Hamza Hamouchene: Rising up to true climate justice (ep420)
“A lot of experts, policymakers and decision-makers talk about the ‘green economy’ and ‘sustainable development.’ In reality, what we are seeing is decarbonization by dispossession—shifting the responsibility through a geographical fix from North to South.”
Why is the North Africa and Middle East region so vital to center in discourses on climate justice? How does the current global energy transition reinforce colonial, extractivist power dynamics? And what is the meaning of “eco-normalization” in the context of the Arab world?
Join us in this episode as Algerian researcher and activist Hamza Hamouchene dissects crucial narratives surrounding the notion of “green energy colonialism.” Posing critical questions about the current beneficiaries of renewable energy projects, Hamouchene offers thought-provoking perspectives that empower listeners to unpack the systemic injustices of “green colonialism.”
Listen via our website or any podcast app, and find the transcript below.
About our guest:
Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian research activist, commentator and founding member of the Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC) and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA). He is currently the North Africa Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute (TNI) and has previously worked on War on Want, and Global Justice Now. He most recently edited and published a collection of essays by various authors, Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Hopelessness Has Done Nothing For Me by Johanna Warren
Episode-inspired artwork by Yasmin Dahnoun
Dive deeper:
Dismantling Green Colonialism, a book by Hamza Hamouchene
Expand your lenses:
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Hamza Hamouchene: Some people call it the Middle East and North Africa, the MENA region. Others use the Arab region and the Arab world. And some other observers and experts prefer the Mashriq and the Maghreb, which is the levant and the Maghreb region. And there are even more obscure namings because they're not that rooted yet. They are used mainly by academics and experts in North Africa and West Asia. For us, we said there is no perfect naming for that region. I prefer North Africa and West Asia but others prefer the Arab region or the Arab world. So it doesn't matter much as long as we are aware that those namings are not perfect and each one has its limitations. But we need to say something here. The Middle East is a colonial designation of the region. We need to ask about the middle of what and east of where. This naming was constructed about the colonizing Europe. And it gives a certain narrative and discourse about the region. A region of wars, a region of ‘underdevelopment’, a region of ‘backward people’, a region of people ‘not fit for democracy’, those Orientalists and racist stereotypes.
I prefer more geographically rooted names because they connect people, cultures, ethnicities, societies, and communities beyond their language, religion, and ethnicity. So when we use the MENA region, it goes beyond the Arab region and the Arab world to include countries like Turkey and Iran. At least the way I use the Arab region is not in its exclusionary mode because some people use it as just it's a region for Arab people or ethnically speaking. But in reality, there are other people in the region including the Amazigh Berbers and I'm one of them. I'm Berber and Amazigh myself. There are the Kurds, there are the Nubians and other people in the region. I don't want to use the word minorities, but there are many, many people and societies in the region.
Regarding your question, why is the Arab region very important to these discussions around energy or the green transition? I think we need to start by looking at the region broadly within the global world capitalist market that is characterized by the new rise and ascendance of new zones of accumulation and growth, specifically, we are talking about China here, and the relative decline of the old established centres of power in Europe and North America. The region plays a very important role. It is a key nodal point in global fossil capitalism. It produces huge amounts of fossil fuels. It contains huge reserves of oil and gas. Just in 2021 and 2022, 35 to 36% of the oil produced came from the Middle East and the North African region. Historically, the discovery of oil and gas in this region played a role in the transformation of the global energy regime that relied then till the mid-19th century on coal. So there was a transformation from coal to fossil fuels in terms of using gas and oil in transport, manufacturing, and industries. But more recently, especially in the last two decades, there was a consolidation of the relationship between the Middle East, specifically the Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia and more specifically Saudi Arabia and Emirates, and East Asia, China.
The oil and gas met the global rise in demand for fossil fuels from that region. And this places these countries, specifically the Gulf countries, as indisputable protagonists in any discussion about addressing the climate crisis or phasing out fossil fuels. So I think this is important to say we're not just talking about energy and climate justice in the Arab region. The book goes beyond the region to have more global relevance.
This is specifically put forward or highlighted in one of the chapters of the book by Adam Hanieh, who sends a key message to the global climate justice movement saying you need to take the Middle East seriously, specifically the Gulf countries, in your strategies and tactics around phasing out fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis.
