“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
So spoke Winston Churchill after the Allied forces’ victory at El Alamein turned the tide against the Axis powers in Africa, November 1942. Today, I repeat this Churchillian quip with reference to a defeat.
Last month, in the gateway city to the Brazilian Amazon, Belém, COP30 reached a hapless conclusion. Putting aside the protests and logistical issues, the conference itself issued only a milquetoast encouragement to increase climate funding, crafted in politically meticulous language to avoid discouraging any country from continuing fossil fuel production.
At the same time that the headlines of COP30 were dominated by intrigue, popular demonstration and logistical challenges, American President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman banquetted to celebrate their closer economic relationship. The golden opulence exhibited by these oil-producing giants starkly contrasts with the compromise-riddled conference.
More than ever, the direction forward has been clouded by disagreements stemming from shifting priorities among conference participants and observers. Bill Gates, a longtime supporter of climate action, issued a new and noticeably measured memorandum that advocated for the conference to temper the direct approach to net zero with other developmental goals, which has been met with much controversy.
As subsidies are withdrawn and tax incentives are repealed, the green transition faces strong headwinds from the powers of brown energy it seeks to replace. The one area of clear global transformation has been the rise in metal production that has enabled unprecedented manufacturing of renewable technologies. The relationship between metals and energy, however, is fraught with ulterior motives and logistical complications.
The energy addition
The increasingly bellicose tone of bilateral diplomacy has become akin to a duel of logistical chess. National autonomy is the paramount goal, and energy is the basis for achieving this aim. It can be argued that the explosion in demand for metals in recent years is principally motivated by martial competition, not an environmental one, although its implications for soft power are significant. Although appearing diametrically opposed, American hydrocarbons and Chinese renewables are but two sides of the same coin of energy policy. It is an energy addition, not transition.
China’s enormous economy depends upon a voracious amount of energy, which it satisfies with domestic coal, imported oil and gas, and an increasing number of renewable projects leveraging the country’s mineral wealth to support a larger power grid. China continues to secure international market domination for various critical materials, from graphite and nickel to cobalt and rare earth elements (REE).
Green technology not only represents a means of securing energy independence but also a means of establishing foreign dependence on Chinese exports for green grid stability. The European Union imported 98% of its solar panels and 43% of its wind turbines from China in 2023, ballooning its renewable capacity as the continent weans itself off of Russian imports. Europe faces a difficult dilemma to balance its climate goals with policies that will bolster its sagging industrial competitiveness. The overreliance on Chinese materials will become an increasing strategic liability, although many Europeans remain optimistic about new methods to combine economic and environmental goals.
Across the pond, although the Trump administration has exhibited unreserved contempt for the advice of climate scientists. Although some of the actions taken by the administration appear counterintuitive to the intention of expanding American energy output, the reversal in energy policy is better understood in geopolitical terms of Trump’s hawkishness in weaning the United States off the Chinese supply chain for critical materials.
Even if or when the American AI construction boom and Chinese manufacturers’ cost-cutting involution come to bust, the mining boom that they have stimulated is not likely to reverse in light of this new geopolitical reality. Throughout the United States and Europe, new mines are being opened using improved extraction techniques that make previously uneconomic deposits commercially viable.
One such example is Rio Tinto’s Nuton program for recovering copper, which coats ore with sulfuric acid and a special kind of copper-digesting bacteria to refine the metal on massive leach pads in the Arizona desert. In Alaska, the tailings of former gold mines are being prospected again for antimony ores, now that the element has gone from a leftover to a critical mineral for the strengthening of armaments. While these mines come online, manufacturers in the United States, Japan and elsewhere in the Western fold look to innovate new techniques that will reduce or omit the need for critical minerals obtained from Chinese suppliers.
In light of international affairs, it is understandable why the climate change discussion has shifted from prevention to adaptation. The developing world is in need of more direct infrastructural and institutional resources to handle climate-compounded disasters, particularly with geopolitical insecurity and the diminishment of funding from sources like the US Agency for International Development (USAID). New tools for reconfiguring climate finance, like the Green Swap, would enable money lending institutions to decouple the developmental and environmental goals of their investments, which would improve both aspects and empower more sustainable societies in the developing world based on green technologies.
There is an assumption that the green transition, in presiding over the demise of Big Oil’s monopoly over energy production, will lead to a more socially and environmentally just world. One must predict, however, that socioeconomic inequities will persist, whether in a supply chain controlled by ExxonMobil and Volkswagen or by Rio Tinto and Tesla. We will continue in a world where the sufferings of vulnerable nations are neglected unless they possess useful resources to obtain.
