Introduction

Consider the following statement, made by Stefan Agne, Head of Cooperation of the Delegation of the European Union to Brazil at the fourth “Conexão pelo Clima” (Connection for Climate) Fair, held in São Paulo, Brazil, in September 2022, an event that gathered governments, companies, investors, civil society, and stakeholders to discuss opportunities and challenges to the preservation of Brazilian biomes and bioeconomy’s implications for a sustainable and socially inclusive economy: “[I]t is perfectly possible to reconcile economic growth and environmental protection by supporting initiatives that work” (in Bressan, 2022, p. 128).

Consider these sentences as well, written by Ignacio Ybáñez, Ambassador of the European Union to Brazil, to a Konrad Adenauer publication: “‘Sustainable Connectivity’ could be the new guiding principle for EU-Brazil engagement. European Green deal is the bloc’s new growth strategy, which entails two transitions: green and digital […] Brazil is a key partner in this agenda. It is one of the world’s largest agricultural and food producers. Thanks to the large biodiversity of Brazil’s biomes, it has a huge growth potential of its bio-economy […] Good practice examples and experience in Brazil demonstrate that it is possible to reconcile economic growth and food production with the protection of the environment” (Ybáñez, 2022, p. 23, emphasis added).

These sentences are illustrative of a pervasive idea of our current times: it is possible to achieve economic growth while reducing social and environmental impacts and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, if political will, economic incentives, natural resources, and technological innovations are made to work in the right direction. The EU would be a perfect example: according to the European Commission (n.d.), EU greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by 24% between 1990 and 2019, while the economy grew by around 60% over the same period. The European Green Deal (EGD), approved in 2020, aims to make the EU the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, with an intermediate target of an at least 55% net reduction in GHG emissions by 2030, while still enjoying economic growth.

The EU is not alone. Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon stressed the need to “decouple economic growth from environmental degradation” as a key element of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network, presided by Jeffrey Sachs, a long-time adviser to the UN Secretary General on SDGs, states that “[t]he key is for all countries, rich and poor, to adopt sustainable technologies and behaviors that decouple economic growth from unsustainable patterns of production and consumption” (Fletcher & Rammelt, 2017, p. 452).

Over the past few years, we have witnessed a global race to announce governmental, financial, and corporate climate ambitions of net-zero targets by 2050 to hold global warming to 1.5 °C above preindustrial times, the more ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement. A net emissions target presupposes that GHG-“positive” emissions can be compensated or cancelled out by “negative” emissions, i.e., removals of GHG from the atmosphere. To achieve net-zero targets, multiple initiatives are advanced: a proper reduction of positive emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy such as wind, solar, bioenergy, and green hydrogen; compensating emissions through carbon offset markets; removing carbon dioxide through natural or technological “sinks,” by restoring damaged ecosystems; protecting tropical forests; and/or developing carbon dioxide removal technologies.

For countries like Brazil, host of the world’s largest rainforest with more than 80% of its energy matrix composed of renewables, these targets could bring great opportunities. If restored or preserved, Brazilian forests could act as natural carbon sinks, and the country could be remunerated for providing environmental services, such as carbon storage. According to Joaquim Leite, a former Environmental Minister of far-right Jair Bolsonaro’s government (2019–2022) and Head of the Brazilian delegation at COP-26 in Glasgow, the creation of a global carbon market “is fantastic for Brazil, for Latin America, for those who have native forests […] Brazil will be a giant exporter [of carbon credits] in this new green economy, it is a unique opportunity […] We will be a great example to the world. The global market will help and remunerate with credits those who have and take care of native forests. In Brazil, [this are the] cases of the Amazon, Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, Caatinga, and (we can take) care of biodiversity and the community at the same time” (Ministério do Meio Ambiente, 2021). Considering that the carbon market could be bigger than the oil and gas market before 2050 according Forbes, there is a race to turn Brazil into “the Saudi Arabia of the carbon credit” (Ondei, 2021).

