Toward a Just and Sustainable Energy Transition

Ashley Dawson thinks about the future through Nicholas Beuret’s “Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition” and Thea Riofrancos’s “Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.”

By Ashley DawsonSeptember 25, 2025

• Environment

• Politics

ENERGY-RELATED CARBON EMISSIONS hit an all-time high in 2024, contributing to record atmospheric concentrations of CO2. As a result, last year was the warmest year on record, the first that was more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. But how is this possible given the record levels of global investment in and deployment of renewables, which reached an all-time high with 536 gigawatts of renewable capacity added in 2023?

The answer is that fossil fuels are not being replaced by renewables, as the term energy transition suggests. Instead, they are being added to the total energy supply. What we are witnessing, in other words, is energy addition rather than transition. Or, to put it another way, we are living through a green transition; it’s just that it’s not the one that climate activists, scientists, or, indeed, anyone concerned about life on this planet actually wants. This green transition is likely to blow us through 2.0°C of global warming by the end of the 2030s, with all the environmental and social disruption that this implies.

To win a decline in global emissions, we must shut down the ongoing fossil-fuel production that is driving energy addition. Yet in order to do this, production of renewables such as solar and wind power needs to be ramped up significantly since we have to electrify everything—not just the power grid but also all transportation, as well as the heating and cooling of all buildings. “More renewables” seems to inevitably mean more access to “critical minerals” like the lithium, cobalt, and copper used in technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles. This in turn implies an increase in mining, a sector associated with some of the worst human rights violations on record, including child labor, land-grabbing, aquifer poisoning, and police and paramilitary violence.

Confronting the contradictions and injustices of the green transition thus means reckoning with extraction. As Thea Riofrancos puts it in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, if climate action requires more extraction, do the ends justify the means? Focusing on this great dilemma of our times, Riofrancos’s book is a thoughtful, engaging, and politically useful exploration of how to imagine and fight for a different green transition. Taking readers to frontiers of green capitalism, from Chile’s Atacama Desert to the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada, Riofrancos also roves widely across the history of the last half century to situate the material fact of extraction within specific political and economic conjunctures.

The term extractivism, Riofrancos explains, was coined by Latin American Indigenous and environmental activists during the 1990s to describe a model of economic development rooted in colonial conquest but now operating at unprecedented spatial and market scale across the globe. In other words, while extraction refers to specific material operations related to the mining of lithium and other minerals, it also describes a set of political, economic, and social relations characterized by the continuing exploitation and subordination of the countries once colonized by Europe, now often referred to as the Global South. Another term for this set of asymmetrical power relations, again developed in Latin America, is dependency. Riofrancos sketches the origins of this term in the work of thinkers such as Brazilian sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who analyzed the “situation of dependency” that characterized Latin American nations in the 1950s and 1960s. The primary features of dependency are unequal exchange and enclave economies, which refer in turn to the patterns of inequality whereby exporters of manufactured goods benefit more from trade than exporters of raw materials, and to the lack of national economic development in countries where extractive industries such as banana plantations, oil fields, and copper mines predominate. In these countries, extraction only leads to poverty—or, as Guyanese activist Walter Rodney put it, underdevelopment.

The political analysis of dependency had radical political implications. Across much of what was then called the Third World, leaders sought to complete decolonization by unleashing a wave of resource nationalism. In the period from the 1930s to the 1970s in Latin America alone, there were 16 nationalizations of the oil and gas sectors, and many more in mining, electricity, railroads, and other key sectors. Perhaps the high tide of such resource nationalism came with the establishment of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel that took control of this key commodity out of the hands of Western oil companies. OPEC was but one instance of Third World efforts to win power over and just prices for the commodities that they were exporting, efforts that led to the promulgation of plans for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) during the 1970s. The wave of US-sponsored assassinations, military coups, and dirty tricks that subsequently unfolded was driven in large part by an effort to reassert core capitalist nations’ control over the terms under which extraction would unfold.

Riofrancos’s book provides a riveting firsthand account of the revival of this resource nationalism in Latin American countries in recent years. Taking us to Chile after the uprisings of 2019, Riofrancos relates the efforts of “eco-constituent” delegates to the country’s Constitutional Convention of 2021 to rewrite the constitution in a manner that would ban mining in protected areas and ensure that state-led development of transition minerals would respect social, democratic, and environmental criteria. This movement to reframe the constitution was ultimately defeated, but Riofrancos shows that it has helped change public perception around extraction in the region. When Chilean president Gabriel Boric promised a national lithium company, he also promised no more sacrifice zones. Nations such as Chile have not escaped dependency, but they are fighting to make sure that today’s green capitalism does not again result in underdevelopment.

