Paper short abstract:

Drawing on comparative research on subaltern protests against the expansion of coal fired power plants in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh and against bitumen mining in the Athabasca tar sands, this paper interrogates green new deal ideologies in relation to ongoing environmental justice struggles.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on my comparative research on subaltern protests against the expansion of coal fired power plants in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh, against bitumen mining in the Athabasca tar sands and coal mining in the Rocky Mountains in Canada, this paper interrogates the political imaginary articulated by various proposals for a green new deal in terms of environmental justice protests against development dispossession. I argue that our current conjuncture, locally and geopolitically, is characterized by racial-capitalist class projects of green passive revolution (and its derivative, fascism redux). Examining the making and moving of commodity frontiers (whether fossil or “renewable”) as extractive intermedia environments of historical nature and accumulated violence allows us to analyze the global trajectories of the “herculean” nexus of financial, proprietorial and state-based class power through which the political-ecological Global South remains subordinated during an organic crisis of the inter-state system. A multiple colonialisms framework drawing on subsistence perspective and social reproduction feminism, world-ecology and intermedia theory enables us to articulate critical perspectives on green new deal ideologies that are grounded in popular struggles against interlocking oppressions and unpack critically hegemonic green capitalist climate emergency discourses. Comparing local Indigenous and other subalternized perspectives on subsistence and regeneration, this paper assesses degrowth theory’s endeavours to advance a pluriversal critique of climate capitalism, green development and green growth.