Ecological crisis and green capitalism: toward a climatization of extractive industries?

The European mining revival strategy correlates with the agenda of transition to a “green” and “climate-friendly” economy. In this article, we focus on the climatization of extractive discourses and practices in Europe, France, and Andalusia in order to show the changes in discourses while noting the continuity of practices. While discourse justifying the mining revival is circulating within Europe, the operationalization of extractive reindustrialization is materializing in different ways across the Member States, revealing specific constraints and dynamics at a regional level. In Spain, for example, more than a dozen mining projects have been launched since the late 2000s, particularly in Andalusia, where reindustrialization has been associated with greening and climatization. In France, where ecologization and reindustrialization have been integrated into a discourse on securing sovereignty, none of the projects submitted over the last decade have been successful, which highlights the difficulty of reconciling greening, climatization, and extractive reindustrialization. We show that the climatization of the extractive industries in Europe largely remains a discursive process that does little to transform mining practices and activities—other than by contributing to legitimizing their redevelopment, under certain conditions which we highlight.