Madhuresh Kumar
In the light of the unfolding climate catastrophes and the unfolding crisis the language of energy transition has gained unprecedented traction. From the corridors of the Parliament down to the provincial governments, the shift from fossil fuels to renewables is being framed as both inevitable and immediate. Yet beneath the veneer of urgency and technological optimism lies a deeper tension, who defines this transition, and in whose interest is it unfolding?
Even as solar panels are installed and new lithium mines opened, frontline communities continue to bear the burden of displacement, pollution, and violence. What masquerades as climate action often replicates colonial logics: militarised extraction, land grabs in Indigenous territories, and green technologies controlled by the same corporate and geopolitical elites responsible for the climate crisis.
In this context, a recent conversation organised by Global Tapestry of Alternatives and Post Carbon Institute, as part of its Thematic Group on ‘Energy and Alternatives’, brought together two powerful voices – Galina Angarova, Executive Director of the SIRGE Coalition (Securing Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in the Green Economy), and Carlos Tornel, researcher and activist with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. Hosted by Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, Executive Director of Home Planet Fund and a member of the Liminality Network, the dialogue challenged dominant paradigms of energy and transition, and called for an ontological shift towards memory, reciprocity, relationality, and community sovereignty.
As Carlos reminded the audience early in the discussion, “This is not a transition. It’s an a systematic expansion of all energy sources.” Rather than replacing fossil fuels, the dominant model of green energy merely layers renewables atop fossilized extractive systems. Wind, solar, and electric vehicles become new strategies for dispossession, especially for Indigenous peoples and peasant communities in the Global South –which includes the emerging sacrifice zones in the geographical North–. Galina elaborated, warning of how “efficiency” narratives hide an ever-increasing hunger for minerals, including the return of uranium mining and water for powering AI-driven data centres.
This article weaves together their insights, not simply to critique, but to illuminate the radical possibilities of energy justice when led from below. It centres a critical question often left unasked in mainstream debates: What is energy for? And how do we reclaim it as a commons, rather than a commodity?
This Is Not a Transition: It’s an Expansion
The mainstream narrative of an energy transition suggests a clean break from the fossil-fuelled past towards a renewable-powered future. But as Carlos Tornel pointed out, this transition is not only false, it is dangerous in its deceit. “What we are witnessing is not a transition. It’s a symbiotic expansion of all energy sources,” he said, underlining how new extractive infrastructures are being built without dismantling the old ones. This so-called ‘green shift’ is not a rupture, but a continuation of extractivist logic in new, technocratic forms.
Galina Angarova echoed this view, dismantling the myth that energy transitions are driven by necessity or care for the Earth. Instead, she noted, they are shaped by geopolitical ambitions, market propaganda, and the insatiable hunger for capital accumulation. “Every so-called efficiency,” she warned, “creates new demand.” Whether it’s the explosion of AI data centres requiring uranium-powered nuclear plants, or the lithium boom destroying Indigenous lands in Nevada and Argentina, new technologies are not reducing extractive pressure, they’re intensifying it.
This accumulation is not new. Carlos reminded us that even in previous energy shifts, coal to oil, oil to gas, there was no actual phase-out. The new simply added on top of the old, expanding the energy frontier. What’s different now is the scale of greenwashing and the rebranding of violent extractivism as sustainability. “In Mexico,” Carlos explained, “most energy is consumed not by households but by industrial production, by capital. Yet the debate focuses on individual consumption, not on redistributing energy away from corporate control.”
Both speakers highlighted how today’s dominant frameworks erase these lived alternatives. Instead of recognising communities as protagonists in shaping energy futures, governments and corporations treat them as obstacles or beneficiaries. “The energy transition we are being offered,” Carlos said, “is a corporate one. What we need is a transformation from below.”
Energy for Whom? Questioning Ownership and Power
If energy is not just a technical matter but a question of justice, then the essential inquiries are political: Energy for whom? Energy for what purpose? Who decides?
