If global summits are the public theaters of climate coloniality where diversion, co-optation, and performativity without substance is repeated, what are its more everyday and intimate registers? This chapter relates climate coloniality to an “imperial mode of living”, arguing that consumption politics deserve more attention in the debate on climate justice. It elucidates the term performative environmentalism to argue that when “green” practices, as performed by cultural elites and encouraged by neoliberal states, become the dominant means of establishing ecological legitimacy in cities that are in turn looking to project themselves as “clean and green” sustainability leaders, the urban poor are denied moral authority in environmental debates, subjected to increased vulnerabilities and risks, reinforcing colonial and racialized oppressions in environmental politics and governance. Greening lifestyles and urban infrastructures is rooted in and reproduces a colonial ontology that divides the world into those considered implicitly deserving resource-intensive lifestyles and those dependent on the generosity of the well-off for their continued survival. Performative environmentalism is the everyday expression and legitimization structure of a form of neoliberal, colonial sustainability, providing a sense of purpose and progress to well-meaning elite environmentalists, all the while reproducing a hierarchical social order, and perpetuating band-aid solutions to structural problems.
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