More recently, Brazilian President-elect Luis Inácio Lula da Silva announced with great enthusiasm at COP-27 in November 2022 in Egypt an alliance between Brazil, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo which calls for a multilateral funding mechanism to help protect half of the world’s rainforests, located in the three countries. The forest alliance was nicknamed by British newspaper The Guardian the “OPEC of Rainforests” (Greenfield, 2022). The “paternity” of the forest alliance is disputed between Lula’s and Bolsonaro’s teams, which evidences how these opposite administrations found “some common ground in pushing for international ecosystem service payment schemes” (Hanbury, 2022).

For EU-Brazil relations, the opportunities are also celebrated. The European Investment Bank invests in solar and wind energy projects in Brazil and aims to convert renewable electricity into green hydrogen to be exported to the EU. Brazil also mines critical raw materials needed for EU’s green transition (Ybáñez, 2022, p. 22). The EU Regulation on deforestation-free supply chains, seen in some quarters as a unilateral protectionist measure, could create incentives for Brazil to curb deforestation.

All of this paints a rather rosy picture, which is hard to sustain for several reasons. First of all, there is no scientific evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental impacts “on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown, but also, and perhaps more importantly, such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future” (Parrique et al., 2019, p. 3). Decoupling of economic growth and environmental impact may work on a regional level if polluting activities are outsourced, but there is no empirical evidence that it can work on a global scale. EU’s claims that it was possible to achieve economic growth while reducing emissions do not take into account the fact that over the past two decades, imports from China have quadrupled (Pérez, 2021), i.e., polluting activities that impact the environment were outsourced to other regions of the world.

Second, previous offset schemes have largely failed, with emissions reductions from projects often difficult or impossible to measure, short lived, or simply not happening (Friends of the Earth International, 2021). In addition, annual carbon emissions from fossil fuels are greater than the annual amount of carbon that can be captured by natural ecosystems or carbon capture and storage technologies. The carbon dioxide from fossil fuels to be unearthed and burned by 2050 is in addition to the carbon that is already circulating and will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. Restoring ecosystems – or even planting a trillion new trees – cannot offset continued, additional fossil fuel emissions. Moreover, as the planet’s temperature rises, forests and the carbon they store will be increasingly threatened by drought, fires, and soil degradation. Unless there are sinks or drains, to use the vocabulary of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, large enough to absorb all these emissions, the concentration of CO2 will continue to increase, as will the temperature of the planet (Friends of the Earth International, 2021).

Technologies that collect or “capture” the carbon dioxide generated by high-emitting activities – such as coal and gas, fired power generation, or plastics manufacturing – are not “drains” large enough either. The 28 carbon capture and storage facilities currently in operation globally have the capacity to capture only 0.1% of fossil fuel emissions and raise concerns about safety and cost of storage (CIEL, 2021). There is, according to the IPCC, “a non-negligible risk of carbon dioxide leakage from geological storage and transport infrastructure” (CIEL, 2021, p. 3). Finally, renewable energy also depends on raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel and other rare earth metals whose extraction can have significant environmental and social impacts, thereby once more debunking the idea that economic growth (even with zero GHG emissions) can be decoupled from environmental impacts. In short, decoupling does not work on a global level and currently existing market; technological and nature-based solutions are not enough to mitigate climate change on the scale needed.

All of this is common knowledge. The UN Environment Programme’s 2021 Emissions Gap Report (UNEP, 2021), released before COP-26, showed that new national climate pledges combined with other mitigation measures put the world on track to increase global temperatures by 2.7 °C by the end of the century, well above the Paris Agreement goals and generating catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate. To keep global warming below 1.5 °C this century, the world would need to roughly halve annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but they are projected to increase by 13%. The respected Climate Action Tracker updated its predictions after COP-27 and concluded that if all Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for 2030 are met, we will still have a 2.4-degree increase from pre-industrial levels by 2100. The best-case scenario, which assumes the full implementation of all NDCs, all net-zero targets, and all mid-century long-term strategies, predicts a 50/50 chance that warming will be limited to 1.8 °C by 2100 (Climate action Tracker, 2022). In order to stay within the 1.5 °C limit, it would be necessary to urgently promote a “wide-ranging, large-scale, rapid, and systemic transformation” (UNEP, 2022, p. 22). What exactly this means is disputed, but one of possible meaning is turning away from the pursuit of “green” economic growth and replacing the pursuit of efficiency with the pursuit of sufficiency, “that is the direct downscaling of economic production in many sectors and parallel reduction of consumption that together will enable the good life within the planet’s ecological limits” (Parrique et al., 2019, p. 3).

