Racial capitalism leads to laundry list of impacts.

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.49 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.50 Indeed, the genocide of the Indigenous populations of the Americas in the 1500s was so massive (nearly fifty million deaths) that farming collapsed and forests rebounded.51 The removal by forests of enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere caused a significant dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 1600s, measurable in Antarctic ice cores.52 Due to the magnitude of this early human modification of the environment, some scholars have proposed 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene.53 This early marker of the Anthropocene coincided with the importation of enslaved Africans to extract gold, silver, and copper in the Americas and to produce the sugar and cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution.54 “Plantation agriculture and cotton in particular were key to the emergence of the industrial power of England first and quickly much of the rest of Europe.” 55 The slave plantation colonies of the Americas supplied not only food and industrial inputs but also markets for British manufactured goods.56 Between 1600 and 1800, slaves in the Americas comprised less than 1 percent of the world’s population, but produced the commodities that dominated world trade.57 Slavery, genocide, and colonialism were thus central rather than peripheral to the Industrial Revolution, the birth of carbon capitalism, and the beginning of the Anthropocene.58 These systems of domination relied on lethal force as well as the ideology of White supremacy.59 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.60 The extraction, processing, transportation, refining, and combustion of fossil fuels has placed disproportionate environmental burdens on racialized communities in both the Global North and the Global South. From the Niger Delta to the Canadian tar sands to 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.61 Thus, local and transnational environmental justice struggles against coal mining, petroleum drilling, fracking, oil and gas pipelines, and polluting refineries and power plants are an integral part of 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 petrostates, and the resulting death, destruction, and displacement of racialized Muslim and Arab populations are among the most violent ongoing manifestations of climate injustice.62 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 USA from certain predominantly Muslim countries.63 Fourth, those most susceptible to climate-related disasters and slow-onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as non-White.64 They reside in geographic locations (such as lowlying coastal zones, small island states, and agriculture-dependent nations) disproportionately exposed to hurricanes, floods, drought, desertification, and rising sea levels.65 In addition, they have been rendered socially and economically vulnerable to climate change by the North’s economic and military interventions.66 The North’s “under-development” of the Global South during the colonial and postcolonial era, so eloquently described by Walter Rodney67 and Eduardo Galeano68 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.69 These reforms increased poverty; reduced access to healthcare, education, and other social services; undermined the development of climate-resilient urban and rural infrastructure; created mass displacement; and deprived states and communities of the resources necessary for climate adaptation and disaster response and recovery.70