Untangling the green from the brown
The burgeoning of green energy has taken place so far within the interests and infrastructure of brown energy, making it difficult to fully separate. As our first industrial revolution rolls along, the green transition promised to eventually replace it is still characterized by mining, production, consumption and waste, which will compound ecological stress and societal risk factors. It is worth considering how green energy is tied to the old system, and how green projects around the world might adversely affect people and the environment within the contexts of extraction and refuse.
Nowhere is the entanglement of green and brown energy more exemplified than in the recent surge of Chinese manufacturing exports. From photovoltaics to electric vehicles (EVs), China has been the driving force behind the global progress that has been made in the green transition. It is important to remember, however, that these electronics have been born out of sustained oil importation and increased coal-fired power plant capacity.
Essential trace elements for green technology, like lithium and REEs, are often obtained as byproducts of the hydrocarbon industrial complex. For example, briny wastewater from Marcellus Shale oil in western Pennsylvania can supply 40% of the United States’ demand for lithium batteries — provided the fracking continues. What happens to its wastewater is yet another matter.
As epitomized by the intensive Chinese REE mines in Inner Mongolia, Bayan Obo, a region can enjoy an economic boom while simultaneously grappling with the landscape-altering defects of mining to health and environment. Every tonne of REE refined here generates approximately two thousand tonnes of toxic waste. Although great strides have been made by the Chinese government in consolidating companies and improving procedures, the region remains saddled with contaminated soil and water resources across over a thousand processing sites.
Aluminum, another essential metal, is procured from bauxite found in the red clays of tropical soils from countries like Guinea and Jamaica. To refine these soils, caustic chemical agents are used to separate alumina from the leftover “red mud,” which is enriched in toxins during the process. Locals have been adversely affected by the atmospheric and hydrologic contamination, and have campaigned for operations to wind down, noting how the economic incentives have declined in recent decades.
As President Javier Milei’s Argentina gears up for new mining investments, some communities across the Andes in northern Chile and Peru suffer from occupational hazards, impoverished social development and long-term health risks like elevated cancer diagnoses because of unsafe mining practices used to obtain lucrative amounts of copper, gold and lithium. Multiple mines, including the world’s largest porphyry copper deposit, Chuquicamata, stack mountains of tailings near the city of Calama, in the Antofagasta region of Chile. Although determined to keep mines operational, citizen representatives nevertheless advocate for greater measures to prevent the dispersion of refuse minerals into the local aquifer and atmosphere.
Neglect or mismanagement of these leftover resources has led to environmental catastrophes, as in the collapse of an iron tailings dam on the upper Rio Doce in central Brazil that killed 20 people and polluted an entire watershed with a cocktail of chemicals. Only ten years later, concurrent to COP30’s proceedings, did a British court declare the mining company BHP liable for the disaster. The operations to extract and refine metals for this ballooning global demand will inevitably jeopardize many vulnerable communities, and each will have its own set of collateral environmental consequences.
Besides the mining and manufacturing of renewables, one must mitigate other environmental risks related to use. EVs, whose large batteries already incur a sizable carbon debt in manufacture, reduce carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions but can increase levels of sulfur dioxide and other atmospheric particulates, due to different internal components and, in particular, rubber tires whose wear increases with the additional weight of the car battery. The environmental positivity of the battery itself is outright negated when fossil fuels are used to power the electric grids for charging EVs during their lifespan.
Sustainability has yet to be achieved when batteries are spent. Currently, a mere 1% of the metals assembled into batteries are recycled. Catalytic converters, attached to automotive tailpipes to neutralize nitrogen oxides in petrol-combusting cars, constitute the majority of recycling for several critical metals, like palladium (33%), rhodium (32%) and platinum (20%).
Numerous facilities for recycling metals are set to come online in the coming years. However, in order to scale up to global ambitions, strides in mining and recycling must be scaled up by orders of magnitude. Mining companies will have to mine a Chuquicamata-sized deposit every year in order to keep up with projected copper demand by 2050. EVs make up the bulk of demand for many metals like lithium (around 1100 of 1400 kilotonnes in 2025).
As methods improve, the green transition will significantly benefit the environment overall, but there will still be substantial environmental risks associated with renewable technologies. It is necessary to ensure thorough custodianship of locations hosting hazardous industries and waste products as mines spring up and electronic waste proliferates. The consent and consultation of local populations is essential to maintain both the economic and ecological justice of green energy projects.
