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As a whole, the Green New Deal (GND) is discussed as one of the most promising political projects to address social justice targets together with climate goals. Yet, as most individual GNDs focus on the national level, concerns about global justice have largely remained absent from early debates, leading some to conclude that the GND reproduces neocolonial and extractivist schemes. To analyse programs for a GND in relation to issues of global justice requires an analytical framework able to evaluate justice claims in extended geographies. Drawing on the later work of political theorist Iris Marion Young, we develop a framework that foregrounds three principles: shared responsibilities for environmental harm of global reach, self-determination for those effected by these harms, and a forward-looking political responsibility to address the structures producing and sustaining injustice. We employ this framework to conduct a qualitative content analysis of four selected GND proposals from the UK, the EU and the US. This analysis indicates that all selected GNDs acknowledge in principle the global reach of responsibilities and formulate (limited) proposals to address these in different fields. However, they do not think of global justice in terms of a forward-looking notion of political responsibility that acknowledges the need of structural reforms and the self-determination of those experiencing harm. Instead, when addressing justice beyond the level of the nation state, these GNDs fall back on a notion of distributive justice. Based on the work of Young, we conclude with a set of propositions for global democratic structures that would support the outlined principles of global justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates on the notion of "decarbonisation by dispossession" in order to shed light on the contradictory character of capital-driven energy transitions. First, we suggest conceptualising "decarbonisation" as a "socio-ecological fix" to intersecting, climate-induced crises of accumulation and hegemony, aimed at saving capital rather than the planet. Second, reflecting on the mineral intensity of "low carbon" technologies such as industrial-scale solar and wind farms, we approach ongoing transitions as a form of "extractivism": a form of predatory appropriation of land and resources, embedded in global geographies of unequal ecological and value exchange. Third, examining the case of nickel, we argue that, despite elements that complicate a clear North-South binary, capital-driven transitions are ultimately reinforcing the colonial character of energy provision; they are causing an expansion of "transition mineral" frontiers and associated dispossession effects, and creating sacrifice zones of extraction and processing concentrated in formerly colonised countries. Considering also the contradictory outcomes of mineral-intensive transitions in terms of CO2 emissions reduction, our findings point to a structural inability of capital to solve its ecological contradiction. We conclude that radical proposals for a genuinely "just" transition, including those that mobilise a Green New Deal framework, should aim to decouple energy provision (and the reproduction of life more generally) from the material and epistemic violence of colonial-extractive capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, the Mayor of Los Angeles announced the Los Angeles Green New Deal (LAGND), an ambitious plan to shift the city's power system to 100% renewables by 2045. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—the electricity provider for the city and the largest municipally-owned utility in the United States—began a consultation process with local stakeholders and energy system modelers to determine possible scenarios to accomplish this goal. While the LAGND was lauded by environmentalists and progressives both within Los Angeles and beyond, it has been heavily opposed by the IBEW 18, the union that represents nearly all employees at LADWP. IBEW 18 has staged protests, created political advocacy organizations, and funded anti -decarbonization political candidates. This paper draws on 20 semi-structured interviews and other secondary materials to understand the union's oppositionand to demonstrate some of the unique challenges that municipal-scale Green New Deal (GND) plans face. We argue that the tensions between the mayor's office and unionized utility workers can be explained, at least in part, by three instances of scalar misalignment—or mismatch—that arise from trying to undertake a GND plan at the city level. These include mismatch between: (1) the scales of political activism and engagement between the mayor and the union, (2) the aims of the GND narrative and the limits imposed by the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles, and (3) the current and future geographies of the electric power system and related infrastructure and its path dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the GND (Green New Deal) platform by exploring the reality of energy development under the European Green Deal (EGD). Taking a special interest in degrowth positions on energy development, the article argues that the European Green Deal is an exercise in necropolitics; intensifying market relationships, extraction, and infrastructural colonization. The article proceeds by reviewing and discussing recent environmental justice and degrowth positions on energy infrastructural development. The methodology outlines desk-based research on resource extraction as well as on the European energy markets. This accompanies multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, charting environmental conflicts along a 400kv high-tension power line. This line goes across France, Catalonia and Southern Spain, stretching into Morocco and occupied Western Sahara. Unconventional research techniques, such as hitchhiking, enabled mobility and expanding the informal interview pool. Outlining the objectives of the EGD, the next section examines three aspects of its necropolitics. First, necropolitical economy reveals the reality of energy market liberalization under the EGD. Second, necropolitical extraction examines the expansion of mining and mineral processing, which are necessary for the EGD and 'mainstream' GNDs. Third, necropolitical operation reveal the reality of 'a rapid rollout of renewable energy deployment' by examining infrastructure conflicts along a 400kv power line between France and Spain. The process of infrastructural colonization is detailed, which also introduces different land defender perspectives on degrowth. Affirming the argument that the EGD is an exercise in necropolitics, the conclusion discusses important ways to expand degrowth, energy ecologies and real energy transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that labour and community-led advocacy efforts towards a just transition are fundamental to delivering the promises of a Green New Deal (GND) and a just post-carbon world. To this end, an ambitious, far-reaching project was launched by the Labor Network for Sustainability, a non-governmental organization dedicated to bridging the labor and climate movements, in Spring 2020 called the "Just Transition Listening Project'' (JTLP). Over the course of several months, the JTLP interviewed over 100 individuals, including rank-and-file union members, union officials, environmental and climate justice advocates, and Indigenous and community advocates to understand what makes transition "just," what opportunities exist for a broad coalition to advance a GND-style proposal, and to document the struggles facing working people and communities across the U.S. In doing so, we utilize the tools of political geography to examine the politics of spatiality, networks, and scale as well as the geographical and spatial dimensions of policy and political-economic institutions. We are particularly mindful of two spatial dynamics. First, that transition policies, particularly in a hegemonic country like the USA, have global implications. The industrial transition that took place from the 1970s to the 1990s, for example, bred nativism because it cast other countries as the cause of the problem. Second, critical geographers have pointed out that environmental justice (EJ) has been neoliberalized in the U.S. as a result of its operationalization, spatialization, and administration, starting with the Clinton Administration. Because JT is rising on the national and global agendas, we pay close attention to whether these dynamics that affected EJ are also operating with respect to JT, as well as how they can be contained. This research is particularly timely given the ongoing federal governmental efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19 and provide basic economic and social supports. The process of the JTLP parallels the goals of the GND--intersectional efforts rooted in community knowledge for the development of a people-led GND. This paper details the process of the JTLP and the prospects for intersectional, broad-based movements that are the only way a GND can be realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault's ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a "technology of government" operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly "green" mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of "vulnerability" in adaptation policies; and the governing of "climate migrants". We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as "in need of improvement". And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]