Kamea Chayne: And to go deeper into all of this, an underlying thread of the book highlights how the Arab region is ripe for energy transition, but held back by resource grabbing and neo-colonial agendas. Many people are aware of the rich fossil fuel reserves in this region that the current global energy system heavily relies on. At the same time, the region also has been noted as having a lot of potential quote-unquote resources that alternative energy infrastructures need.
I'm curious, why do you sense that the focus of a lot of energy transition discourses has been disproportionately centred on the source or the type of energy, rather than say deeper questions about the monopolization of power? And what are some examples from the Arab region or beyond of this so-called green transition being capitalized off of to further injustice and fuel what's called green colonialism?
Hamza Hamouchene: I think the first point here is to talk about the differential responsibilities for addressing the climate crisis. So the UNFCCC, the agency responsible for addressing the climate crisis, says there are two strategies for addressing and grappling with the climate crisis. Climate mitigation, which is the reduction of CO2 emission, is the responsibility and the priority of the advanced and richest countries, which happen to be in the global north. And we are talking here about Western countries, the EU, the US, and the most polluting countries, including China. And then you have the other strategy, climate adaptation which happens to be the priority of countries and communities in the global south since they are least responsible for causing the climate crisis but are more vulnerable because we are seeing more impacts and they have fewer resources to address the climate crisis. And this is because of colonial and neo-colonial legacies.
But what we are seeing, including in the Arab regions and more broadly in the global South, is an externalization of the climate mitigation agenda to these regions. So a shifting of the responsibility for reducing CO2 emissions to countries in the global South recreates the neo-colonial dynamics and recreates more extractivist drives. So when we talk about the global energy transition, we need to say something. First of all, it is happening unevenly, mostly in the global north, but in some pockets in the global south where those projects are externalized. However, this global energy transition is predicated on the continuation of the extraction of base and rare metals and minerals, including copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel. And the question here is, where would these resources come from? They would come from countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, Bolivia, Indonesia, from Morocco, where the exploitation of workers and the destruction of the environment would intensify. So what we are seeing and that's why we are using the green colonialism or green neocolonialism framework. This is just the perpetuation of the colonial dynamics of plunder, dispossession, and dehumanization of others, as well as the externalization of social environmental costs from the cores of the global capitalist system to its peripheries.
So we have environmental or energy priorities of one region of the world, which is the global north or what some people call the West, come above and at the expense of the environmental and energy priorities of other countries in the world and other communities in the world, recreating what some people call green sacrifice zones for sustainability. And this is the same paradigm.
A lot of experts, policymakers and decision-makers talk about the green economy and sustainable development. But in reality, what we are seeing is decarbonization by dispossession, shifting the responsibility through a geographical fix from North to South.
And this includes from rural to urban areas in those countries. So it is green capitalism, it is the same capitalist system, but maybe with a different energy source, while extractivism would continue, the theft of resources, land grabbing, and there are many examples in the regions that we could go into.
I'll try to give a few concrete examples here. So we are seeing some big mega projects that are export-oriented, at least the proportion of renewables in the electricity and energy mix is not that high. So Tunisia, for example, the proportion of renewable energies in the electricity mix is less than 3%. And then foreign agendas shaped by international neoliberal agencies like the IMF, the World Bank, and the EU development agencies, including the German GIZ, push the country to enter the renewable energy structure. But that's not Tunisia's priority. Tunisia's priority, first of all, is local development. That's one thing. Second is adapting to the climate catastrophe it is facing right now, a drought for four to five years that needs to restructure its agricultural model that exports water-intensive cash crops.
Tunisia's priority is finding new sources of water because it's facing absolute water poverty. But what we are seeing now is a lopsided agenda that Tunisia is being pushed to shoulder the burden of climate mitigation. And it's not just Tunisia, there are many countries. And there are other examples of the Xlinks project in Morrocco a joint venture between a British capitalist, who is the ex-CEO of Tesco, a big company here in the UK, with a Saudi company, Aqua Power. The project wants to export green electricity from southern Morocco by building solar plants and wind farms and also building an undersea cable. That is 3,800 kilometres that would take the electricity to Devon in the UK. This project is part of the UK energy security. And then when we know that 80% of the electricity produced in Morocco is coming from fossil fuels, one asks, energy for whom? And transition for whom? Local priorities are not served.
