Mining the Energy Transition: An Introduction

Mining the Energy Transition:An Introduction Angela Kronenburg García and Nikkie Wiegink In 2018, when one of the authors of this article (Angela) was doing field-work in northern Mozambique—a country of research interest to both authors—she ended up following a series of public consultations announcing a new mining project in the area. These consultations were organized by the mining company in the district's town and in the various villages that would be affected and resettled by the project. Angela was primarily interested in the topic of investor-induced displacement—the fact that the investor was a mining company was a coincidence. She actually knew very little about the resource that was going to be mined (graphite) and what it is used for. During the consultation meetings the project was presented to local residents with the help of visual materials (posters, slides). One of the slides was titled, "For what reason is graphite important?" and displayed a photo of an electric car and a solar farm. It explained that graphite was a critical component for these "green technologies" and that there was a growing market for graphite. These concerns were far removed from the lives and realities of local residents and, as a result, this information largely went unnoticed. Instead, the discussions during the public consultations were dominated by people's hopes for jobs and worries about displacement and the loss of agricultural land because of the multiple graphite mines popping up in the region (Wiegink and Kronenburg García 2022). The global connections of what was happening in this mining area in Mozambique only started to dawn on Angela when, in the Netherlands and Belgium, after a period of time, she started to observe electric vehicles charging on the streets and noticed the inescapable talk End Page 311 about an energy transition on the news. This was in stark contrast with the Mozambican context, where "the energy transition" was not yet part of the public debate (Warner et al. 2023). There, discussions about the energy transition came later, haltingly at first, and only started to take off around 2021, initially through donor-government interactions and later in national policy circles. A few years later, in September 2023, the first-ever Africa Climate Summit took place in Nairobi, Kenya. The Summit was a high-profile event, bringing together African heads of state and other leaders such as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, as well as policymakers, development partners, the private sector and civil society organizations. The aim of the summit was to deliberate on solutions for climate change in Africa and agree on a common African position ahead of the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. One of the main topics discussed was Africa's contribution to the global energy transition. Under a "green growth" agenda that called for more climate investments in Africa, energy transition plans and strategies were presented (including by the Mozambican delegation), highlighting the continent's untapped "renewable energy" potential and its abundant reserves of "green minerals." The latter feeds into the strategic quest of the European Union (EU) and the US to secure "critical raw materials" for low-carbon technologies. The Africa Climate Summit not only indicates that the energy transition has now truly gone global but also signals a further entrenchment and legitimization of a new "green" extractive rush, such as the one happening for graphite in northern Mozambique. Taken together, these examples illustrate two important characteristics of the energy transition that we would like to foreground in this introduction. First, that the energy transition, with its associated notions of "greenness," has become a dominant narrative that is increasingly doing all sorts of things in the world. We believe this may indicate a "moment of energopolitical change" generating "fissures and tremors" (Boyer 2014:315) across the globe that merit serious anthropological attention. Second, the energy transition is intimately connected to resource extraction, to the extent that many of these fissures and tremors are materializing and reverberating in...