Economic giants like US, China have been buying up mining rights for minerals, rare earth metals to manufacture ‘renewable’ energy requiring batteries, turbines and solar panels; expropriating and siphoning natural wealth from the natural resource-rich income-poor South to the resource-poor income-rich North; cheapening earth’s resources by exploiting its monopsony (buying) power over South nations.
The need for green transition is unquestionable but in its current form is leading to greater extraction from the earth not the other way and from low income countries (to subsidise ‘more’ for rich nations) creating green sacrifice zones like in the Congo.
It appears that ‘green’ transition is a capitalist fix for business as usual. It is neither ‘green’ nor ‘development’. This maybe understood in terms of #jevonsparadox and #lucasparadox, respectively. When does the penny drop: we need less consumption, less production, less waste, more wholesome provisioning systems.
Jevon’s Paradox: the idea that in the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decline.
Efficiency is good but it’s not THE answer.
Modern day application: alternative sources of energy e.g renewable, enable us to consume more also as it is linked to less co2 emissions, leading to more consumption and thus more resource extraction: the physical infrastructure (turbines, panels, stations) for renewable energy also requiring more material inputs. It’s called the ‘rebound effect’.
Lucas paradox: mainstream
Classical economics state that capital (finance, resources) should flow from high income countries to low, due to diminishing returns of capital: the scarcity of capital relative to labor in low income countries should mean that the returns (marginal product) of adding additional units of capital there are higher than in rich countries where ratio of capital to labour is already high. Reality: the flow of natural wealth and labour value is from South to North.
Elevate Economics 
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