These are just two examples that show this export-oriented agenda, but also other dynamics are being pushed by Western countries, their companies and international neoliberal agencies in terms of privatization and liberalization of the renewable energy sector. So in almost most of the countries, the World Bank intervened to shape the agenda of privatization and liberalization and removal of energy subsidies, making energy a commodity, an expensive commodity for local people. Just back in 2019, there was a new law or an amendment of a law in Tunisia allowing for the use of agricultural land to produce renewable energy. In a country that faces an acute food dependency, which was revealed during the pandemic as well as during the war in Ukraine because Tunisia imports its wheat from Ukraine. One starts to wonder about the priorities of those who are being served. It seems it's not the Tunisians who are winning from that energy transition. So I think it's when we talk about the global energy transition, these questions need to be at the forefront.
Kamea Chayne: I think all of this encourages me to think about this idea that there is no universal conception of what a “just transition” means and looks like and the framing doesn't necessarily consider global injustices and it isn't by definition, as you say, emancipatory.
And so in a way, the green movement itself kind of has been greenwashed as well because people define ‘green’ in such different ways and this whole mainstream vision of so-called ‘sustainable development’ also needs to be questioned as well as mainstream conceptions of the green new deal because a lot of them don't take into consideration or don't centre analyses and interrogations of power and being in the media space, I think a lot about language and how narratives shape perception and how public consent is often manufactured by media. And I also think about the idea that there's no such thing as journalistic objectivity. Any outlet that insists that they're neutral and therefore more credible needs to be questioned because in trying to hide their biases, they somehow position themselves as the arbiters of truth.
Along a similar vein of remaining critical of narratives, you share that narratives are always the product of their historical moment and are never innocent. Therefore one always needs to ask, to whose benefit do knowledge production, representations and narratives work? With this, what are some common orientalist and neocolonial narratives about the Arab region related to climate or socio-environmental issues that you feel we need to trouble challenge and dismantle?
Hamza Hamouchene: This Orientalist colonial environmental narrative about the region was shaped and created since colonial times in the 19th century, specifically in my home country Algeria during French colonialism. So the environment and people were depicted as inferior, needing some kind of repair, dysfunctional, fantastical, abnormal, and frequently degraded in some way. And that necessitated the intervention or the foreign intervention or the intervention of the civilizing mission of Europeans or the white man's burden. As you mentioned, this environmental narrative was shaped to further the colonial mission of subjugating the people and their environment, controlling their economy and plundering their resources. So it was part of the colonial expansionist project. And this narrative travelled across the world. It didn't stay just in Algeria. It has been used in other neighbouring countries.
It has been used by the settler colonial state of Israel to depict itself as an environmental steward transforming Palestine, arid Palestine, or what they call ‘made the desert bloom’. And it has been used in other parts of the world too, in other countries in Africa, in Asia, to further the dispossession agenda, to further colonial and neo-colonial agendas. So this narrative did not end with colonialism, unfortunately. Some of the post-colonial elites have also used it to justify all sorts of projects of grabbing land, grabbing resources, and reproducing the Orientalist narrative around the environment and the people. That narrative goes beyond the question of safeguarding the environment or reforesting it or protecting or conserving the land. And it touches on the renewable energies right now. And I've seen it being reproduced even in World Bank reports.
Depicted as the Sahara, the desert in the Arab region, in some countries like Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria as a vast empty land, sparsely populated, constituting a kind of golden opportunity to produce cheap green electricity to export to Europe. So Europe can safeguard its energy security and continue its energy-intensive production and consumption patterns. But those narratives are deceptive and they are full of lies because they do not take into account questions of property, and sovereignty and do obfuscate in a way the ongoing neo-colonial relations of plunder and dispossession that facilitate the grabbing of land and resources and exclude and ends up excluding local communities and workers from shaping an environmental justice and climate justice agenda. And many examples in the region show how the environmental narrative or environmental orientalism is being used to further neo-colonial grabbing.
We've seen that in the big Ouarzazate plant in southern Morocco that was launched in 2016 at the same time as the climate talks, the COP22 that was held in Marrakesh that year. That project was described as the biggest solar plant in the world and the Moroccan monarchy was praised for its environmental credentials. But the moment you start scratching under the surface, you see a bleak picture. The 3,000 hectares where the solar plant was built have been taken away from their users by the agro-pastoralist communities in what some people call green grabbing. The land was taken without their proper consent or approval. That's one thing. And then the project is privately owned in what is called the Public-Private Partnerships, the PPPs, which is another tool of the green economy. So that project is run by a consortium between a Saudi company, Aqua Power, and other Spanish organizations. This is also an important dynamic that we may need to talk about because the Gulf countries are reproducing the core-periphery relations of dispossession and plunder and capturing the added value at the regional level.
