Racial division precludes organizing among the proletariat—cementing the neoliberal greening of industry. That expands extractivism and mass displacement of minority populations, which reproduces racial-economic hierarchies, creating a negative feedback loop of racial capital exploitation.

Racialized communities have borne the brunt of carbon capitalism from its origins in genocide and slavery to the contemporary climate crisis and are increasingly being displaced by the emerging green energy economy. Their location below the abyssal line subjects these communities to the “slow violence” of the extractive and polluting fossil fuel industry (Nixon 2013); resource wars; predatory economic policies; climate-induced disasters; and criminalization, detention, and state-sanctioned death when they attempt to cross the militarized borders of the global North. Viewing climate change as an environmental issue unrelated to other social justice struggles fosters environmental determinism, erases history, and conceals the multiple and inter-related injustices of carbon capitalism. Communities below the abyssal line are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the first to suffer the ravages of climate change, and their plight is a harbinger of the harm that will befall everyone. Racism creates divisions between groups of people whose vulnerability to carbon capitalism should serve as the basis for solidarity. As economic inequality increases and the planet’s ecosystems are brought to the brink of collapse, all but the very affluent will become frontline communities in an increasingly damaged and dangerous world. A concept of climate justice grounded in racial capitalism can bring together diverse social movements by articulating the links between extractivism, poverty, racism, economic inequality, environmental degradation, displacement, mass incarceration, police brutality, immigrant detention/deportation, militarism, indigenous dispossession, and a global economic order that systematically subordinates the global South and undermines the livelihoods of many in the global North. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted decades ago, “[i]njustice anywhere is injustice everywhere (…). In a real sense all life is inter-related” (King 1963, n.p.). Only through collective struggle can genuinely emancipatory solutions be achieved. Racialization undermines solidarity by portraying large segments of humanity as inferior, unworthy, expendable and as threats to national security. Nowhere is this more evident than in the inhumane response of Northern countries to migrants fleeing conflict, persecution, poverty, and environmental degradation. As climate change increases the flow of migrants, Northern states are imposing solutions that reinforce national borders, intensify the abyssal divide, and absolve the North of responsibility for its prodigious carbon emissions and its current and historic subordination of the South. The scapegoating of migrants for the economic and ecological crises of capitalism impedes resilience and restricts mobility. This replicates historical patterns of confining colonized and enslaved peoples to particular locations while encouraging the mobility of colonizers. It is also eerily reminiscent of Garrett Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics” – the notion that the affluent should toss the (racialized) poor overboard in order to keep their own heads above water (Hardin 1974/2015). The climate crisis calls into question the sanctity of national borders and poses a fundamental challenge to the collapsing sovereign-centric Westphalian system. As current migration trends reveal, people will not sit still in the face of climate catastrophe. They will relocate, adapt, improvise, cross borders and find other ways of surviving and rebuilding their lives. Solutions premised on detaining and expelling climate-displaced persons have little chance of succeeding. The task ahead is to decolonize colonial notions of nationalism and fortified borders and to recognize the rights of climate-displaced persons to migrate collectively and individually. A legal framework based upon the largely unfettered right of states to exclude migrants is ill-suited to the achievement of climate justice