Critical Raw Materials and the Twin Transition — transcript

Transcript of “Critical Raw Materials and the Twin Transition”, a lecture by Dr Jeff Diamanti in the Critical Sustainability lecture series (third edition).

Source: https://youtu.be/fae0b4qAIOg — 36 minutes. See also Infrastructure, where this talk is one of the canvas nodes.

Timestamps link into the video at that moment. These are the auto-generated captions reflowed into paragraphs — no word has been changed, so any transcription oddity is the machine’s rather than the speaker’s.

Introduction

0:00 Hello. Welcome everyone. It’s nice to see so many people on dark evening. We’re very grateful that you’ve joined us for the third edition of the critical sustainability lecture series. A lecture series constructed to foster sociopolitical and socioeconomic engagement. fundamentally valuing ecological integrity over economic accumulation. Through the green offices, lectures, reading groups, magazines, and events, critical sustainabilities aims to cultivate radical imaginaries and move beyond sustaining the contemporary conjecture. Its persistent infrastructural and ecological violence and toward building futures rooted in real ecological justice. While the term critical here conveys a sense of urgency and importance, we also deploy the term argumentatively. Critical sustainabilities is a belief that change at the immediate level is efficient. A critical look towards an evaluation of our social structures is necessary.

1:06 Naomi Klein in no is not enough puts the wager simply. quote, “While what the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s uses of resources, what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion.” And regarding this contradiction between economic accumulation and ecological persistence, the solution is clear. Quote, only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature. In this spirit, I’m very pleased to welcome and thank Jeff Diamanti for joining us today. Jeff is associate professor of philosophy and cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam. For over a decade, he has researched and written on logistical cartographies, energy, infrastructure, and political ecology. Jeff’s first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum, tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland, the economies of North America, and Western Europe.

2:02 He is currently building a long-term research network on supply chain criticism to document and evaluate the conflicts implied by the EU’s critical raw materials framework. His lecture today is entitled critical raw materials in between transition. Thank you.

The lecture

2:25 I have set a timer 45 minutes. I think it’ll be a little less. Um, thank you Shane in the green office for this really uh warm invitation and um probably all of you for showing up. It’s dark and it’s a school night. So, thanks for um I’ve been giving a version of this talk for about 12 months now and each time I do it changes significantly and I now have three very different conclusions and I uh I’m not sure which one I’m going to be giving you today. uh sort of going to go based on feel. But the reason there there are three different conclusions um is because I can this project is really quickly growing and um as I build out different iterations with different collectives and different partners and different thinkers and collaborators.

3:11 Um it really takes on a scale and it and an intensity of thought that like is far beyond what I can contain. Um, which I think is a sign of something good, but also it’s like it’s a project that I’ve been thinking about for a number of years that really feels like a different kind of thing than a book or a series of articles. It feels like something that has to be collaborative um, and super interdisciplinary and and I’m not and I’m like learning how to accommodate the scale of this project as I as I go. So, you’ll feel some of that in the thinking together. Um but at the heart of this really is a set of propositions which you see here which I’m not going to read.

3:53 Propositions that um each of which I have let’s say either published an article on or have elaborated as in a book or something like that. Um, and so these are propositions that I’m bringing, let’s say, to the Critical Raw Materials Act, an act that I treat as a as a kind of mediation of a set of really complex processes and histories economically and politically. Mediations that um I see as writing or scripting futures, futures that many of us in this room are quite concerned about for various reasons from different orientations. Uh but in my experience issuing philosophy and cultural analysis and many of my students are here so you’ll know this. We don’t typically go to this kind of legislation to think about the content of our analysis.

4:45 Um it’s an unusual kind of object of analysis the critical raw materials act. Um but my argument throughout is that it’s all the more urgent that we do tend to these kinds of spaces of mediation and think seriously about what is opaque or invisible to them. but implied by their script. This is a definition of what a mind is. We’re going to be talking a lot about minds today. Comes from the International Labor Office. It’s a definition that specifically is relevant for workers but also for urban planning, taxation, environmental and social assessmental demarcations, attributions of values, risks. What you hear right now is the sonic signature of nickel. Nickel is a primary element on the periodic table.