This current obsession with net-zero targets, carbon markets, the latest promising renewable energy source, and natural or artificial carbon sinks not only tells us something about the pervasiveness of neoliberal greenwashing in world affairs, about ever-increasing privatization of spheres of life, about an almost religious faith in technological and market solutions, and about the hope that nature will save us and make us profit. This obsession also tells us something about persisting on the wrong path despite all the evidence, which constitutes the mechanism of disavowal. While climate denialism refers to deliberate attempts to deny the reality of the climate crisis, climate disavowal occurs when the climate crisis is recognized, but ineffective responses to deal with it are continually put forward, despite contrary evidence and recurring failures. Disavowal occurs when we admit that something is wrong, that we should be doing something different, but we persist anyway. We recognize the problem, but we deny its significance, its implications, and its gravity, hoping or wishing that things will somehow get solved (with market-based or nature-based or technology-based solutions) despite all the evidence, or because of all the evidence, because that evidence is too painful to bear and the gains of looking away are psychically, symbolic, and materially too great.

In this chapter, I will discuss how this international circuit of disavowal works, which desires and affects animate it, and how the EU and Brazil are caught up in it. In the next section, I will further discuss the concept of climate disavowal, and I will frame decoupling as a fantasy that sustain attachments to capitalism. In the following section, I will illustrate the participation of Brazil and the EU in this international circuit through the case study of a promising new source of “sustainable connectivity” between the two: green hydrogen.

Capitalist Attachments, Climate Disavowal, and Decoupling Fantasy

The international circuit of disavowal of the climate crisis is based on affective attachments to capitalism, understood not only as a mode of accumulation, production, circulation and consumption of capital, goods, and services but as a mode of accumulation and circulation of affective energies, desires, and drives. It is often recognized that capitalism generates a lot of suffering: inequality, expropriation, exploitation, biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate change. In its neoliberal guise, capitalism also generates a lot of psychic suffering: “self-made” entrepreneurial individuals who must invest in themselves, take risks, and be solely responsible for possible “failures,” in a context that produces unemployment and precarious jobs. However, it has long been long recognized that capitalism also provides, or at least promises to provide, ample opportunities for the attainment of pleasure. Post-Fordist capitalism does not prevent individuals from having pleasure, nor encourage them postpone it. On the contrary, individuals are commanded to enjoy and are promised various instances of obtaining pleasure, particularly through consumption, which ensures capitalist growth and accumulation (Kapoor, 2020, p. 252). “The naturalization of enjoyment-as-excess […] the desire for the tallest, biggest, wealthiest, flashiest, most original or outrageous […] the ubiquity of the colossal, from beverages to architecture […]; and the surfeit of choice from jeans and fast food to films and dating partners” are evidence that capitalism’s productive engine depends on our continuous enjoyment (Kapoor, 2020, p. 103 and 104).

Desires and pleasures are thus not castrated or repressed by the law of God or the state or by the demands of the capitalist economy, but encouraged. Affective energies and desires are not repressed or sublimated, but co-opted by and for capitalist production and marketing. Pleasure and sexuality are incorporated into capitalist culture: the pleasure principle and the reality principle are no longer antagonistic (Brown, 2018). The capitalist regime incites our desires, through the provision of material goods, which are never satisfied, causing our gaze to be cast relentlessly on other objects of desire (Kapoor, 2018). Nowadays, the promise of pleasure is extended to the possibility of self-realization at work, which consequently generates a “passionate servitude” – characteristic of the contemporary configuration of employment (Lordon, 2014). This new configuration is committed to producing joyful affects intrinsic to the work relationship, that is, affects that are not linked to factors external to wage labor such as consumption, for example. Instead, it promises enjoyment inherent to the act of working.

