The aff’s attempt to solve climate change just offshores the biopolitical violence of the state. They can never prevent climate change and their attempts to look as if they are the saviors of the planet only recreate slow violence and systemic violence upon the global slow.

Climate change mitigation comprises a vast array of economic and technological interventions and strategies, operating at multiple scales and across multiple sectors. The cornerstone of mainstream mitigation policy is, on principle, a shift away from fossil fuels—the highest global CO2 “emitter”—towards “renewable” or less carbon-intensive forms of energy generation. The socioenvironmental implications of expanding renewable energy frontiers are becoming central to research and debate in political ecology and critical geography (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2017; McCarthy, 2015). There is increasing attention, for instance, to the extraction of minerals necessary for batteries and other “low-carbon” technologies (Sovacool et al., 2020); the recasting of large hydropower projects as “climate-friendly” development (Huber et al., 2017); the “green grabbing” and conflicts associated with wind energy generation (Avila ´ Calero, 2017; Siamanta & Dunlap, 2019); the expansion of photovoltaics and “solar colonialism” (de Souza et al., 2018); or the use of climate mitigation funds to promote biofuel plantations (Camargo & Ojeda, 2017).

These processes can be seen as instances of energy or carbon colonialism, whereby countries in the global South and other peripheries are treated as carbon dumps, or targeted for grabbing land and resources necessary to reduce CO2 emissions generated primarily in the North (Bachram, 2004). Moreover, several of those projects “rely on extractive landscapes forged through various forms of physical and structural violence” (Camargo & Ojeda, 2017, p. 62). In other words, projects as diverse as wind farms, biofuel plantations, dams and lithium mining follow the same “green extractivist” logic. According to this logic, extracting as much resources, energy and profits as fast as possible from a territory, irrespective of the impacts on local socioecological relations, is framed as necessary not only for the wealth and wellbeing of populations in host locations—but also, increasingly, as an imperative for “saving” the climate and the planet.1

3.1. Green energy, violence and othering

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).

Dispossession and violence accompanied extractivism since its inception in the colony, whereby imposing the logic of the mine and of the plantation was coterminous with the assertion of the right of the sovereign to dispose of the life of the natives or slaves (Cavanagh & Himmelfarb, 2015). And it continues to this day with the systematic killing or “letting die” of those who find themselves—or get—in the way of the expansion of extractive projects in resource-rich “peripheries” (Middeldorp & Billon, 2019). We see here a close connection between the violence of extractivism and othering understood as a discursive exclusion, or racism in the Foucaludian sense. The colonial order of race hierarchy—assimilating natives to the realm of nature or “savagery” (Mbembe, 2003)—was central to the extraction of resources and surplus value from peripheries, justifying the disposing of indigenous peoples’ and slaves’ lives in plantations and their “entombment in mines” (Cavanagh & Himmelfarb, 2015; Marx, 1976). Contemporary extractive and agricultural frontiers, including those for renewable energy, reproduce the same logic, with different degrees of intensity.

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.

3.2. Dialectics of exclusion and inclusion: the case of lithium extraction

In the case of “green” extractivism and energy too, othering and related “imaginative geographies” (Said, 2003) do not only underpin violence and exclusion, but also the opposite: interventions that ostensibly aim to promote “life”, to “improve” populations, “develop” territories, and rationalise the use of natural resources to address the climate crisis. Green energy and extraction projects are not always explicitly framed as “intentional” development interventions, as it is often the case for “adaptation” programmes, or conservation and carbon capture schemes such as REDD+. Yet, as the case of lithium mining below shows, such green projects are also discursively framed as a means to achieve development, and accompanied by a “problematizing” of the targeted populations or territories, which are framed as “poor”, “undeveloped”, “empty”, “underutilised”—in need of rendering wealthier and more productive.

We noted above that this logic of othering “to-include” underpins historically colonial and development interventions in the global South—framed as civilising or humanitarian missions—and how this in turn normalises and depoliticises (geo)political control and appropriation of resources and wealth. In times of planetary climate crisis, discourses that accompany renewable energy and green extraction projects emphasise the necessity and urgency of such extraction, not only as an opportunity to develop otherwise impoverished peripheries, but also as a duty to contribute to global efforts to mitigate catastrophic climate change (Voskoboynik & Andreucci, 2021). This is perhaps most clearly visible in the case of lithium mining. Recent research on the South American “Lithium Triangle”3 shows how lithium extraction is imbued with imaginaries of a clean, high-tech form of development (Barandiaran, ´ 2019), capable of redeeming troubled histories of dirty extractivism and poverty, while at the same time placing lithium-rich peripheries at the forefront of global geopolitics and political economy of low carbon technologies (Voskoboynik & Andreucci, 2021).

Here the ambivalent promise of easy, unprecedented wealth, traditionally attached to oil alongside the perils of environmental destruction and social conflict (Coronil, 1997; Watts, 2001), is replaced by imaginaries of equally enriching yet eco-friendly extraction, promoting industrialisation and inclusive development while also “saving the climate”. This obscures the fact that water intensive lithium extraction and processing in the fragile socioecological landscapes of the Triangle may amount to a death sentence for the indigenous and campesino communities that live in the area (e.g. Jerez et al., 2021). It shows how the biopolitical logic of development is always accompanied by a necropolitical one (García Lopez, ´ 2020), as well as the role of othering as a technology that underpins both, and permits reconciling their contradictory coexistence. We argued above that othering permits undermining and repressing opposition to extractivism, violently if necessary, and sacrificing local populations for the “greater good”; framed in such a way, “killing” becomes a legitimate political duty of the state (Andreucci & Kallis, 2017; Holterman, 2014). In the case of “green” energy, moreover, framing extractive-infrastructural projects as necessary and urgent not only for local and national development, but for the planet itself, renders opposition to them all the more easily framed as selfish and irrational.

Dispossession and violence accompanied extractivism since its inception in the colony, whereby imposing the logic of the mine and of the plantation was coterminous with the assertion of the right of the sovereign to dispose of the life of the natives or slaves (Cavanagh & Himmelfarb, 2015). And it continues to this day with the systematic killing or “letting die” of those who find themselves—or get—in the way of the expansion of extractive projects in resource-rich “peripheries” (Middeldorp & Billon, 2019). We see here a close connection between the violence of extractivism and othering understood as a discursive exclusion, or racism in the Foucaludian sense. The colonial order of race hierarchy—assimilating natives to the realm of nature or “savagery” (Mbembe, 2003)—was central to the extraction of resources and surplus value from peripheries, justifying the disposing of indigenous peoples’ and slaves’ lives in plantations and their “entombment in mines” (Cavanagh & Himmelfarb, 2015; Marx, 1976). Contemporary extractive and agricultural frontiers, including those for renewable energy, reproduce the same logic, with different degrees of intensity.

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.