Globalizing the Global Green New Deal: Harmful Extractives in the Clean Energy Shift

Susan Park, Teresa Kramarz, Craig Johnson, and Stacy D. VanDeveer

The GND has created a broad political debate on what it means to take climate action by linking the environment to social and economic policies in the United States. However, a GND cannot be struck by and for Americans alone. Many of the materials needed for clean energy technologies, and the smarter and more resilient communities and physical structures required to meet challenges associated with climate impacts and adaptation will be mined, processed, and transported from around the globe. A forward looking, US GND cannot be built on a foundation of the old, exploitive and environmentally destructive global economy.  As we argue in this bully pulpit, the GND must recognize and address the global costs of adopting what appear to be “win-win” clean energy solutions designed to tackle the overlapping challenges of climate change and economic inequality. Doing so entails incorporating and addressing the international impacts of U.S. policies and public administration.

Inequity & Supply Chains are Global

The challenge of any GND is how to connect social spending to climate action: efforts must be made to address vulnerable communities needs in ways that contribute to building sustainable communities. This is because any shift to renewable energy and green jobs creation in the United States is predicated on a global supply chain of minerals that remains dependent upon processes of unsustainable ‘extractivism,’ or the exploitation of natural resources for profit, often in the Global South. Many of the world’s largest reservoirs of minerals like cobalt, copper, lithium, rare earth minerals and other materials required in the production of renewable technology such as solar, wind and battery storage are found in fragile states and under communities of marginalized peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (see Figure). In countries such as Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for example, human rights abuses and environmental devastation are closely linked to the mining sector. In thousands of communities across Latin America and Southeast Asia, mining operations run rough shod over indigenous communities and human rights, with the tacit or explicit support of states and governments. These problems are widespread at current extraction levels. What happens when future, GND-driven demand for renewable energy minerals surges? For instance, according to the World Bank, demand for lithium required in energy storage is expected to jump to almost 1000% by 2050. It is clear that the transition to clean energy will be extremely mineral intensive. 

Addressing the Global Costs of Tackling Climate Change

Now more than ever, hard questions need to be asked about the social, environmental, and political implications of adopting national-level solutions to the global climate crisis. The transition to a renewable future is urgent. So too, are the challenges climate change adaption and building community resilience. Yet such shifts will be built on a global political economy that exports wide-ranging, destructive and deadly social and environmental problems to low-income countries, whose poorest communities are least able to bear such burdens. In seeking to alleviate inequity and address climate change impacts at home, an American GND risks exacerbating these problems in communities across the developing world. We need systematic, transnational and comparative research to identify how such harms are exacerbated. Such policy, public administration and private sector governance research, including careful modelling and case studies must be used to identify political actions and institutional changes needed to globalize the GND.

One option that builds on current research and practice is to build a global GND on transnational regulatory standard setting that critically engages voluntary standards and agreements and the vast number of private authority and public-private initiatives. Multilateral, inter-state cooperation to address the environmental and social harms stemming from mining seems unlikely in the near term, but a range of international voluntary initiatives exist that cut across mining operations. Coalitions between mining and environmentalists – such as the “Responsible Copper Initiative” – are often portrayed as a means by which mining can ‘do good’ – or to at least do a lot better – while at the same time maintaining global operations. But environmentalists are well advised to carefully examine the historical record of extractivism, and its effects on vulnerable societies and environments, before forging such new alliances. 

From a public administration perspective, the GND promotes new forms of resource use and extraction, whose social and environmental costs will be borne by some of the world’s poorest people if global supply chains and common practices in the contemporary global capitalism are left unexamined and unaddressed. Developing capacity for regulating the actions of multinational mining firms – alongside their local partners and sub-contractors – will be critical. When environmental justice groups created a strategy with labor for a just transition at the domestic level, they recognized the danger of generating ecological goods at the expense of social bads like unemployment and forced displacement. On the cusp of a renewable energy boom, there is again an urgent need to reckon with unintended consequences at the international level, since a low carbon economy will be based on an even more resource intensive future.

In short, Americans cannot build a GND at home by ignoring the human and ecological costs of extracting natural resources everywhere else. Huge amounts of public administration research tackle state, local and national scale resource management, environmental and human health protection, and market regulation. As a field of theory and practice, public administration stands to advance our understanding of the social and environmental terms on which we hold public and private actions and decisions to account. Doing so entails casting a more critical eye on the ways in which we frame and defend global environmental policy agendas, including the fight against global climate change and the drive to reduce and end global poverty.

Susan Park  is an Associate Professor of International Relations at University of Sydney.

Teresa Kramarz is an Associate Professor of Global Affairs at University of Toronto.

Craig Johnson is a Professor of Political Science at University of Guelph.

Stacy D. VanDeveer is a Professor of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at University of Massachusetts, Boston