We smell what?

We smell a global political economy based on the transfer of wealth from the global working classes, to an elite minority.

We smell neoliberal development institutions and policies forcing extractive energy models onto former colonised, ecologically vulnerable nations.

We smell a greenwashed energy transition for Europe set to reproduce these imperial dynamics.

We smell the gas and hydrocarbon industries as fuellers and funders of settler colonial occupations and genocide.

We smell the securitisation of energy infrastructure protecting the interests of private profits at the expense of local people.

We smell an energy market reliant on the cheapened labour of racialised, precarious, and migrant workers.

We smell a growing movement of movements against racial capitalism and imperialism. A movement fighting for transnational workers solidarity, for public ownership of energy production and resources, for a worker-led energy transition, for radical, revolutionary care that demands a more inhabitable planet for all.

We Smell Gas

WeSmellGas is a collective of organisers, researchers and film-makers based in Northern Europe. We formed in 2022 around a shared framework: the overlapping crises we face today, including climate change, are fuelled by a racial capitalist global economy, driven by empire and colonialism. Climate justice can only be realised by dismantling capitalism and the imperial processes that reinforce it, including our current extractivist energy system.

Our current energy system is both imperial, colonial capitalism’s material base and the key driver of climate change. Europe is the home of the biggest historic empires and some of the biggest corporate perpetrators of racialised extractivism and exploitation worldwide. As such, WeSmellGas targets European energy imperialism, and focussing in particular on the EU.

We organise along three interrelated tracks. We conduct critical research to locate Europe’s key perpetrators of energy imperialism and work with those in resistance to new extractivist energy projects. We do political education in Northern Europe to translate these findings into creative media, workshops and written content. We take action in European imperial cores, to disrupt, resist energy projects that weaponise and reinforce racial capitalist dynamics, to demand better for us all.

Hydrogen Library