Presentation short abstract

This presentation exposes how green transitions reproduce white supremacist logics of dehumanization, territorial appropriation, and exploitative labor regimes—revealing green growth narratives and policies embedded in international and multilateral climate fora as a continuum of imperial extraction

Presentation long abstract

The rhetoric of "green" transitions and discourses is structurally embedded in white supremacy, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. This presentation, grounded in feminism, antiracism, and decoloniality, dismantles the myth of climate neutrality by examining how green extractivism operates through the same racial hierarchies and colonial logics that have rendered certain bodies and territories disposable.

The so-called transition to renewable energy intensifies exploitation in the Global South through what is understood as racial sacrifice zones—territories predominantly inhabited by Indigenous, Afrodescendant, and peasant communities whose lands are commodified as "empty space" and whose labor is made artificially cheap through unequal exchange. From lithium extraction to hydrogen production, green growth reproduces the dehumanization mechanisms of settler colonialism: framing certain populations as obstacles to progress, biodiverse ecosystems as resources awaiting appropriation.

This violence extends beyond territorial extraction, encompassing exploitative labor regimes rooted in the racialized, geographical, and gendered division of labor. The same system that devalues minerals under Latin American soil devalues care, domestic and subsistence work, linking global extraction chains to global care chains in a unified logic of differential valorization.

The presentation, informed by the upcoming policy brief prepared for the Feminist Action Nexus, explores how these white supremacist structures shape climate discourse and policy in multilateral spaces like the UNFCCC, limiting what can be achieved in international negotiations. It advocates for challenging Northern "solutions" that rely on ongoing exploitation of racialized bodies and territories, calling for transitions rooted in genuine decolonization, labor justice, self-determination, demilitarization, and the abolition of racial capitalism itself.