Therefore, in spite of all the suffering it creates, many of us in this world, despite all we know and think, can cling to neoliberal consumerist carbonific capitalism because it structures subjectivities, agencies, ways of life, and desires (for consumption, for social mobility, for economic growth, for development, and for modernization) and promises to satisfy them, even if these promises are never really fulfilled, at least not for everyone. “Green” capitalism also provides or promises to provide abundant opportunities for enjoyment of (electric) personal automobiles, cheap flights (compensating for our carbon footprint) and (energy-efficient) electricity-dependent home appliances, profiting and enjoying while saving the planet. The excitement around the possibility of Brazil becoming “the Saudi Arabia of the carbon credit” and the creation of the “OPEC of the rainforests” not only reveals deeply held attachments to fossil fuels through slips of the tongue but also that enjoyment-as-excess also operates in green capitalism.

If, as individuals, we are interpellated by capitalism as subjects of desire, at a systemic level, capitalism is propelled by an accumulation drive (Kapoor, 2020, p. 76). Drive refers to the compulsion to repeat endlessly, to the continuous circulation around an object in spite of recurrent failures to obtain it. Enjoyment in this case is derived not from obtaining the object (as in desire), but from endless repetition and circulation. In the case of capitalism, drive is manifested as the “endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction” (Žižek in Kapoor, 2020, p. 79), as “the circular drive to accumulate for the sake of accumulation” (Kapoor, 2020, p. 76). The accumulation drive transform crises into triumphs, as crises (such as the climate crisis) create novel opportunities for accumulation (as in green capitalism). Drive, in this sense, derives pleasure from the challenges of finding new paths to accumulation (Kapoor, 2020, p. 86).

All of this discussion leads to the conclusion that it would be very painful to promote a dramatic transformation of our global socioeconomic system, since it would mean giving up on something that promises pleasure and enjoyment in myriad of forms. In order to avoid the pain that would ensure from breaking attachments to capitalism, we disavow it, i.e., “simultaneously acknowledging and denying our ties (to capitalism) and the pain this causes” (Fletcher, 2018, p. 60). In disavowal, reality – in this case, of climate change – is accepted, but its significance is minimized (Weintrobe, 2013, 7). “[D]isavowal is a simultaneous admission and denial, or a state of ‘half-knowing,’ that operates according to the formula ‘I know very well, but still. . .’” (Žižek in Fletcher, 2018, p. 66). The act of disavowal, instead of completely denying a problem, involves a tendency to quickly fix the problem without seriously investigating its complex origins and potential solutions (Weintrobe, 2013, p. 8).

In this affective context, mainstream responses to climate change are attractive, appealing, enticing, and difficult to give up on because they promise us that we can, with some adaptations, continue to live, or hope to live, in a way that many of us are invested in. Disavowal, thus, brings great pleasures: the pleasure of avoiding the pain of facing a difficult reality (our efforts are not working, we face a bleak future if we don’t give up on something we are strongly attached to); the pleasure of feeling that at least we are doing something: something that is better than nothing, that is not good enough, but that is feasible and “realistic.” The international circuit of disavowal is, thus, charged with pleasure.

In this context, decoupling works as a fantasy to mask the realFootnote 1 of capitalism and the real of nature, i.e., capitalism is an economic system marked by contradictions that make it unstable unless it continues to expand, and that nature has limits, both in terms of the resources it provides for capitalism and in terms of its ability to offset the effects of capitalism, by capturing carbon, for example (Fletcher, 2018). The fantasy of decoupling hides the underlying conflicts between the goals of reducing inequality, eradicating poverty, ensuring environmental sustainability, reducing GHG emissions, and making profits, which it aims to reconcile. It serves to maintain belief in the idea of achieving SDG’s promise of a “sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth” within the framework of a neoliberal capitalist economy (Fletcher & Rammelt, 2017, p 450 and 451).

