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Abstract
This thesis explores the colonial knowledge(s) and logics in Seattle, Washington’s climate mitigation plans to understand the role of the settler-colonial city in urban climate action. Ideas of control, efficiency, and universal leadership serve as foundational logics in Seattle’s climate action plans, producing an overarching priority to “electrify everything” to achieve carbon neutrality, a narrow and colonial means of addressing the climate crisis. The electricity produced by the municipal utility, Seattle City Light, is central to this priority. There is tension here as the utility violates Indigenous treaty rights and enacts cultural genocide through their energy production, enacting carbon colonization at the urban scale. Seattle purports to be “pro-environment,” but their actions on the Skagit River are destructive enrolling climate mitigation into settler-colonialism. I highlight how Indigenous resistance to this injustice is always present and climate justice organizations in Seattle have alternative visions that disrupt carbon colonization.