Join us for our upcoming critical conversation: The Other Side of Energy Transitions: Critical Mineral Mining in Latin America, featuring Dr. Donald Kingsbury on October 1.
Description
Decarbonizing energy transitions, as currently proposed, are resource intensive. Critical minerals such as lithium and copper are required for the electricity generation, distribution, and storage technologies of post-fossil fuel futures, triggering financial speculation, political reconfiguration, and the extension of extractive frontiers the world over. While policymakers and the private sector often frame energy transitions as both necessary responses to the climate crisis and opportunities for new waves of ‘green’ industrializations, these promises often ring hollow in the territories from which critical minerals are mined. Rather than inclusive and sustainable growth, contemporary energy transitions often replicate unequal distributions of sacrifice and abundance that have characterized global political economy for generations. This talk contextualizes the urgent need to decarbonize global supply chains with the social and environmental consequences of intensified extraction. Based on over a decade of work on decarbonization and extractivism in the Americas – specifically on lithium mining in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Canada – the talk makes the case for both an ethical and practical need to avoid replicating environmental injustices of the present in emerging post carbon political economies.
Speaker
Donald Kingsbury, PhD, is an Associate Professor (teaching stream) in Political Science at the University of Toronto and the former Vice President of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Don’s research focuses on the political ecology of energy, with an emphasis on the social and environmental consequences arising at the intersection of decarbonization and resource extraction in the Americas. Most recently, these investigations have centred on lithium mining in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. They have also included studies across the globalizing supply chains of energy transitions in Canada (in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Québec). His academic work can be found in Extractive Industries and Society, Global Environmental Politics, The Anthropocene Review, and Cultural Studies, among other publications.