However, the real insists on rupturing the fantasy. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)‘s own reports published to inform the SDGs, in spite of optimistic declarations, admits that decoupling is difficult to measure, absolute decoupling is rare, relative decoupling is usually achieved by “a shifting of the material and environmental burden into developing countries” and that “efficiency gains in resource use may paradoxically lead to greater resource use” (UNEP 2011 in Fletcher & Rammelt, 2017, p. 457). UNEP reports indicate that even economic activities that are considered “non-material” have not led to dematerialization. Computerization did not generate a dematerialized “knowledge economy”: instead, material extraction, particularly of minerals and ores, increased from 35 billion tons in 1980 to almost 60 billion tons in 2005. This is also recognized by EU’s ambassador to Brazil: “Among the common challenges of digitalization faced by both the EU and Brazil are identifying and maximizing synergies between the green and digital agendas. Although digital technologies can help implement climate actions, reduce pollution and restore biodiversity, their widespread use is increasing energy consumption, while also leading to more electronic waste and bigger environmental footprint” (Ybáñez, 2022, p. 20). Other non-material processes that were supposed to support the possibility of decoupling demonstrate similar trends. For instance, the shift from vinyl albums to online music and from books to e-books still requires material production of computers and e-readers, as well as energy to transport these items and power all the equipment used to deliver these digital media (Fletcher & Rammelt, 2017, p. 462). The International Energy Agency forecasts that by 2040 clean-energy technologies will demand 40 times more lithium than in 2020, 25 times more graphite, about 20 times more nickel and cobalt, and 7 times more rare earth elements (The Economist, 2023a).

In spite of all this overwhelming evidence, UNEP and the EU insist on the promises of decoupling. These are clear cases of disavowal: we (UNEP, EU) know very well that there is no evidence that decoupling works (quite the contrary), but still, we are enthusiastic about it.

These attachments to “green” capitalism constitute a relation of cruel optimism: “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” or “actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (Berlant, 2011, p. 1). According to Berlant (2011), this “desired something” can be food, a kind of love, a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. In our case, it is green growth: it draws our attachment by promising to reconcile economic growth, profits, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, and climate change mitigation but actually delivers only (very unevenly distributed) growth and profits, thereby constituting an obstacle to our (humanity, nonhumans, and the planet’s) flourishing. As Berlant (2011) explains, in relations of cruel optimism, “the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming” (p. 2). As we have seen, the abundant evidence that we are heading for a catastrophe unless drastic transformations take place is difficult to bear. Disavowal allows us to avoid this pain while the decoupling fantasy create innumerable opportunities for pleasure. This is how we find ourselves in a situation of profound threat that can be profoundly confirming. Importantly, we should not see cruel optimism as a pathology, perversion or dark truth, but as “a scene of negotiated sustenance that makes life bearable as it presents itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently” (Berlant, 2011, p. 14). In a context of ecological collapse, a relation of cruel optimism with green growth makes life bearable at the present time, even if it contributes to unbearable future.

Before we proceed, it is important to note that is not only “green” entrepreneurs, investors, or shareholders, not only policymakers in developed countries and regions (such as the EU), not just consumers in the Global North are part of the international circuit of disavowal. Postcolonial, Third World, Global South countries like Brazil also have aspirations and desires for growth, modernization, and development (Chakrabarty, 2018). In fact, even some of the losers of neoliberal capitalism (the indebted, those in precarious jobs in the South and the Global North), even some of the staunchest critics of capitalism, can be caught up in circuits of disavowal. Thus, it is not only the global political, financial, and industrial elites that refuse to promote the drastic socioeconomic transformations needed to mitigate the climate crisis but also the middle and subaltern classes of Asia, Africa, and Latin America who cling to the promises of capitalism and modernization.

The Cruel Optimism of Green Hydrogen and the Phantasmatic Promise of Sustainable Connectivity Between EU and Brazil

In this section, I will explore EU-Brazil cooperation on clean energy, particularly the promises of green hydrogen, which is currently being presented as one of the most promising sources of “sustainable connectivity” between EU and Brazil. I will argue the current excitement with green hydrogen follows the affective structure of a cruel optimistic attachment: it literally and metaphorically adds fuel to the fantasy that we can continue to pursue economic growth without facing catastrophic consequences, because, in this case, an alliance between nature and technology will save us.

