Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research in the Soma Coal Basin, this paper examines how the current discourses and policies of ‘climate change mitigation’ unleash intensified forms of labor-based violence and environmental disasters; and enable new frontiers of extractive colonialism such as deep-sea mining.

Paper long abstract:

Blatantly doubling down on fossil fuel production, “governments plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C” according to the Production Gap Report 2023. This paper addresses two processes that are obscured within “the widening gulf between governments' rhetoric and their actions,” as named by Angela Picciariello. First, I examine how the so-called green and sustainable projects and the relative decline of coal production in Europe unleash intensified forms of (spectacular and slow) labor-based violence and disasters in the Global South, the Indigenous energy geographies of the North, and the geopolitically liminal, non-Western regions such as Mexico and Turkey. To do this, based on 18-month-long ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on the Soma mine disaster of May 13, 2014, which took the lives of 301 coal miners in Turkey. I argue that a renewed combination of disciplining and neglecting the bodies and body parts of working class and other dispossessed communities—in Foucauldian terms, a renewed merging of an anatomo-politics of the human body and a biopolitics of population—is the ordinary, yet obfuscated truth of contemporary fossil capitalism. Second, and more briefly, I lay out my preliminary thoughts on the material politics of ‘sustainable energy sources’ and ‘energy security’ within capitalism by looking at the (exploratory) deep-sea mining projects. I discuss how hegemonic discourses of ‘climate change mitigation’ and the current forms of international climate policy enable new futurities of extractive colonialism such as deep-sea mining.