Humanity has affected the environment in many ways, and resolving its issues is not a straightforward task in certain cases. The numerous cargo ships that travel across our globalized world release exhaust full of water-condensating particulates. These create anthropogenic clouds whose albedo reflects sunlight back into space, ameliorating the impact of the greenhouse effect on the atmosphere.
In and of itself, cutting back the emissions of these maritime aerosol particles would serve to exacerbate global warming significantly. The inverse relationship between extreme heat and extreme smog is one of the many ethical knots which ensnare the green transition to the legacies of brown energy.
Climate change does not only concern the atmosphere. There is increasing consensus that all these industries have impacted Earth’s geology to the point that we have entered a new stratigraphic epoch: the Anthropocene. Plastics, the “wonder material” of hydrocarbon reserves, manufactured more than ever before, have infiltrated the very anatomies of living creatures in deleterious ways still not fully understood. The collective weight of anthropogenic asphalt, concrete, metal, and other materials now outweighs the collective biomass living on planet earth. On average, a body’s worth of our weight is produced as waste every week. Within our lifetimes, alkaline seawater is cementing the coastal debris from steelmaking into solid rock.
Civilization has made an indelible mark on the world. Even in a green transition, it will continue to do so. If we cannot go backward, we must then go forward. There must be a renegotiation of man’s place in nature.
For a thorough understanding of climate change and the solution to it, we must use the natural sciences to contextualize our energy production. After all that we have done, the ultimate question is not whether to stop, but whether to undo and redo sustainably. The solution to the oil rigs must not merely add more open-pit mines, but must also address the root causes of human-induced imbalance to the environment. To do so, the green transition will have to be augmented by a blue one.
Chemical imbalances
An unfathomable quantity of carbon rock has been deposited on the earth, accruing and eroding with the rise and fall of seascapes and landscapes. Forested swamps metamorphose into coal, which we burn for power. Oceans of plankton mature into the oil we convert into plastics. Corals and other calcium carbonate skeletons are cemented into the limestone we calcine for concrete. From each of these rocks civilization extracts carbon, on an earth-changing scale, for the power and materials unleashed by its liberation into the atmosphere.
Industrialization has manipulated the natural cycles of other key elements of life. The Haber-Bosch process, which fixes atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia for crop fertilization, has enabled food yields to feed billions more than before. Another important component of fertilizers, phosphorus, is quarried from sedimentary phosphate deposits. Ruthless mining has obliterated entire islands in the Pacific for the phosphate-rich guano that coated them. Millions of tonnes of its waste product, phosphogypsum, loom over cities like Huelva, Spain, threatening to contaminate waters with carcinogenic and radiogenic metals.
Nitrogen and phosphorus in the water are two of the most important controls on the carrying capacity of organisms in the water. More nutrients mean more life. Watersheds that have accumulated years of artificial nutrients from sewage, lawncare and agricultural runoff suffer from eutrophication as a result. Ironically, this overabundance of nutrients wrecks ecosystems when harmful algal blooms (HABs) explode into existence.
The HABs created by eutrophication include toxins from dinoflagellates, whose eventual death and rot asphyxiate the water of its oxygen. Oddly enough, they are a testament not only to mankind’s problem, but also represent the unmatched potential for quick-growing photosynthesizers to capture carbon and lock away toxins and other excess nutrients in a harvestable form.
Already, the oceans have absorbed over a quarter of our cumulative carbon dioxide emissions. A majority of photosynthetic carbon fixation and deposition takes place in the ocean. The hydrosphere has been the central mediator in the exchange of carbon between the geosphere and the atmosphere. By simple stoichiometric reckoning, it serves to reason that if we have artificially accelerated the release of carbon from the earth into the sky, then we must find a means of artificially accelerating its capture. The ocean is the ultimate enabler of this objective.
The elemental processes into which humanity has inserted itself are ultimately still a part of natural carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. In disturbing these cycles, we have damaged the planet. Even if all carbon emissions were to cease tomorrow, the cumulative imbalance of atmospheric carbon would continue to acidify oceans and exacerbate heatwaves. Any plan for a circular economy cannot only substitute carbon combustion. It must also include a completion of them. The carbon must be made solid again. The most sustainable way of accomplishing this has a name: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
The aquacultural revolution
Terrestrial projections for BECCS have been proposed, involving the rewilding of land with forests and dense vegetation, which would be managed to permanently capture carbon. However, land use on Earth is already strained to its limits, and attempts to use arable land for non-edible purposes, such as sequestration, have rightly drawn criticism. The case of American corn being used to produce more emissions than petrol through bioethanol is a perfect example.
