Introducing Issue #2: Frontiers

A future of clean, abundant energy does not come free of environmental cost. Cutting carbon from our energy system hinges on electrification—of transport, of heating, of industrial processes—all of which will require minerals on a vast scale. From copper and cobalt to rare earths and lithium, the path to a stabilized climate travels through considerable extraction from the earth. 

The International Energy Agency, an influential intergovernmental organization, predicts that demand for lithium in 2050 will be ten times what it was in 2023, more than any other “critical mineral”. Copper, meanwhile, for which there is already a large global market, will need to grow by 150 per cent in the same period to meet demand. Growth on this scale means significantly more mining. And when the geography of global extractive industries means that extraction is often located far from—and is therefore often invisible to—major centres of demand, more mining means the potential for considerable social and environmental harms, from polluted water and habitat loss to exploitative working conditions and human rights abuses. These are real challenges, and they are routinely leveraged (frequently in bad faith) to make the case against building clean energy infrastructures, or in politicians’ and pundits’ efforts to portray the climate movement as somehow hypocritical or naive.

The work of political scientist Thea Riofrancos, an interview with whom opens this issue of The BREAK—DOWN, cuts through the disingenuousness of many of these claims, while taking seriously the tension from which they derive: that the climate action we so urgently need does not come free of environmental, social and cultural implications. By embracing the complexity of decarbonization, Riofrancos’s work approaches this tension head-on, asking how we might reconcile the urgency of this undertaking with its potential harms, and how, through collective effort, we might minimize them. In advance of the publication of her latest book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, we explored these questions together, as well as how the idea of the “frontier” captures the struggles between capital, people and natural that define this moment. These struggles serve as the jumping off point for the contributions to this Issue. 

As Omar Ferwati and Nessie Nankivell write in their Dispatch from Canada’s “Ring of Fire”, so-called for its vast mineral deposits that have placed it at the centre of a fight for Indigenous sovereignty: despite the national or even global level at which the politics and economics of the climate crisis are largely discussed, “the frontier of climate justice often unfolds at a more intimate scale.” Their contribution is joined by two further reports from the frontlines of extractive industry: the Indonesian photojournalist Garry Lotulung reports on the social and environmental impact of the boom in nickel mining in Halmahera, an island in the North Maluku province of Indonesia, while Sam Meadows documents the communities of the so-called “Lithium Triangle” spanning Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.

Other contributors push the idea of the frontier in new directions. Geographer Jacob Bolton writes on the scramble for the Arctic as rising temperatures promise new shipping lanes and extractive terrains—a “consolation prize of a planet in ruin.” Atmospheric scientist Sofia Menemenlis charts the race to manage climate overshoot through the technologies of geoengineering, “opening new frontiers for dangerous interventions in the Earth system.” It is a race borne of the drive to maintain business as usual while the impacts of a changing climate mount—and for some, a “get out of jail free” card for the hardest questions of the energy transition, from infrastructural transformation to the demise of the fossil fuel economy. As trade unionist Ben Lennon argues in his contribution: “the primary frontier of the energy transition now isn’t located in production or price… it is people,” and more specifically, the utter failure to invest in the skilled labour force needed to turn targets into reality. For Brazilian scholar Sabrina Fernandes, Brazil’s ecological frontier is located in the government’s confrontation, or lack of it, with large agribusiness, which remains a hugely powerful and destructive force in a country whose actions on climate and ecological conservation will have profound implications for the world. Ashok Kumar, meanwhile, maps the frontiers of resistance to fossil capital, arguing that the sector’s consolidation into ever fewer, larger firms creates new sites for strategic intervention. In a concentrated industry, he contends, “every disruption is effective, whether or not it stops a project outright. Even when it looks like we’re losing, we’re shifting the risk landscape.”

“That is power,” Kumar writes. And indeed, the possibilities of collective power are woven throughout this Issue, from the Indigenous communities on the frontlines of extraction in Canada, Indonesia and South America, to the deep histories of resistance to colonialism in the Irish peat bogs, explored by filmmaker Roisin Agnew in her piece on defying the conversion of these landscapes to data centres. Activist Nathan Akehurst, meanwhile, shares his experience on a rescue ship in the Mediterranean, where unlikely alliances form between local communities and volunteers in resistance to the demonization of migration—a coming together against brutality that will only be more urgent as the world continues to warm. 

Without question, despite the mounting defeat and repression of progressive forces around the world, there are countless such examples of resistance from which to build and draw both hope and inspiration. Yet for all of these, the same questions with which we started remain: in the trade-offs between decarbonization and human and ecological impact, how should we determine where extraction or infrastructural development takes place—which costs are bearable, or inescapable, or even necessary—and who gets to make these decisions? How can we design a better future that repairs for past and minimizes future harms? And how can we construct systems of ownership, governance and planning that enable us to build that future, ensuring economic activity serves the needs of life and not private firms’ bottom lines?

These are just some of the questions we put to Riofrancos in a conversation that, in many ways, and despite the diversity of their subject matter, frames the collected contributions of our second Issue, all of which define in diverse ways what it means to be a “frontier” in the climate crisis, and all of which, to borrow Thea’s words, demonstrate how frontiers are “never exhausted by the economic and political imperatives that designate them as [such]. They exceed them. They are more bountiful.”