The state uses reusable energy as a form of slow violence, separates affected people from their jobs, creates sacrificial zones drawn on racial lines, and labels marginalized communities as “the enemy” as justification for state violence.

On one hand, othering those affected by the violence of environmental harm and dispossession serves to suspend the responsibility of the state (or multilateral institutions) for guaranteeing the wellbeing of such groups, typically already marginalised and racialised populations (Andreucci & Kallis, 2017). A related expression of such othering is the production of certain territories as “sacrifice zones” of extraction and waste (De Rosa, 2018), increasingly also associated with the “green energy” economy (Zografos & Robbins, 2020). On the other hand, othering-qua-racism can be used to legitimise the outright use of direct, murderous state or state-sanctioned violence, the establishment of “states of exception”, and the deployment of military force, “counterinsurgency” or “pacification” tactics against groups that actively resist or oppose extractivist projects (Brock & Dunlap, 2018; Huff & Orengo, 2020; Weldemichel, 2020). Those who resist are labelled as “terrorists”, “agents of foreign powers”, or are otherwise discursively constructed as “internal enemies”, in order to justify their repression or killing.

To the extent that they follow an extractivist and colonial logic, large-scale renewable energy and associated extractive-infrastructural projects are illustrative of “necropolitical”, exclusionary uses of othering.2 Extractivist logics are historically associated with material and immaterial forms of “dispossession” (Navarro Trujillo, 2021b). Much like fossil fuel extraction, “low carbon” energy projects contribute to separating affected populations from their means of livelihood—both directly through legal or de facto “enclosures”, and indirectly through contamination and other forms of “slow violence”. While dispossession and enclosure can also result from climate adaptation programmes (Taylor, 2015; Zografos, 2017), land enclosures, mines, plantations and large scale infrastructural projects such as mega-dams are associated with grave socio-ecological impacts, and therefore show more clearly the “deadly” side of “climate action”, including the production of dispensable, “surplus populations” (Alonso-Fradejas, 2021; cf.; Sassen, 2010).