The Green New Deal ignores and perpetuates the exploitation of black and brown communities while obscuring the parasitic nature of capitalist production.

On redeeming whiteness at the United Nations and the allure of Green New Deals. For a long time, the writing had been on the wall for marginalized regions and countries whose disaster profiles and vulnerability have only become targets for asset managers like Black Rock and investors interested in making huge profits from climate disaster (e.g. , ). In light of this, the UNFCCC seemed to offer a rare forum, for these countries to voice and share their experiences, albeit one lacking in serious progress. At COP 26, countries left with only an undertaking to discuss loss and damage and a partial deal on ‘methane emissions’ with no binding and secure arrangement on fossil fuels (Jacobs, 2022). For some climate negotiators and scholars accustomed to the pace of multilateral climate governance, or who dance well to the tune of the status quo within these mainstream spaces, these inflection points may represent progress on longstanding issues. However, for global south communities being destructively reconstructed and refashioned after every hurricane season or flooding event, these piecemeal shifts offer limited hope of new avenues for life and possibility. As Patrick Bond, reflecting on the first global Climate Justice Forum and COP 26 suggests, the non-ambition of the Paris Agreement may have inured and insulated many in the very narrow framings, (non)reformist reforms, and politically problematic objectives that it offered (). He further argues that “no matter how much debate proceeds in injecting various justice framings into the UNFCCC, it will be impossible to generate an outcome of human endeavor, and planetary survival will be moot” (). This series of papers may help unlock new potential principles, analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances (called PASTA) that Bond and others have found necessary (). Apprehending the material effects of race as an ordering construct of capitalism permits new investigations into questions that affect global South communities and the equally dysselected in the global North (Wynter, 2003). Climate-related impacts not only reinforce imperial relationships (Bonilla, 2020, Sheller, 2020) and reproduce surplus populations (Perry, 2021a). They also offer empirical ground to reflect critically on the very material and epistemic terms by which new and reconfigured contours of humanism are being remapped (Baldwin, 2022) and have long been defined by proximity to European ideals. The approaches adopted in these papers emphasizes how racialist ideas and class politics underpin climate change measures, their global diffusion, ongoing extractive practices and the relationship between capital, land dispossession, and transformed relationship between nature and non-human beings (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019, Davis et al., 2019, Girvan, 1975, Girvan, 2014, , Penados et al., 2022, Rice et al., 2021, Simpson, 2017). Political responses at different scales, from climate activism to state-level actions to ongoing climate and economic crises that appear virtuous or well-meaning need to be analyzed and interrogated along these lines. Climate activist groups, especially those emerging in 2019 in Northern Europe, led by Greta Thunberg, have been predominantly white and extol longstanding views about nature and the environment and representing middle-class interests (Kalt, 2021, ). Their activism, often couched as “saving the environment” (see, IPPR Environmental Justice Commission, 2021), have ignored the history of Black and brown anti-racist environmental movements and the intersectional and anti-capitalist nature that these struggles took on, often emerging from the global South during the 1980s (Rehman, 2022). These new movements have often not paid attention to the relationship between colonialism, often perpetrated by their own states and corporations and ecological violence, and the primary role of capitalist social relations in ecological breakdown. In this vein, widespread attention has been paid to what is perhaps perceived as the most prominent of ‘progressive’ environmental crisis policy proposals by global North thinkers and institutions: ‘Green New Deals’ (hereafter GNDs) (Chowdhury 2022: Chomsky and Pollin, 2020, Commission, 2019, Ocasio-Cortez, 2019, Pollin, 2015, Táíwò, 2022, ). GNDs aim to decarbonize the economy and generate large-scale public investment in ‘green’ jobs and industries but they also tend to reinforce deep-rooted global stratifications in the process (, Paul, 2021, Perry, 2020, ). This is because they primarily advocate techno-fixes which would do little to nothing to address the root causes of climate breakdown (War on Want and London Mining Network, 2019). GND interventions also tend to obfuscate how environmental policies – including ‘net zero’ and carbon–neutral targets – treat Black and brown places as zones for imperial clearing and remediation to be performed by the very actors who have perpetrated these harms over decades and centuries (e.g. ). In other words, GNDs do little to address the ongoing legacies of racial capitalism. It is noteworthy that GNDs are not themselves uniform in their orientation, nor do they always propose homogeneous and modernist developmental reforms. For instance, Max Ajl’s ‘A People’s Green New Deal’ (2021) should have four integral elements: universal access to renewable energy, national political (and worker) sovereignty, climate reparations, decommodified public spaces, and food sovereignty based on agroecological techniques of production. Harpreet Paul similarly calls for innovative mechanisms that raise funding for those already marginalized “in a way that protects, respects and promotes human flourishing within our planetary boundaries” (, p. iii). She further suggests that reparative climate justice should be about fostering coalitions and cooperative action in workplaces, communities, schools and hospitals, and embodies a vision and movement that recognizes human-nature interdependences. Leon also believes that dismantling harmful ownership structures precipitating the climate crisis, and harnessing community power are important related steps in developing a truly internationalist approach. Nonetheless, GNDs appear to have fallen out of favor, even in their inadequate neo-imperialist form in which subordinate countries’ futures are tied to further and more violent resource extraction and their wishes for democratic and viable alternatives for life are undermined. At the same time, a ‘cost of living crisis’ has hit countries in the global North, connected