Carlos Tornel insisted that these questions be reclaimed from engineers and economists. The dominant discourse renders energy neutral, apolitical, and purely quantitative; a problem to be solved by market mechanisms and technological innovation. But such framings, he warned, obscure the deeper power structures at play. “Energy is not an abstract thing, it’s a social and political issue,” he said. “We need to take back the politics of energy.”
In countries like Mexico, Carlos explained, energy production overwhelmingly serves the demands of capital, not the needs of people. Auto industries, mining corporations, and export-oriented factories consume massive amounts of electricity, while working-class and Indigenous communities remain marginalised or dispossessed. Yet these same communities are now being targeted once again, this time in the name of green development.
Rather than expanding supply to meet manufactured demand, Carlos argued for a radical redistribution of energy. This would not mean deprivation. On the contrary, it would involve reducing corporate and military consumption, and reorienting energy systems to support dignity, care, and collective well-being. “No energy system has to grow at all,” he said. “We can degrow without losing quality of life, if we redistribute and abolish the excessive consumption of industries, individualized transport systems and luxury emissions .”
Galina Angarova added another dimension: that of sovereignty and consent. Drawing on the work of the SIRGE Coalition, she pointed to the multiple ways Indigenous peoples are denied agency over what happens on their territories. Whether it is mining for so-called “critical minerals” or the construction of transmission lines, decisions are made through top-down processes masked as consultation. “The burden of the transition is being placed on the very communities who have contributed least to the crisis,” she said.
Galina’s intervention challenged not just corporate power, but also the paternalism embedded in liberal climate policy. The language of benefit-sharing, she noted, often assumes that Indigenous peoples should want integration into green supply chains. But many do not. “Our communities are asking for protection, not participation,” she said. “They are asking for life, not investment.”
This is why, for both Carlos and Galina and just as articulated by many social movements, true transition must begin with a shift in who holds decision-making power. Energy sovereignty must include:
- The right to say no to extraction, even when it is labelled renewable.
- The right to define well-being beyond GDP or electrification targets.
- The right to build systems rooted in indigenous knowledge, not technocratic blueprints.
These are not abstract rights. They are being asserted every day by communities resisting wind farms in Oaxaca, lithium mines in Nevada, or hydropower projects in the Amazon. They reveal the limits of a green capitalism that promises decarbonisation without justice. As Carlos put it poignantly: “We cannot let the far right co-opt transition, but neither can we allow the centre to define it through extraction in softer language. We must build it from below, together.”
Collective Shadows and the Rise of Eco-Fascism
Even as the climate crisis accelerates, so too does the political climate shift, towards repression, militarisation, and the consolidation of authoritarian power under the guise of security and transition. Both Angarova and Tornel warned that the vacuum left by failing neoliberal climate responses is being filled by a resurgent ultra-right, one that couches fossil fascism in patriotic terms, builds on a “nostalgic past” and wraps the burning of fossil fuels in nationalist flags while paying lip service to addressing the climate crisis through a green or “decarbonization consensus” that builds on the possibility of sustaining fossil fuel extraction.
Carlos pointed to recent writing by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in The Guardian on what they call “end-times fascism”, a politics that thrives not despite collapse but because of it. In his words: “They [the far right] capture very well these desires… and how they are exploiting it. The transition is building into that idea. But again, this is the corporate energy transition, not the transformation that we actually need from below.” The language of energy independence and mineral security, increasingly deployed in Western capitals, is not only exclusionary; it is actively militarised. Whether it is lithium in Chile, cobalt in the DRC, or rare earths in China, energy has become a terrain of global rivalry, not repair.
Galina offered a more introspective and profound analysis, warning against the binary worldviews that fuel polarisation. Drawing on her own experience growing up in a community where “left and right did not exist”, she reflected on the dualisms that dominate political discourse today: “There’s good and bad, black and white, left and right. And both sides hate each other to the bone.”
She suggested that this is not just a political problem, but a spiritual and psychological one. “What I see today,” she said, “is our collective shadow, the parts of ourselves we suppress—coming out and wanting to inflict pain.” The rise of ultra-right ideologies, she argued, is a mirror to unresolved trauma, loss, and fear within societies, conditions that neoliberalism has deepened through alienation, inequality, and commodification of life.
