The "Decarbonization Consensus" continually mobilizes the discourse of technological potential and innovation. At the same time, it explicitly advocates for "green business", "climate finance", "nature-based solutions", "climate-smart mining", "carbon markets" and various forms of speculative investment. Almost seamlessly, the "social responsibility" policies of extractive companies have become "socio-environmental responsibility" policies in recent decades, in an attempt to build an image of ecological responsibility that is in stark contrast to reality.
As a consequence, the “Decarbonization Consensus” is marked by ecological imperialism and green colonialism. It mobilizes not only practices, but India Email List a neocolonial ecological imaginary. For example, governments and companies often use the idea of "empty space", typical of imperial geopolitics. If in the past this idea, which complements the Ratzelian notion of «living space» ( Lebensraum), generated indigenous ecocide and ethnocide – and later served to promote «development» and «colonization» policies of the territories–, today it is used to justify territorial expansionism for investment in «green» energy.
In this way, large territorial extensions in rural areas with little population are seen as empty spaces suitable for the construction of wind power mills or hydrogen plants. These geopolitical imaginaries of corporate transitions reproduce colonial relations, which can not only be seen as an imposition from the outside in, from the North to the South. In many cases, what is at stake is also a kind of internal green colonialism, which forges the conditions of possibility for the advance of green extractivism based on alliances and colonial relations between national elites and global elites.