A green future is being packaged for public consumption: governments speak about clean transitions, corporations pledge net zero, and advertisements cycle through forests, wind turbines, and electric cars presented as symbols of hope. The official narrative is straightforward—technology will correct the damage whilst the economic machine continues on its current trajectory.
Walk through the supply chains and the illusion unravels. New mines are sunk into old colonial frontiers. Forests are converted into carbon credits. Wealthy nations approve new drilling while telling others to tighten their belts. The climate crisis becomes a growth market. What is sold as transformation is the same extractive order, repainted in eco-friendly colours.
Green capitalism is slow violence: it works through distance and disguise, where branding sanitises harm and abstraction shields exploitation. The structure beneath remains intact.
The Story Green Capitalism Tells
The mainstream story offers change without disruption: markets will innovate, growth will somehow detach from resource use, consumers will make enlightened choices, and entrepreneurs will deliver breakthroughs that smooth the path ahead. It is a story crafted to reassure those invested in the status quo because it promises that the fundamentals will remain untouched.
This story obscures the root of the crisis: an economic system driven by endless extraction, endless production, and endless waste. No marketing strategy can hide the material reality that global consumption already exceeds ecological limits. The narrative avoids the essential questions: who directs the transition, and who carries its burdens?
Extraction Reloaded
The shift towards renewable energy and electrification has triggered a global race for minerals with deep historical echoes. Cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, and rare earths now sit at the heart of “clean tech”. The countries that consume the most demand stability whilst the regions that supply the minerals absorb instability and harm.
In mineral-rich territories across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, extraction reshapes land and life. Communities face polluted rivers, fragile jobs, land dispossession, and heavy policing around project sites. Workers, often with limited alternatives, enter dangerous shafts or labour in open pits to meet distant demand for green products. The devices marketed as ethical carry the consequences of this extraction.
This contradiction is not incidental. It is structural. A system premised on perpetual expansion always seeks new frontiers. When one resource is depleted or regulated, another is opened. The green transition shifts pressure from fossil reserves to mineral reserves without altering the growth-driven logic beneath.
Why Capital Embraces the Green Turn
Corporate enthusiasm for climate action is not rooted in moral awakening; it is a strategy to maintain power. ESG reports, sustainability audits, and net-zero pledges create a sense of progress that leaves ownership untouched. They deliver visibility rather than redistribution, reassurance rather than transformation.
Technological fixes serve the same function. Carbon capture is marketed as a lifeline for continued drilling. Offsets allow major emitters to claim progress without reducing emissions. Hydrogen labelled as clean keeps gas corridors alive. These fixes are deployed to extend extraction, not reduce its centrality.
Delay becomes an asset: every year of stalled action protects profits for industries driving the crisis. Financial institutions and resource-dependent states support this delay because their influence depends on the existing structure, making the transition a debate about devices rather than power.
Land Turned Into Carbon Stock
Offsets and carbon markets reveal the colonial core of the green economy. Forests in the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia are transformed into carbon stores for companies and governments in the North. Local communities experience increased surveillance, restricted access, and diminished control over their territories. Debt-pressured governments sign deals that treat land as a climate ledger instead of a living place.
Offsets rarely cut emissions; instead, they relocate responsibility, allowing wealthy countries to continue emitting whilst poorer regions absorb carbon. The people living on the land lose agency whilst corporations purchase the right to delay decarbonisation.
This is not climate justice—it is green colonialism.
The Myth of Green Growth
Green capitalism depends on the belief that the economy can grow indefinitely whilst material throughput declines. This belief has no grounding in physical reality: efficiency gains are undermined by increased consumption, renewable infrastructure requires vast quantities of minerals, land, and energy, and multiple planetary boundaries have already been breached. Growth becomes an unquestioned doctrine, even as it accelerates ecological collapse.
A system built on endless expansion cannot remain within ecological limits. It can only displace harm, conceal it, or rationalise it as necessary.
What a Real Transition Demands
A liveable future cannot emerge from corporate branding; it requires a shift in power. A genuine transition means bringing energy, water, land, and major industries under democratic control, ensuring production prioritises human need rather than profit and ecological limits are treated as binding. Communities affected by extraction must receive restitution and long-term repair.
Reducing material demand is essential: durable design, repair culture, recycling, and extended product life reduce pressure on extraction zones whilst planned obsolescence is phased out and consumption in wealthier regions contracts.
Value must remain near where it is generated: raw materials should not be exported only to return as expensive components. Regional refining, manufacturing, and recycling shift power away from multinational supply chains and towards producing societies.
Markets cannot deliver this; democratic planning of energy systems and public infrastructure is essential, with decisions following social and ecological priorities rather than investor expectations.
A Politics of Life Beyond Green Branding
The climate crisis is not waiting for an inventor to save it; it is shaped by a contest between extractive power and the possibility of a habitable world. Green capitalism promises change that leaves hierarchy untouched, offering a cleaner version of the same system and suggesting that the forces driving collapse can engineer their own solution.
The alternative is clearer: democratic ownership, ecological repair, and collective sufficiency. A transition that refuses to treat people and ecosystems as expendable, that places life before profit.
The world does not need a greener capitalism. It needs a politics capable of ending the violence hidden behind the green veneer.