We access a root cause—laundry list of impacts.

2.2. Racial capitalism at the core of greener capitalism Dependency implies the expanded reproduction of racialized global relations of exploitation. The memorandum released in the early 1990 s, signed by Lawrence Summers, when he served as Chief Economist of the World Bank, only expresses the racism that has historically structured dependency relationships (Summers, 1991). In that memo, Summers defended the migration of polluting companies from the North to the countries of the South, arguing that “a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages” (‘Furor on Memo At World Bank’, 1992). The racist tone of the statement was completed with “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that”. In this line of thought, the global south is just a source of raw materials and sink for waste for production in imperialist countries (Rice, 2009). This is the underlying basis for most of the imperialist proposals of green capitalism and GND. Pulido (2017) underlines that environmental racism is not a product of neoliberalism but is an essential part of racial capitalism. This type of racism can be understood under the idea that racialised and low-income groups “are disproportionately exposed to pollution, but it also includes biases in natural resource policy, uneven application of environmental regulations and nature excluding conventional environmentalism” (Pulido, 1996, p. 377). In the same line of thought, decolonial approaches critically expose how coloniality of power codifies racial differences between people from the core and the periphery, making the latter appear as naturally inferior, thus taking advantage of this process to plunder their labour and nature (Álvarez and Coolsaet, 2020, p. 3). In the same line of thought, the concept of territorial coloniality (Betancourt, 2021) states that social, economic, political, environmental and cultural devastation/domination/exploitation is linked to a matrix of subalternisation of people and territories in a differentiated manner. The advance of extractivism and domination over territories affects with greater force and violence the most vulnerable sectors and regions. This matrix of subalternisation has been applied not only to many people, but also to nature and its essential elements. Racial capitalism explains that racialisation, and thus racism, are at the core of capitalism's existence and not just a derivation of capitalism itself (Gill, 2021, p. 2). This is central to the super-exploitation of both labour and nature (Burden-Stelly, 2020). As Issar explains, at the core of the process of primitive accumulation are processes of racialization and violent appropriation of bodies and nature (Issar, 2021). Within neoliberalism, certain facets of capital's exploitation are enhanced or made more explicit, such as racial and gender inequality. In this stage, the destruction of nature becomes ever more present. The proposals emanating from the imperialist centres (which until not long ago were also imperial or colonial centres) reproduce a vision of the international division of labour that places populations on the frontiers of exploitation (on the peripheries), as surplus and expendable populations (). In these territories, racialized communities are “displaced not only by climate change, military interventions, and neoliberal economic policies, but also by the measures deployed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions” (González, 2020, p. 117). In fact, “many responses to climate change are, in fact, amplifying systems of discrimination, segregation, and displacement as they attempt to adapt to the climate crisis and safeguard dominant economic and socio-political structures.” (L Rice et al., 2022, p. 2). In these sacrificial zones of racialized capitalism, populations are “particularly susceptible to harm due to their classification as surplus and disposable. Racialisation justifies and naturalises violence and dispossession” (). Some are even talking of a global system of climate apartheid (). As Melamed suggests: Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups - capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed. These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires (Melamed, 2015, p. 77). At the limit, these processes of racialisation are expressed in what Leff calls the ultimate form of the class struggle: the point at which what is in question is who has the right to make use of the world to “discharge into an environment privatised the waste of life ” (Leff, 2005). Indeed, it will be the world's poor who will get the brunt of the policies to tackle climate change. The different valuation of life is reproduced within the dependent capitalist States themselves. The advancement of extractive activities is prioritised over the reproduction of life in some territories. A clear example of this is the militarisation, during 2020 and 2021, of the town of Andalgalá, in the province of Catamarca in the central region of the Argentine mountain range, in order to limit the social mobilisation unleashed in the face of the start of an open-pit mega-mining project using the pandemic and enforced isolation as an excuse. With this intervention, the State defended the interests of the transnational mining corporations, repressing and criminalising those who were fighting for life and territory. This is yet another example of how dependent states operate in racialized capitalism, given that Catamarca is one of the poorest provinces in Argentina, and government discourse has focused on the idea that the solution to the structural poverty in this region would come from mega-mining. However, after 20 years of mega-mining activity in the region,2 the province's economic wellbeing has not improved, while the region's water has been poisoned, disease rates have risen, and droughts have deepened (No a la mina, 2015). Another example of how racial capitalism operates within dependent countries is the case of the advance of extractive activities in the territories of indigenous communities in Argentina. Despite the existence of a 2006 law that declares the emergency of the native peoples, proposing a survey of the territory of indigenous communities and the prohibition of evictions, not only has this survey not been carried out, but multiple evictions have also been executed. Thus, for example, the Mapuche people in the southern provinces have been dispossessed of their ancestral territory to allow the advance of mega-mining and the oil industry through violence and criminalisation, in combination with a media campaign that seeks to construct the image of the Mapuche as terrorists. Even self-proclaimed progressive governments (such as that of Alberto Fernández, in office in Argentina since late 2019) reproduce repressive strategies in order to move forward with extractive projects that are expected to feed the inflow of dollars into the economy. Increasingly explicitly, they link the development of mining extractivism (gold or lithium, for example) to insert the local economy into the circuits of the new green capitalism (Kulfas, 2021).