Christos Zografos,
Reseacher at the Reseach Group on Health Inequalities, Environment, Employment Coniditions Network and professor of the Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the European Union (EU), the current energy crisis is connected to two key challenges. First, the risks posed by geopolitical (e.g. the war in Ukraine) and health (e.g. pandemics) emergencies that produce energy-supply uncertainty. Second, the pressing need to transform current, carbon-intensive energy systems into low-carbon ones in order to respond to the climate crisis.

To that end, important policy initiatives have emerged in the last three years, notably the European Green Deal at the EU level, as well as national policy schemes, such as the Spanish government’s Ecological Transition.

These hopeful initiatives demonstrate leadership in tackling the climate challenge, and a commitment to finally addressing the concerns of scientists and civil society about the impending, potentially catastrophic and unequal effects of climate change. When it comes to energy, these policies promote the electrification of the economy through the mass conversion of energy systems to renewable sources and the conversion of automobile fleets to electric vehicles powered by renewable energy. On top of that, these schemes are committed to ensuring that these transformations ‘leave no one behind’.

Notwithstanding such bold intentions and policy action, a key concern has emerged amongst civil society and scholars regarding the sourcing of the materials needed to achieve those plans. According to the International Energy Agency, mineral demand for electric vehicles and battery storage could grow up to 30 times greater over the period to 2040. Studies for the World Bank show that to have a 50% chance of limiting the global temperature increase to 2ºC by 2100, some 3.1 billion tonnes of 17 core minerals will need to be extracted, and the demand for key transition minerals essential for renewable technologies, such as lithium, cobalt, and graphite, could increase by approximately 500% by 2050.

A question emerges: where will the material needed to power low-carbon energy transformations come from? Today, nearly 70% of known lithium and cobalt reserves are located in developing countries. Almost 50% of global cobalt reserves are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a region that ranks amongst the ten most polluted areas in the world, where its extraction involves dangerous working conditions and the widespread use of child labour. It has also been linked to that country’s deadly civil war, which has claimed approximately 6 million lives.

Which brings us to a second, equally important question: through what means will both the material and energy production infrastructure necessary for low-carbon transitions be made available? The Noor power station in Ouarzazate, Morocco, one of the world’s largest concentrated solar power plants, occupies land approximately the size of the country’s capital, Rabat. Constructed with capital from the European Investment Bank, Noor supplies Europe with renewable energy through submarine cables that connect it to the Spanish electricity grid. But according to the Environmental Justice Atlas, constructing Noor involved the dispossession of rural and pastoral communities from their land by characterising it as ‘marginal’ and ‘under-utilised’, a possible case of green grabbing. Closer to home, in Serbia and Spain, social conflict has blocked the mining of critical minerals such as lithium and the building of large-scale wind and solar plants that occupy large tracts of land, risking the displacement of other economic activities and posing dangers to biodiversity.

Those material and political realities have prompted scholars and civil society activists to point to the danger that the global North’s responses to the energy crisis may lead to new forms of colonialism, namely, climate colonialism, or maintain forms of neo-colonialism. The policy relevance of this is hard to miss: unless such contradictions between energy transitions and local concerns are addressed in the design of our new low-carbon energy systems, we risk turning those transitions into a new instrument of power and injustice.

The need to respond to energy challenges is urgent, but urgency cannot be an excuse for multiplying democratic deficits, which can cause a backlash and further delay much needed low-carbon transitions. Time is of the essence, but so is the need for political will to take seriously concerns about past and present injustices and undertake a meaningful socio-ecological transformation that truly ‘leaves no one behind’.