5:58 It’s number 28, which means it has 28 protons. And nickel sounds like that because its atomic structure reflects light with a spectral signature that you see here. And this spectral signature generates a sound unique to nickel when the light waves are sonified as frequency pitches. Jill Lind, the creator of the atom tones project at Skidmore College, imagined the directory of elemental sound as a creative teaching tool, a way of teaching students about the materiality of frequencies and the unique physics of chemical elements. But listening to the pitch of the earth according to the shape of spectral lines has a long history in the geosciences too and it’s the premise of both remote and institute sensing technologies deployed to survey geomorphology or to read the spectral texture of the earth as you see it.

7:01 So spectral in this sense derives from the spectrum of waves emitted by the atomic composition of the element. A spectrum related to spectroscopy and thus a description of two things at once. A technique for reading and a description of the text being read. Spectral is both a trace of the elemental pervasiveness of the earth that is what needs to be summoned up or sensed into legibility and a technique of making that trace appear. This conjugation of spectral trace and summoning up of the earth for interpretation is what I want to draw our attention to today. And I’ll do so by thinking a bit about the legislative forms of subsuming this elemental spectrality into a means of what Katherine Ysef has termed the sovereignty of white geology.

8:03 A summoning that draws lived cartographies elsewhere into the invisible grounds of capital’s racial ontology. In this project, I’m asking collaborators, a number of whom are in this room, to help me write in an anticipatory fashion with the interpretive habits of extractive capital in order to prepare solidarities across colonial cartographies and the supply chains aggregating around a capitalist economy in internal interminable energy transition. I say to come here because while there is no shortage of historical injustices and violence that we should obviously and do turn our attention to, injustices and dispossessions in urgent need of redress, the new suite of legislation aimed at the future acquisition of critical raw materials in the European Union, following suit from the United States, Canada, and Australia, who have their own version of this legislation, turns future cartographies of extraction into the confident and soothing source of European and Western sovereignty.

9:28 By 2050, the European Union will demand upwards of 90 times more rare earth elements alone for digital technologies and renewable energy infrastructure than today. and more than double the current materials nominated as critical for the future sustainability and prosperity of the EU. Under the banner of the twin transition, twin transition, the legal justification for these prospective supply chains has largely gone unchallenged, if acknowledged at all. The Critical Raw Materials Act of 2023 streamlines the social and environmental assessment regulations for each of the 34 materials on the list, which we will look at in a moment, and thus promises an exceptional legal envelope inoculated against democratic and ethical consideration. Since the EU has nearly none of the materials nominated as critical internal to its own borders, new trade deals, incentives, and forms of persuasion are promised in the coming decades.

10:49 And it will do so through a securing not just of supply chains, cheap labor, unearthed territories, but also the material inventory of resources required to fortify the increased composition, organic composition of energy transition capital. And in a moment, I’ll say a little bit more about that. Uh what you’re looking at here is an example of what’s one of these collaborations looks like. It comes from a book that is um is at the press at the moment in Luxembourg. Um and this is a these are um these are maps of existing nickel reserves in um in SMI and in the circumpolar north including large parts of um the Inuit nation state called Greenland and as well as large parts of the set colonial state we call Canada.

11:57 And um this is just an example of one particular element thinking about the cartographies that are now summoned into legibility in order to support the material needs of European sovereignty and economic prosperity by 2050. This is one example of many. It’s an example as well of like what a counter cartography might begin to look like. Though we could I think have a long conversation about what’s wrong with this approach. other approaches that maybe you’ve encountered that you think are really promising for building solidarities. Here’s the um the European Commission’s 34 critical raw materials. This is published by the European Commission. It’s a lot of information. You might not even be able to read it. We’re going to return to this over and over again, but I now want you to just start to think of all these materials independent of whether or not you’ve heard of them, and I’m imagining you’ve heard of some, but not all.