The frontiers of green capitalism surveyed in Extraction also extend to the core capitalist nations of the United States and the European Union. Riofrancos discusses efforts by wealthy countries to “onshore” or redevelop their own domestic mining sectors to ensure a reliable supply of transition minerals such as lithium. This onshoring effort has led to the opening of mines in a belt across southern Europe and in the US Southwest. The book explores contentious debates about whether this return of mining to the capitalist core will result in more ethical practices of extraction. Riofrancos offers a fascinating discussion of how corporate promises concerning ethical environmental and social governance can themselves become a strategy of capital accumulation, allowing corporations to attract investment simply by promising to sign on to purely voluntary pledges not to despoil the environment or commit human rights violations.

Through her interviews with Indigenous activists challenging lithium mining projects in the American Southwest, Riofrancos helps sketch a counter-geography to the world-straddling frontiers of today’s green capitalism. Indigenous protesters from sites of long-standing extraction such as those in the Southwest are linked to the Indigenous groups whom Riofrancos meets in Chile’s Atacama Desert in a kind of transnational political formation. Through its account of these global solidarities, Extraction challenges static divisions between the Global North and South. Though not depicted on any maps, the movements Riofrancos tracks are networking with one another through groups such as Yes to Life, No to Mining. Riofrancos does not treat these groups as monolithic, noting that frontline communities are often riven by conflicts, but does document how they can form potent coalitions such as Chile’s Observatory of Environmental Conflicts, which brings together environmental activists, scientists, lawyers, and Indigenous organizations that fight extractivist projects in the multinational lithium triangle that links Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.

Riofrancos’s book ultimately returns to the vexing question of how to regard extraction in a time of climate emergency. Declaring that she does not believe in zero-sum formulations, Riofrancos discusses the result of groundbreaking research that she and a team at the Climate and Community Institute (where she is strategic co-director) carried out. Their investigation explored the extent to which decisions about infrastructure and lifestyle in wealthy nations such as the United States would impact the amount of critical mineral extraction necessary for the green transition. The results of their research, Riofrancos reports, were quite startling. The best-case scenario of more mass transit, denser cities, and more recycling of critical minerals would lead to 66 percent less lithium extraction than many experts predicted. The upshot, Riofrancos argues, is that we should not take it for granted that the green transition must maintain business as usual. We can imagine and fight for new, more sustainable, less extraction-reliant ways of life. We must end what has been called the imperial mode of living. We can demand supply chains organized around justice for everyone they touch, rather than profit for the few.

Riofrancos’s book could not be timelier in its depiction of the frontiers of green capitalism. By suggesting that we overcome capitalist realism, the sense that there is no alternative to the present way of living, Riofrancos opens welcome vistas for political imagination and action. But though Extraction does depict struggles against current modes of green capitalism, it is hard to feel optimistic about their odds of victory. The question of how to challenge the dependency that is hard-baked into extraction is a particularly thorny one today, when much of the progressive “pink tide” has been rolled back in Latin American nations, and when authoritarian repression and geostrategic competition seem to be intensifying remorselessly. Green New Deal programs such as the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and the European Union’s Green Deal have effectively been shut down as far-right forces have gained political power across the globe. What we have instead of the Green New Deal, as Richard Seymour has argued, is disaster nationalism. How can environmental activists contest the transition, let alone win supply-chain justice, under such conditions?

Nicholas Beuret’s new book Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition grapples with precisely these difficult political questions. The green transition is already happening, Beuret argues, but hopes for a revival of green social democracy have faded. Indeed, the prospects of an imagined progressive transition are bleaker than ever. In almost every nation today, the Left’s electoral prospects seem to have been dashed by a shockingly effective far-right insurgency. Beuret consequently concludes that there is no win-win solution of the type imagined by Green New Deal advocates, in which the transition benefits both workers and the environment. There will be no left capture of the state, no war communism, at least not in the foreseeable future.