The overexploited biomass of the oceans, on the other hand, is already in need of a reboot. As Taras Grescoe underlines in his expose, Bottomfeeder, the current level of fishing in oceans worldwide is unsustainable. Widespread trawling in waters like the North Sea has obliterated the virtual entirety of the seafloor ecosystem in the quest for seafood, so that large finfish stocks remain only 2–3% of what they were before fishing was industrialized. The insidious proposals for robotic deep-sea mining of critical minerals threaten to cull the ocean floor yet again.
It is evident that fishing requires a revolution in approach. The green economy also requires a revolutionary change in approach. The wedding of aquaculture to the green economy is to create the “blue economy.” Its approach combines economy with ecology to offer the opportunity at reconstructing an entire food chain to be diverse, robust, and sustainably managed for continual fruitfulness. This is the approach of integrated multitrophic aquaculture (IMTA).
IMTA is a mouthful of a term, but it simply describes a body of water used to grow multiple different types of species. Incorporating proxy data into environmental models that clarify how biomass cycles through nutrients, growers can artificially select different species to symbiotically grow in a combined ecosystem. Algae, especially seaweeds like kelp, are its keystone species.
By cultivating kelp on longline ropes floating upon open water with scaffolding to support shellfish aggregation and coral reefs, IMTA systems could expand across the open ocean. Coastal communities would be revitalized by such stable aquaculture, and even inland industries would benefit from the surge of biomass to be sequestered and repurposed.
Asia currently dominates the production of seaweed cultivation and consumption. In fact, Chinese producers have been leaders in the development and upscaling of IMTA, particularly in the Shandong peninsula. Sixty percent of Sanggou Bay (~100 square kilometers) on Shandong’s east coast has been dedicated to IMTA, yielding 84,000 dry tonnes of seaweed and 60,000 tonnes of shellfish annually. An extensive list of companies now exists in China to process yields from waters like it.
Sustainable aquaculture can be accomplished at a profit. Conservation funds that establish marine protected areas lead to at least twice as much monetary value being generated from the biomass of fish and crustaceans enabled to grow in their waters. As with mining, BECCS and its concomitant industries will be constrained by the need to scale up worldwide IMTA development. The main bottleneck for seaweed is its current supply, which is in high demand yet represents only a fraction of what it could ideally be.
Improved technologies must enable logistical upsizing of the aquaculture supply chain by orders of magnitude to implement IMTA globally. To do so, engineers from Europe and elsewhere are creating innovations in marine scaffolding and mechanical harvesting that will enable drastically greater yields than are possible with existing methods that are manually intensive. New policies can facilitate oceanic expansion of IMTA and incentivize collaborations between aquaculture projects and renewable energies like offshore wind farms.
The case of seaweed production in Wagina Island, in the Solomons of the South Pacific, demonstrates the budding potential for aquaculture to enable greater food and financial independence for climate-vulnerable nations. The blue economy gave greater leverage to the island’s local community when deciding to reject proposals for a bauxite mine with the potential to contaminate local water. Nevertheless, a catastrophic recent tsunami and overreliance on the fluctuating export market to China are recent challenges that emphasize the need for IMTA to be logistically robust, economically diversified, and locally tailored to suit each country the best according to its needs.
As demonstrated by HABs, abundant algae is a double-edged sword. Whether a society is prepared to harvest and convert is the difference between a pleasant or a nuisant existence; whether lives are saved or killed. For example, the free-floating sargassum kelps of the Sargasso Sea are beached on Caribbean coastlines in large quantities, whose numbers correlate positively with rising temperatures and pollution. When it decomposes, the sargassum releases lethal fumes of hydrogen sulfide, which have endangered the health and tourism-reliant economies of coastal communities.
Seizing upon the opportunities presented, scientists at the University of the West Indies in Barbados developed a method for using wastewater and sargassum biomass as the principal ingredients of an automotive biofuel. Further investment and mechanization will scale up production to levels that will have significant effects on the energy independence of Caribbean nations. Other chemical transformations investigated by a group from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) aim to produce hydrogen gas and REEs from sargassum biomass.