13:03 Uh, lithium, for instance, I think we probably have. We know quite a lot about lithium. Actually, there’s a lot of literacy around lithium supply chains and and their function, the function of lithium in the production of EV batteries. Um, tungsten. I know there’s some people in this room who know about tungsten, but I I’m sure that there are others who maybe haven’t heard of it before. Nobium, magnesium, phosphate rock. So everything you see in red is it qualifies as critical. So it has an exceptional status. You’ll notice though that there are two that don’t meet the standards or the criteria for criticality and yet they are still critical and those are nickel and copper. below the axis.

13:48 We’ll talk a bit about that, but their exceptional status is really just their ubiquitous function within the production of a suite of commodities, which we’ll also turn to in a moment. If it’s critical, it’s because along the two axis, it exceeds um uh both internal supply demand. So, of none of these materials does the European Union have any more than 10% domestic supply. That is to say that they’re almost entirely dependent on external export. I mean sorry import and the economic importance is a criteria that suggests that of the kinds of commodities that will secure mid-century prosperity these materials are central indispensable. Um, it goes without saying, though maybe worth saying anyways at this moment, just because I won’t say much more about it later, that a lot of the kind of urgency of this legislation is really a kind of reaction against Chinese monopoly over these supply chains.

14:52 How China managed to achieve a monopoly during the great age of de-industrialization in the west is another lecture in itself. Um, and I um, and I think that there’s much more research to be done in order to qualify this sort of um, I would say kind of amnesia of the European Commission and waking up and thinking, “Oh my gosh, there’s a crime of foot. How did China manage to do this?” Same with the United States. But that’s for another day. Uh, let alone independent of any kind of xenophobia that attaches to this discourse of of unfair play. Okay. Listening to the spectral lines haunting the present asks for an imminent reading practice. Imminent reading of capital today involves a familiarization with the aesthetic patterns of how supply chains regulate and motivate the movement of value across moments and spaces of the supply chain.

15:57 That is to say, what happens to raw matter as it is mediated through the distinct worlds of extraction? That’s so I’m about to name like the typical nodal points in the business literature of a supply chain. There’s either four or five typically extraction, processing, component production, and commodity assembly. These are moments in the supply chain that take place in different parts of the world. um they happen in distinct logistical spaces and they are figured according to the logic of value quite distinctly as well. So to think with the phrase of Beverly Best who was here last year to give a lecture, what are the quote perceptual physics of capital as it patterns the movement of value in and through these often securitized and opaque moments of supply chain capitalism, especially when where it is in the world that we are thinking from in each of these four moments of the supply chain um are from the perspective of the value form of capital worlds apart some barely figuring as worldbearing at all.

17:20 So prospecting which is kind of where I began our attention today is one of those aesthetic moments or the surveying of geomorphological pattern in search of resource concentration. An interpretive process involving probing the Earth with various waves of light and sound. Topological scanning for extrusion and tectonic expression of depth. Earth systems models contextualization. Stratographic sampling. In each of these interpretive orientations, surface, time, cause, depth, geologists read for the spectral lines or remains of two distinct concepts of elementality. One, the intersection of planetary force, tectonic time, which melts into two, the atomic specificity of this or that chemical identity, the spectre of cosmic creation in the planetary grounds of what lays before and beneath a spectral signature in the earth that reads as so many pitches or or spectrographic lines.

18:25 But this interpretive effort and it is an effort if you’re a geologist to read the earth for perspective value involves another orientation as well toward the spectral lines of the earth and that is the determinant tense of a resource economy reading for value in these spectral lines as well. A tense that is prolleptic. It jumps forward drawing the historicity of the present into alignment with the world-shaping energies of capital seeing this or that extrusion on the cardographic survey or this or that pitch as potential resource instead of mere ecological signification or grounded reciprocity or a form of reading the present through what Jennifer Wzel following Mary Louise Pratt memorably termed quote the expectant gaze of extractive capital and its lock inheritance of colonial judgment.