But then even looking at the environmental credentials of such a project, the Ouarzazte project uses extensive amounts of water coming from a nearby dam shifting the water use from drinking and local agriculture to this mega project. The dam has dried up because of the solar plant and because of the exacerbating climate crisis. So what we are seeing is not a transition led by working people and for them. We are seeing a corporate-led capitalist transition that is trying to reproduce capitalism, that is trying to create new front lines or new frontiers of capital accumulation, take advantage of the crisis, maintain private interests and make profits. So it's important when we talk about these things to go into concrete examples and see what people are saying. In another project like in Morocco, the Midelt, people described the solar plants that are being built there as an occupation. This is without going to clear examples of green colonialism in occupied Western Sahara, occupied Palestine and the Golan Heights, where dispossession, plunder, violence and genocide are taking place against the people their environment and their resources.
Kamea Chayne: As we speak now in March of 2024, the political project of Israel is now, I think like five months into its genocidal military violence on the people and lands of Gaza, now with over 30,000 Palestinians killed and over 70,000 injured, according to AP News. I would appreciate it if you could tie in the so-called green transition to Israel and Palestine relations. You co-authored an article for Al Jazeera, How Arab Eco-normalization of Israel Covers Its Crimes, where you explore how the image of a green technology pioneer helps Israel to greenwash its occupation and apartheid in Palestine. I mean, so much of this entire situation and the polarization around it, I feel has been a deeper war on truth and narratives and perceptions of what's going on and perceptions of reality. And greenwashing is just another layer of this, leading a lot of people to calibrate their moral compasses in different and sometimes completely misinformed ways. So I'm curious to have you expand more on what exactly you mean and refer to when you talk about eco-normalization and how the images that are reported trace its positioning in the climate movement hide certain things and reinforce its political and diplomatic powers.
Hamza Hamouchene: We must be bringing Palestine into this discussion. And I think it's not just about bringing Palestine, but also centring it into the discussion. I don't believe that we can talk about green colonialism, decolonization, and environmental and climate justice in the Arab region and beyond whilst turning a blind eye to what is happening in Palestine.
We cannot turn a blind eye to the genocide being perpetrated by the deeply racist settler colonial state of Israel with the active support of imperialist powers from the US to the EU to France, Germany and others who are abetting and supporting that genocide, participating in it. I believe that the Palestinian liberation struggle is also an environmental justice issue. It's also a climate justice issue. There will be no climate justice on occupied land. And I think we need to go a little bit a step further and be in active support of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and emancipation.
We need to call for the end of genocide and a ceasefire. But at the same time, the struggle is a struggle for liberation and emancipation. I feel that I just needed to say this, because it's impossible to talk about decolonization, as some people right now are talking about it.
It has become very fashionable to use the word ‘decolonize’. But when it comes to supporting the Palestinian cause, we see cowardice, hypocrisy, and silence. Those who don’t speak up are canceling people who are showing their support and solidarity with Palestine.
So in the book, we have a whole chapter by Manal Shqair, it's an excellent chapter on greenwashing colonialism and eco-normalization, what she calls eco-normalization.
And I think it's important here to define what we mean by eco-normalization. So normalization as a whole is making political and economic relationships with the state of Israel in the Arab region and beyond. But, what we've seen lately, is that these normalization deals extended to the environmental sector, to the renewable energy sector. So that's what we are calling eco-normalization that legitimizes the Israeli discourse that is an environmental steward helping other countries in the region face their environmental issues like water droughts or water poverty and also providing technology for helping those countries in their transition to renewable energy. And that is dangerous in itself.
First of all, it green-washes Israeli settler colonialism and presents Israel under a green guise in a good way, as helping the others in the region. But then it masks the plunder that has been ongoing for more than seven decades in terms of plundering the water, in terms of stealing the land, in terms of destroying the local economies, in terms of uprooting the olive trees of the Palestinians, in terms of changing their environments. This is the reality of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism that we need to place at the forefront when we talk about decolonization, when we talk about environmental and climate and climate justice.