The commercial potential of seaweed and other algae is staggeringly diverse. Plastic packaging in the United Kingdom is being replaced with biodegradable seaweed packaging. Enriched in the very nutrients of eutrophication in the ocean, seaweeds like fucus have been harvested in France and Ireland for centuries as crop fertilizer. Hydrocolloids like agar, alginate and carrageenan are an unsung byproduct of algal polysaccharides used for various creams and medicines. Everywhere humanity has wantonly dispersed the planet’s elements, seaweed and other algae purify water quality and mollify acidity while concentrating the very nutrients we need.
Advances have been made in the nurturing of other marine organisms that will support IMTA projects. Scientists from the Horniman Museum in London have successfully imitated natural stimuli in coral hatcheries to spawn corals in captivity for the first time. Salmon hatcheries have already benefited fish stocks in freshwater systems like those in Scotland. The calcium carbonate of shellfish like oysters and mussels has the potential to replace quarried limestone as a green alternative to cement and aggregate in concrete. Altogether, IMTA has the potential to supplement or even supplant the bulk of extractive industries with renewable resources.
Abiotic techniques
As IMTA is researched and scaled up, one may also consider more immediate methods for capturing carbon. Funding for carbon capture projects declined 55% in 2024, the steepest fall among all climate technologies, even before the incoming Trump administration stunted existing infrastructure. Carbon capture already receives a bad rap among environmentalists, especially when touted as a carbon-neutral solution to expanding hydrocarbon power plants or, more generally, to delaying the transition from fossil fuels.
This can be partly attributed to the way in which carbon capture is advertised. In particular, the abstract concept of carbon credits has fostered dishonest business practices, in which carbon-emitting businesses often use a horde of loopholes to gamify the buying and selling of carbon debt. Often, these credits reference tracts of existing land that have been secured from vulnerability, or are pegged to carbon that has yet to be sequestered, sold by direct air capture firms as vouchers. Still, the sheer ingenuity of several proposals by well-meaning individuals deserves attention.
Some have proposed methods of carbon capture that do not involve harvesting biomass. One is an abiotic proposal to dump granulated sands of olivine, a common mineral present in oceanic basalt rocks, to weather carbon dioxide from solution and sink to the ocean floor. Others have suggested iron dust could be spread across the ocean to encourage phytoplankton blooms that would sink. Proposals like these offer promising possibilities, but each suffers from its novelty. A carbon capture project must procure funding, draw up complex ecological models to calculate risk, negotiate with stakeholders and occasionally overcome public resistance.
Electricity acquired from a power grid of renewables may aid the manual process of harvesting algae and sequestering carbon into rock. One company, Seacrop, has innovated a technique involving the electrostatic attraction of certain fibers to phytoplankton, separating biomass out of water more efficiently than current pumps and filters allow. Another proposal from UCLA suggests flow reactors could be scaled up to electrically increase the alkalinity of seawater, allowing calcium and magnesium ions to precipitate into carbonate rock from the carbon already in aqueous solution.
Other renewable technologies are adopting techniques to eschew metals wherever feasible. One Swedish startup, Modvion, is constructing wind turbines out of wood rather than steel, which will enable them to be built in larger sizes. Meanwhile, the technology of sodium-ion batteries is rapidly evolving when compared to standard lithium-ion batteries. The replacement of lithium with this heavier yet more common element could greatly improve the economic and ecological standing of electric vehicles.
The future
Japanese economist Masaaki Yoshimori recently wrote in Fair Observer that the objective of the Green Swap is to provide the architecture for the transition to “post-carbon capitalism.” Respectfully, I think on the contrary: the future may well be one of post-capitalist carbon. However volatile our nations and our markets, our planet’s elements are constant. If an economic system is to perpetuate itself upon our planet for the centuries and millennia to come, there must come to be an equal and opposite market incentive to recapture and recycle carbon and other minerals back into the economy.
In order to properly envision a circular economy, new paradigms of efficiency and success might have to be introduced. A truly green revolution cannot be a one-way street only concerned with the mining and consumption of renewables. A true circular economy will be one that mimics natural cycles, not omits them. Only the well-curated bounty of the oceans is capable of sustainably replicating the commodities and energy obtained from hydrocarbon drilling.
We must think big, but we must also act carefully to rebalance our relationship with worldwide ecosystems. As we reconsider how to implement the green revolution, the blue economy must play a starring role in all of our plans.
[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
The post The Green Transition Needs a Blue Transition, Too appeared first on Fair Observer.
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