Global extractive imperative: from local resistance to unburnable fuels

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, there has been an ‘extractive imperative’ in Latin America that made intensified extraction the policy solution to all socioeconomic challenges. More recently, a similar consensus has emerged in a diversity of political, economic and geographical contexts - such as Turkey, India and the United States - that makes it possible to speak of a ‘global extractive imperative’. The imperative is especially evident in settings also characterised by authoritarian neoliberalism and the burden of resistance against extractivism is suffered overwhelmingly by marginalised communities at extractive frontiers. Emerging efforts to declare a share of existing reserves of fossil fuels ‘unburnable’ would not only help make progress towards tackling the climate crisis, it would also broaden the societal bases of societal struggles against capitalism’s extractive excesses.