Research

Our Framework

Our analysis focuses on energy over fossil fuels. Energy is the material base of imperial, colonial capitalism. Energy shapes geopolitical alliances, fuels war machines and defines precarious and racialised regimes of labour. Our energy system is driven by a racial capitalist model of extraction and exploitation in the name of economic growth, profit and development. It does this in the fossil fuel industry. It is doing this in the so-called green energy market.

This is historical. The global energy market was formed in the age of the European empire around a colonial model based on the extraction and transfer of resources and wealth from colonised places into imperial cores. Since, the power of states has been amalgamated into corporations, financial institutions, trading blocs and military alliances, transforming and complexifying contemporary imperialism beyond a South to North divide.

To help us think through the complexities of contemporary energy imperialism, we use ‘industrial complexes’: a network theory used by abolitionists in their analysis of prisons as profit machines.

We look at how investors, policymakers, lobbyists and corporate actors design a global energy market driven not only by profit but strategic geopolitical interests which instrumentalise racialised, class-based inequalities across borders; and create new ones. We view multinational energy corporations as frontline imperial agents, driving the deathly privatisation of land and resources, and siloing its profit into the hands of a global elite. We recognise neoliberalism’s role in creating collaborative relationships between company and state, which contributes to cementing corporate power and disenfranchising workers. We understand mutually supporting interests as working in ‘networks’ that are reliant on the land, labour and lives of racialised and working class people across the world.

Gas

Gas is a highly polluting and dangerous fuel, producing methane leaks across the supply chain. Methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term and can be attributed to over a quarter of all global warming. Gas tankers or LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) carriers are ‘climate bombs’ that can emit more emissions than whole countries. Still, gas has been the subject of a greenwashing push, by fossil fuel lobbyists in key governments, who have designed a narrative that gas is the fuel that will ‘transition’ us away from fossil fuels. Even though gas is itself a highly dangerous fossil fuel…

We look at how Europe’s fossil gas industry is mapped onto colonial histories of racialised and class-based exploitation and extractivism, instrumentalised for corporate profit and geopolitical interests. Our mode of inquiry is the gas industrial complex: a Black Marxist framework that situates gas production within its political economy, racial capitalism. The gas market is reliant on processes of racialisation to produce the unequal social dynamics required to justify its processes of accumulation by dispossession. Simply, the gas market needs hierarchy to justify its exploitative and ecologically damaging model: race is that hierarchy. Race is also a shape-shifter: it plays out differently across contexts, but ultimately exists to produce differential relations of human value that allow accumulation to continue.

We are currently completing a long-form academic intervention on the gas industrial complex that we aim to publish early next year. Our case study has been the EastMed region (Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine) and as such we are exploring how mechanisms of racialisation play out, both on an intra-European level and in the broader SWANA region. We are grateful to our incredible comrades who have been supporting this project, from across academic and grassroots spheres.


Hydrogen

According to its corporate and political champions, hydrogen is a fuel that can be produced with minimal environmental impact. As such, it’s receiving significant advocacy and material support from policy-makers working on our transition away from fossil fuels.

Hydrogen is not the climate solution it’s proponents would claim, whilst its environmental and social impacts are enormous. Hydrogen is a fuel made from the electrolysis of energy. So how that energy is made is significant. Currently, 99% of hydrogen produced worldwide is produced using fossil fuels.

The EU is currently aiming for 10% of its energy mix to be made from ‘clean’ hydrogen by 2040. Blue hydrogen made using fossil gas and unproven carbon capture technology is part of this allegedly ‘clean’ mix: prolonging business as usual for imperialist fossil fuel corporations. New research has shown blue hydrogen to be even more harmful in terms of emissions than burning coal directly. Secondly, green hydrogen made using solar, wind or hydropower, requires vast amounts of land and water. 50% of the EU’s green hydrogen will be imports. The danger is a significant number of projects are appearing in places that were or are continually colonised. Due to ongoing and historical forms of colonialism and neoliberalisation including debt burdens, many of these places have less economic bargaining power around whether or not to take on energy projects destined for export to Europe that will not benefit local people.

We focus on hydrogen’s industrial complex. This means looking at states, energy corporations, development banks and other financial institutions collaborating to get backing for new EU-backed hydrogen projects. We look at how the legacies of colonialism in places resisting hydrogen projects affect how much political participation locals have in deciding whether or not this project is something they actually want in their area. We are in the process of establishing new relationships with comrades on the ground, in Namibia, South Africa, DRC and Chile, as key sites of EU and private hydrogen development. We are not against green hydrogen per say. What we want to transform are the relations of power that open doors for violent and extractive projects to be implemented against interests of local communities.