The protection of the environment and cooperation in energy, specifically sustainable biofuels, have been a focal point of the EU-Brazil strategic partnership since 2007. The European Green Deal and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia have further strengthened EU’s goal of reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. EU’s Joint Action for More Sustainable, Affordable and Secure Energy (REPowerEU) aims to decrease Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas by 2030 by diversifying its imports and relying more on renewable energy sources in the long run. The target is to meet 45% of the EU’s energy needs through renewable energy sources such as sustainably produced bioenergy (i.e., bioenergy that does not involve deforestation or food insecurity), solar and wind power, and green hydrogen generated from renewable sources (Boehm, 2022, p. 39).

As countries present their net-zero plans to meet global climate goals, hydrogen has regained importance on the agendas of the EU as well as countries like Australia, the UK, and Japan, who have released national hydrogen strategies. In July 2020, the European Commission released its “Hydrogen Strategy for a climate-neutral Europe,” which included a bold objective of achieving 40 gigawatts (GW) of electrolyzer capacity by 2030 for the production of green hydrogen (for comparison, between 2000 and 2019, a total capacity of just 0.25 GW of green hydrogen projects was deployed globally) (Carbon Brief, 2020). European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans said that “[Hydrogen] has become the rockstar of new energies all across the world”; the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Hydrogen Council, Shell and BP have also shared their visions for the future importance of hydrogen; and British Newspaper The Telegraph has dubbed the 2020s as the “hydrogen decade” (Carbon Brief, 2020).

This is because hydrogen burns cleanly, releasing only water and energy; contains more energy per unit of weight than traditional fossil fuels; and also allows energy to be stored and transported (Thomaz & Pimentel, 2022, p. 62). In a positive scenario, hydrogen may have the ability to fuel transportation modes such as trucks, planes, and ships. Additionally, it could serve as a heating source for homes, stabilize electricity grids, and aid heavy industry in producing materials like steel and cement. Hydrogen could be particularly useful to sectors which are difficult to electrify, such as steel production, shipping, and aviation (Carbon Brief, 2020). However, achieving all these functions with hydrogen would necessitate vast amounts of the fuel, and its cleanliness would be dependent on the methods utilized to create it. Hydrogen is the most abundant element on Earth, but it doesn’t exist in its pure form, so it has to be separated for use in energy production. There are various ways to extract hydrogen, each varying in terms of their level of renewability and cleanliness, as well as the technology employed. Grey hydrogen is made from fossil fuels; blue hydrogen is also made from fossil fuels, but with capture and storage of carbon dioxide emissions; green hydrogen is generated using electrolysis powered by renewable electricity and does not emit GHG gases (Carbon Brief, 2020).

International trade in green hydrogen is growing between producing countries like Brazil and other countries in Latin America, Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean and importing countries primarily in Europe and Asia, who do not have enough renewable energy sources to achieve their goal of decarbonization (Panik, 2022, p. 96). Although green hydrogen production from renewable energy sources is still expensive, countries with abundant resources could have the potential to produce it at lower costs. Brazil operates onshore wind projects with some of the highest capacity factors in the world. According to the Bloomberg “Hydrogen Economy Outlook” report, Brazil has the second-lowest cost of producing green hydrogen after China (Panik, 2022, p. 95). Brazil’s government has created a National Hydrogen Program aimed at developing its hydrogen market and has also set up a credit line and is investing in research, development, and innovation to support its hydrogen initiatives (Thomaz & Pimentel, 2022, p. 63).

The State of Ceará in Brazil launched its first Green Hydrogen Hub in February 2021 and has since signed over 20 Memoranda of Understanding with national and international companies that have announced investments worth around USD 20 billion in the Pecém Green Hydrogen Hub (Panik, 2022, p. 97). Other states in Brazil have also announced plans to launch their own Green Hydrogen Hubs. The European Investment Bank has invested €1 billion in solar and wind energy projects in Brazil and aims to convert this renewable energy into green hydrogen for export to Europe (Ybáñez, 2022). Three major infrastructure projects are being planned in Ceará, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco for the export of green hydrogen to Europe, and the Port of Rotterdam owns 30% of the Port of Pecém (Panik, 2022, p. 97).

