Description
In this study, I analyse renewable energy and green transformation practices, which have recently been on the agenda in Turkey, as in other advanced and late capitalist countries, from a Marxist political economic perspective. Critical approaches define green transformation and renewable energy pursuits as a new strategy of the neoliberal economic order. In this study, I take the existing literature one step further and define the green transformation as a new strategy of accumulation in the financialised capitalist system and a new order of appropriation and exploitation at the global and local levels in terms of distributional relations. In Turkey, the promises of green transformation and renewable energy meet on two conflicting planes but regulated by capitalist principles. Firstly, there is no interruption in extractivist activities, especially gold and coal extraction. Secondly, with the claims of renewable energy and green transformation, universities ensure the continuity of capitalist knowledge production by ignoring the impact of capital relations on the process of destruction of nature. In this study, from a dialectical materialist perspective, I argue that Turkey's environmental policy is actually a kind of climate denialism, that it cannot be separated from regional and global hegemonic struggles, and that it directs its climate policies within the framework of its commercial relations with the EU and BRICS.
