion that draws an abyssal line the human and non-human racialized body.

Racial Capitalism and Climate Change: An analysis of climate change through the lens of racial capitalism and coloniality reveals additional aspects of climate injustice that are obscured by the four-part definition articulated in this article (distributive, procedural, corrective, and social). In order to appreciate the full extent of climate injustice, it is important to examine the ways that race is inscribed in the history of carbon capitalism and the sacrifice zones of both the fossil fuel economy and the emerging green energy economy. First, the colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade established the material and ideological foundations of capitalism – a system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and white supremacy (Davis and Todd 2017, Yusoff 2018). The Anthropocene is the epoch under which ‘humanity’ – but more accurately, petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism – have had such a large impact on the planet that radionuclides, coal, plutonium, plastic, concrete, genocide and other markers are now visible in the geologic strata. (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 765; emphasis added) The genocide of the indigenous populations of the Americas in the 1500s was so massive (nearly 50 million deaths) that farming collapsed and forests rebounded. The forests removed such large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere as to cause a significant dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 1600s, measurable in Antarctic ice cores – leading Lewis and Maslin (2015, pp. 175-177) to propose 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene. This early marker of the Anthropocene coincided with the importation of slave labour to extract gold, silver and copper and later the sugar and cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution (Yusoff 2018, pp. 29-33). Starting the Anthropocene at 1610 captures all impacts of the Industrial Revolution, which many scientists and historians consider a key part of the Anthropocene – because European annexing of the Americas was an essential factor in providing food energy and raw material imports that were critical elements allowing an Industrial Revolution to take place. (Lewis and Maslin 2018, p. 319) Colonization and slavery were therefore central rather than peripheral to the Industrial Revolution and the birth of carbon capitalism (Williams 1994, Beckert 2014, Blackburn 1997, Yusoff 2018). Second, the “slow violence” inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on racialized and poor communities throughout the world remains a central feature of contemporary capitalism (Nixon 2013, Soyapi and Kotzé 2016). The extraction, processing, transportation, refining and combustion of fossil fuels has placed disproportionate environmental burdens on racialized communities in the global North and South. From the Niger Delta to the Canadian tar sands and the countless communities living in the shadow of polluting petrochemical facilities and power plants, the life cycle impacts of fossil fuels include eviction from ancestral lands; desecration of sacred sites; poisoning of air, land, and water; fires, explosions, and industrial accidents; loss of subsistence fishing and hunting rights; and exposure to significant health hazards (Klein 2014). Local and transnational environmental justice struggles against coal mining, petroleum drilling, fracking, oil and gas pipelines, and polluting refineries and power plants are thus inextricably intertwined with the struggle for climate justice. Third, 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. The North’s bloody resource wars, its collusion with despotic petro-states, and the resulting death, destruction and displacement of racialized Muslim and Arab populations are amongst the most violent ongoing manifestations of climate injustice (Klare 2004, Natarajan 2012, Klein 2016). When persons displaced by these conflicts seek refuge in the global North, they are branded as potential terrorists and subjected to restrictive border controls, including the notorious “Muslim ban” on travel to the US from certain predominantly Muslim countries (Liptak and Shear 2018, Telford 2018). Fourth, those most susceptible to climate-related disasters and slow-onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as non-white (Haas Institute 2017, Pulido 2018). They reside in locations such as low-lying coastal zones, small island states, and agriculturedependent nations disproportionately exposed to hurricanes, floods, drought, desertification and rising sea levels (Anand 2004). In addition, they have been rendered socially and economically vulnerable to climate change by the North’s economic and military interventions. The North’s “under-development” of the global South during the colonial and postcolonial era, so eloquently described by Walter Rodney (1972) and Eduardo Galeano (1997), has been exacerbated by decades of neoliberal economic reforms imposed initially by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and subsequently through regional and multilateral trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties (Gonzalez 2015). These reforms increased poverty; reduced access to health care, education, and other social services; undermined the development of climate-resilient urban and rural infrastructure; created mass displacement; and deprived states and communities of resources for climate adaptation and disaster response and recovery (Haas Institute 2017, Saad 2017). Finally, 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. For example, wind farms are being developed in Oaxaca, Mexico on indigenous lands to provide energy to Walmart, Coca-Cola, Heineken and Cemex (a Mexican cement manufacturer) without public debate; adequate compensation; free, prior and informed consent; equitable sharing of benefits with local communities; and mechanisms to provide compensation for damage and loss to land (Baker 2015, Zárate-Toledo et al. 2019). In Canada, a controversial proposal to build an enormous hydroelectric dam on the Peace River threatens to displace indigenous peoples and replicate the sacrifice zones of carbon capitalism – this time in the name of “green energy” (Scott and Smith 2017). In Brazil and throughout the global South, forest conservation schemes developed through the climate regime’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism undermine the rights of local and indigenous communities to harvest plants, timber, or fish in their ancestral territories (Klein 2014, Kronk Warner 2015). Lastly, legislation in the US and the EU mandating the blending of biofuels into transportation fuels has increased food prices and incentivized large-scale land transactions in the global South that destroy forests and displace rural dwellers in order to make way for large plantations to cultivate biofuel feedstocks (such as oil palm). These mandates remain in place even though the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of many biofuels exceed those of the fossil fuels they replace (Gonzalez 2016). An analysis of climate change grounded in the coloniality of power reveals a key thread that unites these abuses – the abyssal line dividing those deemed human from those deemed non-human or sub-human. While everyone is vulnerable to climate change, those who occupy the sacrifice zones of racial capitalism are particularly susceptible to harm due to their classification as sub-human and disposable. Racialization justifies and naturalizes violence and dispossession in war zones, in resource extraction zones, in the green energy economy, and in the refugee camps and migrant detention centers of the global North. As Naomi Klein candidly observes: A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own first – will be marshalled to rationalize these monstrous decisions. (Klein 2016, p. 9) Even though they have uprooted “the darker races” (Du Bois 1900/2007) throughout the world through the ecological and economic crises of colonialism, militarism and predatory capitalism, Northern governments use a variety of border controls to exclude “those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations” (Walia 2013, p. 5). For those below the abyssal line, racism is not simply prejudice or discrimination, but “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007, p. 28). International law has been deeply complicit in the project of racial capitalism. As Antony Anghie (2004) explains, international law originates in the colonial encounter and has been used to justify successive Northern interventions in the global South through a variety of doctrines – including terra nullius, the doctrine of discovery, the mandate system, trusteeship, modernization, development, good governance, humanitarian intervention and pre-emptive self-defense. International law has depicted Southern peoples as so primitive, savage, uncivilized, backward, and under-developed that their lives, livelihoods, and cultures are unworthy of protection (Anghie 2004, Gonzalez 2015). This history raises serious questions about the ability of the climate regime to secure climate justice for racialized communities displaced by climate change.