So Manal goes into two different projects to showcase how this eco-normalization is dangerous and how we should challenge those projects of eco-normalization and support the calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (PDS), to isolate Israel so we can challenge its project of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation. She talks about a project called Prosperity. This is a project between Israel, and Jordan, with the involvement of the Emiratis. So it has two dimensions. Blue prosperity is when Israel builds a desalination plant on the Mediterranean and provides water to Jordan because Jordan faces huge water stress and issues.
But then at the same time, to run that desalination plant, green electricity needs to be provided by Jordan. So the Emiratis would build a solar plant on Jordanian land and all the green electricity would be sent to Israel. But then, if we see the relationship as equal, Israel is providing water and Jordan is providing green electricity, which masks what Israel has been doing in rendering Jordan a thirsty country by stealing its shares of water in many rivers. And then we have Israeli companies that have signed deals at the COP27, the climate talks in Sharam El Sheikh in Egypt with many countries in the Arab region to do some renewable energy projects. These companies themselves participate in creating the energy and water apartheid infrastructure in occupied Palestine.
So I think we need to make those links and we need to document those projects and challenge them in different ways, either challenging those companies or calling for energy, an international energy embargo on Israel, not getting electricity and technology from them and not transporting energy for or exporting energy for them. These are the two things Manal focuses on in her chapter. But I think for the listener, it's worth saying that in the first weeks of the genocide, Israel gave licenses for various companies, Israeli and Western companies, to explore for gas in the Mediterranean, just 100 kilometres away from the Gaza Strip. The interconnections between environmental, energy, economic and political colonialism intersect.
It is a full-blown colonialism that dehumanizes others steals their resources and grabs their land. This is happening within the international or the global capitalist economy with the involvement of big Western corporations and governments.
And that's how we should see Israel as a European American colony in Arab land. It is the outpost of Western imperialism in the region. And this is happening also in conjunction with these normalization deals, especially with the Gulf countries. And that's why I mentioned earlier that we need to have a nuance when we talk about the Arab region. It's not an undifferentiated whole. The Gulf countries in alliance with Israel play a sub-imperialist force in the region, reproducing accumulation by dispossession, propping up authoritarian regimes in the region like in Egypt. and other parts of the Arab region. So it's important to make those connections.
Kamea Chayne: Your work highlights how multi-layered the climate crisis is. And yeah, interrogating power at every level and situating the concept of justice at the micro scale to the macro and the global. And I think it's vital to sit with these complexities because how we frame and understand any issue directly shapes how we think about or ideate possible solutions and forge our paths toward collective healing and liberation but it can feel overwhelming to process all of these things while also knowing that this is just the tip of the iceberg like everything we talked about today. So I'm curious, what has inspired you most as you learn about different grassroots effort efforts that are geared towards systemic and structural change? And what are some of your costs of action or deeper inquiry for our listeners?
Hamza Hamouchene: I think some of the most important dynamics and things that I've seen during my work in the region are some activists connecting various issues, connecting the dots between the environmental and climate question, the social and economic justice question, the inclusive just development model that they should see in their country, as well as a deep belief in internationalism. The person who comes to my mind when talking about these issues is a dear friend of mine called Mohad Ghasmi, who is currently a political prisoner in Algeria. He has been a tireless environmental activist since 2014 when he was one of the leaders of the anti-fracking movement in Algeria but also participated in the 2019 pro-democracy or anti-military dictatorship uprising in the country.
He managed to connect various issues and have an internationalist perspective centring on the local demands of the marginalized people at the socio-economic political and environmental levels. So I think he continues to be a deep inspiration to me. In our acknowledgement of the book, we mention him as one of the people who inspired this book. And we are grateful to him and to others in the region who continue to build movements, and grassroots organizations despite all the difficulties and challenges from military dictatorship, repression, imperialist intervention, from wars.
The Palestinian liberation struggle is another site of inspiration despite all the catastrophes, despite all the tragedy that we are seeing. Palestinians still resist, Palestinians still refuse to be defeated, and Palestinians would like to continue to survive. I think we need to put Palestine always at the center of our discussion because Palestine is a global front against the system of death that we are seeing right now.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more references and resources from this conversation linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Hamza, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an absolute honor, and we're really grateful for everything that you shared with us.
For now, as we wrap up, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Hamza Hamouchene: I would say that decolonization and concepts of environmental and climate justice are not purely rhetorical or abstract concepts, but they must be deeply rooted in material resistance and liberation. And as Fanon once said, every generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it. And I hope that our generation will rise to that challenge.