All of this again paints a rather rosy picture that masks the real of green hydrogen. The IEA’s, 2019 hydrogen report says that “it may be tempting to envisage an all-encompassing low-carbon hydrogen economy in the future,” but it adds that “the use of hydrogen in certain end-use sectors faces technical and economic challenges compared with other (low-carbon) competitors” (IEA, 2019). Michael Liebreich, senior contributor to BloombergNEF, wrote that “On the surface, [hydrogen] seems like the answer to every energy question” but added that “Sadly, hydrogen displays an equally impressive list of disadvantages” (Liebreich, 2020). The list is quite long, but it can be summarized as follows.

First, the majority of hydrogen production currently comes from high-carbon sources without carbon capture, which is cheaper than using renewable sources or capture and storage technologies. The IEA reports that the majority (76%) of hydrogen today is produced from gas and 23% from coal, mostly in China, while only 2% is produced through electrolysis (IEA, 2019, p. 37). Second, hydrogen is challenging to transport and store due to its bulkiness and cost. While importing hydrogen from sunny or windy regions, such as Brazil, may be an attractive option for countries lacking sufficient renewable resources, the cost of transporting hydrogen in special containers at high pressures and low temperatures is expensive. The hydrogen industry is currently very localized, with 85% of hydrogen being produced and used on-site due in part to the high costs of transporting it (IEA, 2019, p. 68). Additionally, distributing hydrogen within a country requires significant upfront investment in infrastructure. Third, its production and use are also not very efficient when compared to alternative energy sources, leading to increased expenses and energy requirements. Electric vehicles, for example, are several times more efficient than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (Carbon Brief, 2020). Furthermore, the supply and value chains involved in the use of hydrogen are complex, requiring coordination among various parties.

The IEA acknowledges the uncertainty regarding the costs of producing hydrogen from various sources in different regions, as well as how they will compete in the future. However, the IEA does note that the cost of green hydrogen could decrease by 30% by 2030 due to the declining costs of renewables and the scaling up of hydrogen production (IEA, 2019, p. 14). It’s worth mentioning, however, that comparing studies is challenging since some studies only include production costs, while others include transport and distribution costs. Ultimately, fossil fuel costs will have the most significant impact on future hydrogen prices, and the success of green and blue hydrogen will depend on future electricity and gas costs (Carbon Brief, 2020).

In addition, hydrogen may have a significant impact on global trade, potentially creating a new group of energy exporters rich in solar and wind energy, such as Chile, Australia, and Morocco. This development could also potentially reshape geopolitical relations and alliances between countries. The Economist has even coined the term “electrostates” to describe these future energy powerhouses. However, there are concerns about the potential for “green colonialism” in the hydrogen revolution, as developing countries could be viewed solely as providers of raw materials (Van de Graaf et al., 2020).

Even if we leave the important issues of green colonialism, the potential for dematerialization, and environmental impacts aside, it is clear that creating a market for green hydrogen that has the necessary infrastructure and is competitive with other energy sources is challenging. To make green hydrogen competitive, the “ideal conditions” of low renewable energy costs, low investment costs, and high operating hours must come together. This will require policies to be put in place within the green hydrogen production process to reduce costs, increase capacity, and promote domestic electrolysis production through incentives such as tax cuts, subsidies, loan credits, feed-in tariffs, and others (Thomaz & Pimentel, 2022, p. 68). Brazil has the potential to become a green hydrogen exporter if it can produce green hydrogen at a competitive price while maintaining sustainability standards and having a transportation-friendly grid (Thomaz & Pimentel, 2022, p. 72).

As we can see, there are a lot of “ifs” and conditions to be met. This is, in fact, a common linguistic structure of optimistic proclamations of the possibilities of green growth, which usually begins with “(a) a statement of a win-win scenario,” i.e., the opportunities of green hydrogen, and is followed by “(b) a caveat in the form of a reality check usually starting with a ‘but’, which emphasizes the challenges in achieving the desired win-win scenario” (Oya in Fletcher & Rammelt, 2017, p. 456). The difficulties, in this case, reside not only in amassing political will, achieving the right market prices and developing technological innovations.