both to the aftermath of Covid-19 inflation hikes linked to supply challenges and super-profiteering, and the surge in wholesale gas prices due to ongoing war in Ukraine. For countries with a significant debt burden, the crisis has exacerbated pre-existing hardships. Appreciation of the hegemonic currency, the US Dollar, means that countries are facing lower export volumes, increased debt service payments and borrowing costs linked to adjustments in interest rates in the US and Europe (Debt ). This means countries face sovereign default, such as recently experienced by Ghana, Sri Lanka, and Zambia. There is also the likelihood of more forceful intervention at the hands of their creditors or their agents. Yet these proposals have so far marginalized the experiences of climate devastation that are already being visited on racialized communities in the Global South. As indicated above, the geo-physical and socio-ecological relations that are spawned in the wake of climate breakdown perpetuate and exacerbate asymmetries that harken to longstanding colonialist relations between the global North and South. New solutions are underpinned by processes of racialization and racialized subjectivities germane to the colonial and modernizing development project. New formations and practices that are anticipated under a ‘global’ GND put forward by the United Nations do not contest existing spatial asymmetries of technologies, power, capital, and resources (Gallagher and Kozul-Wright, 2019, ). Instead, proposals often claim to offer a new ideas and approaches based on reformed multilateralism, by which all boats rise to new green horizons. These imaginaries further discount and ignore the global racial hierarchy that was set in motion due to colonial political and economic relations and their new mutations created in the postwar era. While GNDs appear to have sound principles, the manner in which the most prominent discussions and practices have emerged around them, whether in ‘progressive’ or social democratic circles is a universal imposition in which global class struggle is downplayed. In addition to oppressed voices, positions and aspirations of global South people and communities are silenced and deemed an afterthought. It is purported as a redeeming effort with all of its paternalism, that (white) elites and middle classes know better and that global South peoples need salvation from the worst effects of the problems created by extractivist and high-carbon consuming elites and corporations in the global North. While the work of creating new structures for labor and community-controlled workplaces appear essential and progressive, as GND proponents proffer (), these working arrangements are nestled in already exploitative global commodity chains. The task of dismantling labor arrangements arising from capitalist social relations and spatial dependencies with global North corporations and institutions remains to be seen. In the post-Trump period, the United States presents itself as a shining light in climate Armageddon, having just secured a climate deal in Congress, awkwardly called ‘The Inflation Reduction Act’. The Act proposes to spend $370 billion on climate issues, yet it permits more fossil fuel exploration and licensing (Davenport and Friedman, 2022). Europe also presents itself as a hopeful beacon of ‘carbon neutrality’ with its intention to reduce its supposed dependence on fossil fuels (from its former colonies) (European Commission, 2018), which the Russian invasion of Ukraine has only further complicated. The climate crisis and its uneven unfolding offers spaces for redemptive acts of nominal inclusion and violent exclusion through green capitalist utopias. The erasure, displacement and uneven mobility of people and places accompanying such moves serve to ground new acts of purification, rebirth and redemption (see Shilliam, 2012, Wynter, 1995). There is a possibility that ultimate “inclusion” on the COP 27 agenda and “recognition” – which were long being vehemently denied – through statements from global North powers about loss and damage leading up to the latest climate summit can be seen as a form of (violent) imposition (Jackson, 2020) through acts of misremembering historical erasure, misattributing responsibility, instrumentalizing indigenous ways of knowing, misrecognizing those with the most to lose, and even tokenistic accommodation. These redemptive acts are paralleled by ‘reformist’ and sometimes punitive policies that offer little else than structural adjustment reforms, debt packages and so-called innovative financial instruments (, Perry, 2022). Further, in this redemptive thrust, the European Union and United States have weaponized political and economic power within global climate policy and financial institutions to impose so-called carbon border adjustment taxes that sanction carbon-intensive exports from the global South (Friedman, 2021, Unctad, 2021), whose societies have long served as the extractive zones or resource reservoirs for global North corporations, states and investors. The monumental achievement of green technologies and the green futures they are meant to realise, is to allow global North corporations to promote, patent, and dominate this apparent form of redemption (). The public investment push of GNDs adds credence to the rational redemption of the state as a basis for socio-ecological transformation () – what we argue is a new crisis configuration that rearticulates degrees of humanness – in part supported by climate science reports, climate financial architecture, and the mainstream of global climate governance. The current changes in monetary and fiscal policy that increase parasitic debt relations is another example in which the exploitation of global South workers is made worse and entrench inequalities. Understanding and problematizing these entanglements and linkages between connected yet distinct geographies in terms of labor surplus value extraction, commodification, and land overexploitation would help unlock and demonstrate which human institutions need dismantling at different scales. An analytic that promotes internationalism and appreciates labor exploitation as heterogeneous, uneven and interconnected processes enables a broader consideration of alternatives and highlight the ongoing struggle and legacy of global South movements. It should also eschew universal global policy fixes that can be applied regardless of historical or political context and needs, and ideally should eliminate the straightjacket with which governments and people in the South must currently contend in pursuing their own goals and ideas towards self-determination and ecological and social justice by other means.