This does not, however, mean that the terms and material foundations of the transition cannot and should not be contested. As presently constituted, the transition economy, Beuret argues, is organized to make businesses feel secure in their investments. This means the government’s main task is to “derisk” private investment rather than to organize production directly. Rightly underlining the enduringly neoliberal framework that underlies such an arrangement, Beuret suggests that the success of the transition is gauged not by diminished carbon emissions but by growth rates. Conducted under these terms, green transition, he argues, ruthlessly punishes the poor, facilitates the continued ascent of hedge fund managers and other rentier capitalists, and promotes a heightened draining of resources from the Global South. Beuret coins the term “climate squeeze” to identify the impact of this elite-led green transition on everyday life in Global North nations, where incomes are shrinking, the cost of food and other necessities is spiraling, and hope is dwindling.

As bleak—if accurate—as this analysis may be, Beuret argues that the transition is still in play. As the term itself suggests, the transition is a terrain of class, race, and gender conflict. It is, as he puts it, a war of green transition. Beuret lays out two key tasks for activists in this conflict over the shape of the future. The first is to block continued fossil-fuel use. Building on the work of Andreas Malm, Beuret lays out the case for blockade and sabotage of fossil-fuel infrastructure as a core component of environmental activism. Or Something Worse offers a scathing indictment of most climate activism today, which Beuret convincingly argues is composed of one-off militant stunts designed to win short-term media attention. For Beuret, direct action must target specific choke points in fossil-fuel infrastructure, and it must unfold over an extended period in order to damage fossil capital as grievously as possible. Extended blockades can only be sustained through the cultivation of a cadre of well-organized and militant activists.

Beuret acknowledges the risks of such protest, noting that assassinations of environmental and land defenders are rife across the Global South, and that much of the North has been heavily militarized in recent years. But, he argues, repression is no reason to retreat from climate action. This is certainly correct, but it is not an adequate response to the heavy criminalization of protests around so-called critical infrastructure. The threat of spending years in jail is likely to deter many activists from involvement in a blockade of fossil infrastructure, and even if large numbers of people were willing to participate under such terms, the movement itself would likely be broken as large numbers of activists are locked up for years. There needs to be a strategy to beat state repression of direct action.

In an essay written after the publication of Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021), David McDermott Hughes offers an intriguing argument for what he called a “climate strategy of last resort”: convincing juries to nullify the charges that will be thrown at protesters by a state captured by fossil capital. Jury trial is a constitutional and common-law right in the United States and the United Kingdom. As the climate emergency bites deeper, climate activists can carry out blockades and even sabotage in communities where they have conducted concerted organizing and education campaigns. They can time their actions to “natural” disasters, and can publicize each and every action as an ethical and necessary response to the ecocide of fossil capital. While this certainly won’t guarantee jury nullification, it nevertheless suggests that the courts may be turned into a weapon in the arsenal of the climate movement rather than a tool of state repression.

Beuret’s second major task for activists in the war over the green transition is to create an alternative path to a sustainable social economy. He acknowledges that this second task is even harder than blockading fossil infrastructure. Nevertheless, he offers some genuinely imaginative concrete political strategies to get from here to there. One is to refuse the climate squeeze. This means resisting the idea that inflationary trends—already so damaging but likely to intensify dramatically as the climate emergency shreds global supply chains—are inevitable and relate only to individual consumer choice. Prices need to be politicized. A mass refusal to accept the burden of the energy transition (i.e., higher energy prices) has already played out in France with the “yellow vests protests,” and it was the spiraling costs of public transit that sparked the massive anti-neoliberal uprisings in Chile in 2019. Beuret suggests that informal fare evasion, rent strikes, shoplifting, and other acts of refusal should be organized into a “Don’t Pay” movement against the costs of the green transition. If the green transition is conducted by and for elites, they and the corporations they control should pay for it.

Winning such struggles, Beuret emphasizes, will take determined political organizing work on a community scale. There is no magic unicorn out there that will save us, no union or smart tech or social democratic party that is automatically on the side of a just transition. Beuret argues that environmental activists must build a deep and politically autonomous base by organizing in specific communities. This organizing work, he suggests, should focus not just on defensive struggles against the climate squeeze but also on counterplanning for the kind of transition that communities want and need. His argument is essentially for the building of a kind of dual power, one grounded in local communities and animated by what I have called an environmentalism from below.

This does not mean simply tending one’s own garden like a latter-day version of Voltaire’s Candide. Nor does it mean that organizers should eschew building the kinds of transnational solidarities that Riofrancos describes in her account of movements working to shut down extraction on the frontiers of green capitalism. Local autonomy is a mirage in the age of climate emergency, and mere survival simply leaves the political stage to the Far Right. What it does mean is that there is no alternative to building a movement for a different green transition out of the diverse, fractious, and fragmented societies we currently inhabit. Time to roll up our sleeves.