The current excitement with green hydrogen follows the affective structure of a cruel optimistic attachment: a “sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy [in this case, again that it is possible to decouple economic growth from GHG emissions] that enables you [the EU, Brazil] to expect that this time, nearness to this thing [green hydrogen] will help you or a world to become different [really mitigating climate change] in just the right way” (Berlant, 2011, p. 2). This optimism is cruel because the object that draws our attachment, decoupling, the latest clean energy source, green hydrogen, actively impedes the aim – mitigating climate change – that brought us to it in the first place. Green hydrogen hampers the goal of mitigating climate change because it diverts us from actually downscaling economic production and consumption. It literally and metaphorically adds fuel to the fantasy that we can continue to pursue economic growth without facing catastrophic consequences, because, in this case, the alliance between technology and nature (the sun, wind, and hydrogen as the most abundant substance on Earth) will save us.

Green hydrogen is not the panacea that will deliver growth decoupled from environmental impacts, but the excitement around it suggests that it is working in other spheres. It generates new investments opportunities; pleasure from finding new paths to accumulation; activities in which one can feel entrepreneurial, proactive, useful, creative, and virtuous; and hope for countries Brazil to become an “electrostate” (as well as the “Saudi Arabia of Carbon Credits” and member of the “OPEC of the rainforests”). Green hydrogen sets in motion an array of activities that deliver abundant material and affective gratifications.

Concluding Remarks

The Economist (2023b), in a recent Technology Quarterly, argued that one of the obstacles to greening electricity grids, paramount to mitigate climate change, lie in some environmentalists who oppose building the necessary big bits of infrastructure: “The skyline must be preserved, they might say, or the woodland is too ancient to fell, or the colony of terns too important in and of itself.” According to the magazine, “more building is the most practical course of action […] and it is economic growth that will make possible the building of new transmission lines, gigawatt-scale renewable power installations and, indeed, the mines from which the minerals these things need are sourced. To demonise it, as some environmentalists do, is to expose the world to more climate change, not less.” It warns “those who believe there is no way to stop climate change through growth” that “to change the way the world thinks, person by person, is a yet more ambitious task than changing the ways in which the world generates and distributes its electric power. If the energy transition cannot be achieved with the habits of mind already available, it is hard to see that it can be achieved at all.”

Yet again we see an example of disavowal at work, propelled by attachment to capitalist economic growth. The magazine knows that it is impossible to decouple green electricity grids from environmental impact: it sarcastically notes that the skyline, the woodland, and the colony of terns will suffer; minerals will need to be mined. And yet, this course of action is defended because it is the most practical, the only feasible one to mitigate climate change. Questioning the continuous pursuit of economic growth, or the “GOD imperative” (Grow or Die) (Kapoor, 2020, p. 80) upon which capital circulation depends, is ruled out as impractical.

This chapter called attention to the affective energies, desires, and drives that sustain the international circuit of disavowal of the climate crisis, predicated on attachment to capitalism and sustained by the fantasy of decoupling. As we have seen, all the available scientific evidence shows that the solutions that have been continually put forward by the international climate regime, including green electricity grids and green hydrogen, cannot work fast enough or on the scale needed to prevent the Earth’s climate from exceeding 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels, to say nothing of the non-negligible environmental and social impacts. These solutions, thus, are not practical or realistic, but they surely are enjoyable. This chapter departed from the premise that identifying and making sense of the circuits of pleasures and displeasures that underlie and are set in motion by ecological collapse is crucial if we are to make an accurate diagnosis of the present, which is a condition for imagining and practicing really effective responses.

Although focused on Brazil-EU relations, the mechanisms of disavowal described here also apply to the relations between the EU and Latin America more generally. After all, Latin American countries are full of resources needed to achieve net-zero targets and carry out the green transition: tropical forests, renewable energy sources, and critical minerals such as lithium and copper and rare earth elements are just some of them. The risk of “green colonialism” and hazardous environmental impacts of mining are not negligible, but they are usually sidelined by (cruel) optimist discourses that present Latin America as key to the global energy transition. By focusing on the affective attachments that stand in the way of effective policy responses to this global problem, this chapter hopefully contributes to discussions on interregional cooperation on climate change as well.