In a moment of striking vulnerability, she offered a method of resistance that begins not in confrontation but reflection: “My life is a mirror. Whatever I am facing is because I have it inside me. That’s how I deal with personal issues, and we have to extend that collectively.” For Galina, reckoning with our shadows is not a retreat from struggle; it is a necessary precondition for reconciliation, understanding, and the remaking of solidarity beyond reactive politics.
At the same time, she was clear-eyed about the escalating violence. In the United States, for instance, she spoke of new executive orders that fast-track mining projects, many of them on Indigenous lands, while reducing environmental assessments to as little as 28 days. “We’re not even mining based on market demand anymore,” she noted. “We’re mining based on political propaganda.”
This dynamic of security-led extraction is not unique to the US. Across the world, governments are rebranding exploitation and neo-colonialism as transition, and dissent as extremism. The same logics that justified oil wars and land dispossession now animate green militarism. We are pretending as if we have not learnt years of resistance to the extractivism across the world.
Indigenous Economy, Memory, and Relational Futures
Amidst the critique of false transitions and political capture, the conversation did not dwell in despair. Instead, Galina Angarova and Carlos Tornel offered grounded, embodied alternatives, rooted not in speculation but in memory, practice, and Indigenous worldviews. Their reflections served as a quiet but radical reorientation: away from extractive economies and towards relational economies of care, reciprocity, and community sovereignty.
Galina spoke movingly of her upbringing in an Indigenous Siberian community, where the economy was not monetised but lived through exchange, gratitude, and obligation. “We didn’t pay for food. We traded it. I expressed gratitude and that was the currency,” she said. This was not nostalgia; it was a reminder that viable, ethical systems of survival and abundance have always existed beyond the logics of profit and private property. Her account challenged the assumption that communities must be “integrated” into the green economy in order to be “developed.” Instead, she made a case for protection without assimilation, and sovereignty without compromise.
The dominant model sees land as an input and energy as an output. But for Indigenous and community-rooted worldviews, land is kin, and energy is life-force, not a commodity to be traded, but a gift to be honoured. As Galina posed powerfully: “How do we take land out of speculative markets and actually have a relationship with it?”
Carlos echoed this through a broader lens of degrowth and energy justice. He urged us to reimagine energy not as a utility but as a collective right, embedded in place, governed by people, and subordinated to social and ecological priorities. Rather than ask how to green the grid, he challenged us to ask: “What is energy for? For whom? And how do we use it to strengthen our relationships, with each other and with the land?”
Both speakers offered glimpses of what a post-extractive, post-carbon world could look like. Galina envisioned communities reinhabiting land with intention, trading tomatoes for squash, exchanging skills and ceremonies, and organising not around markets but mutual care. “How do I build my own agency, and then how do we build collective agency?” she asked. Her vision was both deeply personal and powerfully political.
Carlos closed with a challenge: “Let’s think about our dependencies; how do we break them? How do we build sociability and solidarity instead?” He urged listeners not to carry guilt, but to step into responsibility, with others, not alone. The work of transition, he insisted, must not feel like punishment, but possibility.
Together, their reflections pointed to a powerful proposition: that transition is not just a technical or policy shift, but a cultural, spiritual, and ontological reworlding. It is about reclaiming the commons, recovering memory, and rebuilding relationships that neoliberalism has sought to sever.
In a time of accelerating extraction and collapsing consensus, the answer may lie not in scaling up, but in grounding down, in cultivating the practices, stories, and solidarities that can carry us across this threshold not only with resistance, but with radical alternatives and hope.
Madhuresh Kumar is a member of the Facilitation Team of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives.
Join the next session of this webinar series happening on June 25th, 2pm GMT. This session will turn to the African continent to explore how the energy transition is reshaping territories into new sacrifice zones, and to discuss the challenges and struggles that lie ahead.
Learn more and register here – https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/events:geof:04
