Preface to “Energy Matters” Open Access

Abstract

The problem with fossil fuels isn’t the energy we obtain from burning them. There would be far less anxiety about continuing to use oil, gas, and coal if that were the only issue. The real problem, as we are all aware, is that burning fossil fuels produces CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, which has serious repercussions for human and nonhuman life on the planet, especially given the rate and scale at which we use them. One can of course mount all manner of criticisms of fossil fuels—the way they are used, who owns them and has decision-power over their use, the ends to which their energies are put, the unexpected conceptual and philosophical commitments they compel us to make, and the sociopolitical and material consequences of extracting and employing them. But I doubt any of these criticisms would, on their own, have a bite deep enough to shock us out of our political and epistemic torpor about energy, even if it could be shown, say, that much of contemporary geopolitics turns out to be little more than energy politics. When it comes to using fossil fuels, producing no CO₂ would mean they would be far less of a problem. There’s too much they do for us, and there are too many other environmental problems that need attention.

It is for this reason that the ferocious political struggle now being played out over our energy futures amounts to a fight over the best (or most realistic) way to solve an equation: how to get rid of unwanted CO₂, while ensuring energy keeps flowing. Renewable energies promise to solve this equation by eliminating CO₂ and its gaseous brethren through the creation of energy without the need to burn carbon. Other ways have also been proposed to solve the CO₂/energy equation: those advocating carbon capture, utilization, and storage technologies claim that we can stick the gaseous stuff back into the ground, making it possible to continue to use fossil fuels pretty much as we have been until now. Whatever one thinks of either approach, the answer is the same: the way forward is to make the worrisome stuff go away and, in so doing, make the climate crisis go away too.

Fossil fuels are but one of the things we dredge out of the earth. Iron, bauxite, phosphate rock, gypsum, aluminum, copper, zinc, lead, and cadmium: there is a very long list of minerals lurking beneath the soil, all necessary to the global economy and the onward march of modernity. It might be possible via renewables to disentangle ourselves from the need to extract energy from the ground. There is far less of a possibility—indeed, I would suggest there is none—that we can put an end to extracting everything else. Critics have been alert to the ways in which renewable energy, perhaps especially renewables requiring batteries, require the increased extraction of minerals such as lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, graphite, quartz, and mica. This recognition—now fairly widespread—has been employed as a rebuke to those believing the CO₂/energy equation can easily be solved without environmental or social consequences. But there has been far less recognition of the blunt reality of extraction, of its necessity, intractability, and endlessness. The IEA tells us that the use of fossil fuels has peaked and will soon start to decrease.¹ By contrast, the UN’s Global Resource Outlook 2024 reports that when it comes to extraction of other raw materials, we are just getting started.²

This collection of essays investigates the fictions and realities of extracting energy and other raw materials in Latin America. Each attends to the violence of contemporary extraction, highlighting its social and environmental consequences and showing its impact on communities (including Indigenous communities), the spaces these communities inhabit, their sociocultural relations, and the worldviews that have long guided their lives. Contemporary practices of extraction in the region have reinforced long-standing center-periphery relationships, which has enabled wealthier economies in the Global North to pass along the multiple traumas attending extraction to Latin American countries while reaping the benefits that come with bringing the depths of the earth to light. The global market for raw materials is expanding, which might suggest the opening up of new economic opportunities in the region, even given its all-too-real environmental costs and its impact on all those living at or near extraction sites. But the real money is made after raw materials make their way to the center, where they go through additional refining processes and are then transformed into tech commodities sold on markets across the globe, including the commodity frontiers from whence they came.

Each essay in this special section sets itself the task of exploring challenges that have been made to narratives and discourses that have been mobilized to make the current system and logic of extraction and exchange appear unobjectionable—a quotidian reality against which all protests are deemed misguided, misinformed, or ill-intentioned. The critical work of the contributors is to expose the fiction of this reality, by puncturing the hegemonic narratives of progress that have sought to obscure the darkness and dirt of extraction underneath the shiny surface of rights, freedoms, technological innovation, and progress. Together they offer a vibrant starting point for understanding how cultural actions and expressions and political cultural criticism can impede current practices of extraction. A poem and a corporate report may share little in voice, form, and genre. It’s because the language of reports now gives shape to our future that we need the language of poems to propel us in directions better attuned to the needs of all the planet’s inhabitants.

The critical power of these essays comes from the nuanced ways in which they attend to the material and political dissimilarity between the two modes of extraction I name above: extraction with the potential for resolution (energy) and extraction without any such resolution (everything else). The authors are careful to challenge existing narratives of energy renewability—not because they hope we stick with fossil fuels but because they understand the energy solutions currently on offer are far too clean. The expansion of renewable energy may reduce CO₂ production or even make it disappear entirely. But the critical minerals needed for renewable energies will remain behind, as will questions of ownership, profit, and environmental impact. Light and air are inevitably weighed down by materiality of earth. And the authors understand, too, that the blunt necessity of mineral extraction cannot be gainsaid. But if extraction is in many respects inevitable, what isn’t is the how, why, where, when, and who of resource extraction. Extraction in Latin America needn’t be controlled by corporations based elsewhere in the world. It doesn’t have to be only to the benefit of oligarchs and corrupt governments. And it needn’t be done in a way that fails to carefully consider its environmental consequences. Though it might seem strange to say so, there are better or worse ways to extract, which may include decisions not to extract some things at all (i.e., no more fossil fuels, less iron and aluminum). It is only by fully understanding the social and political forces and fantasies animating extraction that we will get to a point of making collective decisions about what comes out of the earth and what does not, whether in Latin America or elsewhere in the world. Which is why explorations like the ones collected here are so important to the struggle for environmental, social, and political justice.

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