Although the historical tension between the environment and labor politics must be overcome, this fabricated dichotomy is possible partly because of the well-exercised maxim that mining brings economic development, and economic development is subject to state and industrial influence. Push vigorously.
Alternatives
The hustle and bustle of substituting another extractive industry for one extractive industry obscures the fact that the biggest factor of human impact on the earth’s ecology is economic growth.
It also advocates relying on technology as the only means to reduce carbon emissions.
Although improvements in technical efficiency helped reduce the material and energy intensity of economic activities, these improvements did not succeed in bringing about an absolute reduction in impact.
Transforming our energy system must not come at the expense of workers. We need to rectify the lack of effective and binding mechanisms to ensure respect for human rights. International legal norms require multinational companies to be responsible for infringements in their complex supply chains.
Human rights treaties that bind the company and its supply network, ethical procurement, worker- and community-led decision-making can all play a role.
choose
The same can be said of innovations in energy storage, transmission, distribution, power generation and supply technologies that do not rely on primitive earth minerals and metals.
Workers and communities should be able to ask, whose interests are mines for? Will they have fair access to the extracted resources and the final products made from raw materials-whether it is renewable energy or other products? Can the mine be closed and the fair distribution of energy can be maintained?
In this case, the social protection of mining workers and communities must be ensured.
In the end, the solution is basically social; technical repairs and efficiency improvements alone cannot bring justice or ecological well-being.
However, on the demand side, there are some ways we can make more informed choices about energy and resource consumption.
justice
This change should result in a reduction in consumption and reuse, or the widespread sharing of available materials, thereby significantly reducing the demand for new resource extraction.
Front-line communities and workers need resources to articulate new alternatives to the dominant development model.
Justice and fairness must touch all aspects of transformation and spare no effort.
By ensuring the redistribution process of employment and livelihoods, increasing access to energy, food and public services is complementary to reducing excessive consumption.
As the world enters a recession after the pandemic, a truly global green new deal is an opportunity to put climate justice first and center.
However, this must first ensure that the recovery or transformation of the global north will not come at the expense of the ecology and the well-being of workers in the global south.
This author
Sebastian Ordoñez Muñoz is the Senior International Project Officer (Latin America) of War on Want, based in London, UK.
