The way it’s going, the “green” energy transition isn’t all that green; a paradox that that takes center stage in Thea Riofranco’s book titled Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. Renewable energy technologies, such as solar and wind energy, have often been hailed in mainstream environmental discourse as the way forward, the only solution to end usage of fossil fuel-based energy, a transition that can halt the violent processes of climate change. And on the surface, this makes sense. Why not begin powering our societies with renewable energy that is presently abundant and doesn’t need to mined to access?
For Riofrancos, this equation is not so simple. From the first chapter of the book, she highlights that the manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, three “essential” technologies of our renewable energy era, requires “a veritable periodic table of inputs from the earth’s crust,” including lithium, graphite, copper, iron, nickel, cobalt, bauxite, silicon, manganese, and many more. The acclaimed solution to ending the extractive process of mining alas requires more mining.
The renewable energy transition depends on electrification, and electrification depends on rechargeable batteries. The batteries that make storage and use solar and wind energy instead of fossil fuels depend on high-purity lithium compounds. Meeting global lithium demand ten years from now, in 2035, will require between 59 and 74 new and fully operational lithium mines. So, maybe renewable energy sources like solar and wind energy are not directly energy sources that need to be mined, but the storage and distribution of them on a large scale will only be possible with even more mass extraction.
Like every kind of mining since the beginning of capitalism, the mining of lithium will bring with it boom-and-bust cycles, social conflicts, and environmental harm. Which means the “green” in the green energy transition is a false signifier that legitimizes new forms of extractive energy production, implicating the general public by gaining their support through selective information sharing, instead reinforcing the image and association of renewable energy to environmentally friendly, non-extractive practices and the affective placement of hope that the climate crisis can be mitigated.
What Riofrancos terms as an “extractive frontier” is critical to understanding the supply chain of supposedly green and renewable energy. The extractive frontier is a space where mining takes place and the minerals are procured. They are “not unfortunate blemishes on otherwise clean energy, nor are they tragic but inevitable flaws in an otherwise virtuous economic system. Instead, they link the brutal past of colonialism to the stark injustices of the green future.” In short, the supply chain of supposed “green” energy is necessarily exploitative and extractive. The green energy transition has a major human rights issue to contend with: a violent struggle between Indigenous rights and climate action.
Indigenous land has historically been represented, perceived, and treated as a sacrifice zone or wasteland. Through this extraction process, Indigenous land often becomes an exploited frontier and Indigenous people bear the environmental and social cost of mining. The process goes like this: Indigenous people are displaced from their homelands without adequate compensation; they are relocated to areas still dangerously close to the site of extraction where various forms of pollution enters their bodies and has consequences on health. Or, in other words, if the foundation of the green energy transition is exploitation, violence, and extraction, the green energy transition is an unjust and violent one for other aspects of the production and consumption chain.
The kind of energy being used, be it fossil fuels or renewable energy, matters much less than the practice, scale and economy surrounding it. Quoting Erich Zimmerman, Riofrancos states that “resources are not; they become.” This was relevant to Riofrancos in highlighting that the natural processes that distribute minerals operate independently of human will, but they only become useful and valued resources as a result of human action. I teased out another connection. Environmental discourse is preoccupied with naming the problem, often pointing a finger at fossil fuels for causing the climate crisis which is incredibly reductive and completely obscures the human agent of this crisis.
High-income countries consume six times as much biomass, fossil fuels, metals, and nonmetallic metals than low-income countries, which means that the flow of energy resources is more concentrated in these areas. Raw materials are transported from low-income countries and later manufactured in high income countries. As Riofranco’s highlights, “the same countries that provide more energy, land, labor, and raw materials than they consume also earn less from trade and suffer worse environmental impacts.” High-income countries are also former colonizers, and mining exemplifies this pattern of former colonizers benefitting from the resources mined in former colonies. “Colonial patterns are entrenched, not uncontested. The grand struggle of who controls the earth’s bounty is far from over,” Riofrancos reiterates.
Riofrancos also draws attention to the temporal sleight of hand that undergirds green capitalism. The harms of extraction are rendered spatially distant and temporally deferred, while the benefits of electrification are immediate and visible to consumers in high-income countries. Electric vehicles, solar rooftops, and wind farms appear as symbols of progress precisely because the mines that make them possible remain out of sight. This uneven geography of visibility allows environmental harm to be displaced onto marginalized communities, transforming sacrifice into an acceptable prerequisite for climate action. The future-oriented rhetoric of climate mitigation further legitimizes this trade-off: present violence is justified in the name of averting future catastrophe. Yet, as Riofrancos insists, these futures are not evenly distributed. For communities living on exlpoited frontiers, the green future arrives as pollution, displacement, and intensified state and corporate control. The transition is an uneven one as it actively produces new forms of environmental injustice under the banner of planetary survival.
In the latter half of the book, Riofrancos highlights how policymakers saw the green energy transition as more than a way to stem global warming and climate change and lay the foundations for a greener future. The fact that this “green future” would entail new infrastructures, technologies, sectors, and trade routes (and most importantly, more profit) meant that “policymakers looked to these supply chains as the most strategic terrain for asserting global power.”
Upon reading this book, it is clear that Riofrancos has a thorough understanding of geoeconomics — the notion that economic policy and national security are one and the same — as well as the supply chain of renewable energy. She highlights that in past eras, “this fusion of economy and security took place in the context of total war, and today the battlefields are supply chains and the goal is green dominance: supremacy over new energy technologies.” Even governments and political elites of low-income countries want to climb the ladder of the energy transition full speed ahead, without considering the consequences of such a decision.
Riofrancos talks about how she herself was a strong advocate for renewable energy until her extensive fieldwork along the lithium mines in Chile. The “green” signifier attached to the idea of renewable energy makes it feel like an easy thing to root for. With this transformation on display, she thinks of ways forward. “A just transition should not only phase out fossil fuels but also transform the unequal social system that carbon energy had helped consolidate in the first place.”
If climate action requires more mining and extraction, do the ends justify the means? Especially given that mining is often irreparably ecologically destructive. Perhaps we need to rethink what climate change means: if we want to limit the effects of climate change, we should also include the material impacts of human pursuits on land and thematerial destruction of land from mining, not just climatic events like floods, melting glaciers, and rising temperatures.
Riofrancos begins the book with a daunting fact: the transportation sector is the single largest contributor to the U.S. carbon footprint and the second largest source of global carbon emissions. The final chapter of her book follows up on this and asks a simple question: Would it be easier to dig innumerable new mines than to nudge Americans to move around differently, through public transport instead? While we don’t have the answer to this, the social need to have access to transportation is backed by the industrial need to profit off of the consumption of vehicles. And so, the way forward may be to separate social need from industrial need, which will require a fundamental shift in how we live our lives.
