“We Have to Convince Them Whatever it Takes”: The Climate Necropolitics of Energy Transitions in India and Zambia

Abstract

Sixty-five million years into the era of New Life (the Cenozoic), we find ourselves in what might be the Cenozoic’s last epoch, the Necrocene. To mitigate the crises provoked by exhuming and burning dead matter (i.e. fossil fuels) from the depths of the earth, the industrialized world has reached a consensus to build massive infrastructures for lower-carbon energy and rapidly electrify all sectors. Through international agreements that take a techno-managerial approach to decarbonization, nation-states have committed to solutions that require an unprecedented demand for the extraction of transition materials (e.g. cobalt, copper, manganese), alongside the appropriation of land used for centuries by agropastoralists for subsistence and the more-than-human as a habitat, with the moral rectitude of taking climate action. Despite a deluge of scholarly work illustrating the futility of decoupling such transitions from environmental destruction, climate mitigation through technological substitution continues its march toward economic growth, fed by the logic of “green” extractivism. In this study, we interrogate the utopian discourses of energy transitions by drawing from fieldwork examining the implementation of industrial-scale solar plants in Rajasthan, India, and on a potential resource frontier in Luapula, Zambia for the high-grade manganese required in electric vehicle batteries. We ask whether lower-carbon energy transitions create conditions of precarity and death. The two case studies reveal a trajectory that exacerbates precarity and hastens social and premature death in deeply unequal ways, underpinned by ongoing climate coloniality: the essence of electrified Necropolitics in the Necrocene.