19:28 Quote, its vision is narrowly focused on the economic yet also prodigiously unrestrained in imagining a future latent within but quite distinct from facts on the ground. So there’s another text written into the spectral remains, another text that is being read, another text that is in turn reading and scripting extraction. I know I teach in a philosophy department. That’s part of the problem. I think I’m trained to think about the world using a set of methodologies that I don’t think are the same as most scholars in sustainability studies. I think that’s part of what I’m arguing for is a different set of vocabularies and grammars for thinking about similar kinds of objects so that we actually can have an interdicciplinary conversation about for instance EV batteries or drones or labor productivity or neocolonialism and the sites of extraction that seem to bear all of the weight of the history of capital in the EU over and over again.

20:40 questions that actually in a lot of spaces of sustainability I don’t hear asked to ask them. I’m suggesting one way of structuring that conversation that allows for the historicity of these propositions about where to get the materials from to come into focus. Of course, this is deliberately I mean there’s there are multiple arguments there are multiple histories and and multiple concepts that I’m working with simultaneously and of course it’s provocative. It’s supposed to be provocative. Uh the idea at the end though in terms of a target audience I mean really I have in mind a set of social scientific and humanistic researchers coming together and thinking about what our methodologies can bring to the table in conversations about sustainability and at the end I’ll suggest this thing called supply chain criticism.

21:32 My intention is to take up a set of discourses that we experience and encounter in the world all the time around sustainability. Uh discourses that I feel are largely uh making claims on the world without a critical evaluation. claims about sustainability, what constitutes sustainability, the best way to get there and for who and the research that I’m doing which draws from different traditions which of course if I provided I think would help a little bit and you would see oh it’s coming from anti-colonial struggles it’s coming from a very specific thread in um in critical race theory and certainly if I spent more time telling you a little bit about what I take from Marxism I think then you would have a sense of like my intention which I’ I’ve shorthanded but my intention is to defamiliarize the language and the discourses that seem to lay claim to the discourses around sustainability and transition that we hear all the time.

22:36 So in rooms that you’re talking about I don’t know what you’re talking about but I can imagine cuz I spend time in those rooms too. They’re actually the language is not so dissimilar. The concepts are not so dissimilar. The ideas of what has to happen now and how to get there is shared. There’s largely consensus about sustainability. There’s consensus about energy transition, right? And there of course there’s there are very interesting debates about um about sustainability that I’m glossing over but generally sustainability is this kind of normative language that structures especially in the university many many disciplines have but the questions I want to ask about the history that is repeated in the supply chains the actual material spaces that will provide the materials for this transition the ethics around the feel-good story and the normative impulse of transition depending on these geographies and all of the invisibilities and the violences that will be expanded exponentially if these supply chains were to be secured on the terms of their proposition in this legislation.

23:43 I don’t see very much contestation of that and I want to contest it. I want to defamiliarize some of these words we use and the norms that are associated with them. Now am I doing that successfully? No. But that’s the attempt, right? Is to sort of say actually we have all these other traditions of thought in the university that we typically in a space thinking about sustainability don’t turn to. Uh they seem to have very little to say about about um the materiality of sustainability, the social the social structures and forms that that we need to achieve in order to get there. um achieving net zero in one industry versus another. History philosophy doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about that, right?

24:32 Which is is a problem actually. Um but I’m all I’m trying to my intention is to think what does the world look like if we actually include those voices in those traditions of thought and what do what do these normative concepts around sustainability and transition look like to us as practical projects as opposed to mandates? projects that are that should be negotiated democratically. My argument is that actually these normative concepts are undercontested and there’s an entire world of history bound up in them that is glossed over that I think is a problem. I think it’s greenwashing. I think it’s violent. I think that the invisibilities of those who are dis that will be and already are dispossessed in the source geographies is [ __ ] spooky.

25:16 It’s like really upsetting to me, you know? And so what I’m sort my intention is simply to defamiliarize these words for us a little bit to think, okay, now what could we do as researchers with different sets of experiences and and methodologies? What can we do together to maybe produce some kind of solidarity with those at those s the people at those source geographies who are already being subsumed into this story if it feels compelling to do so. Does that help? I mean I can say I I share said that you know does that help though? It does. I would love to talk more about this because you know that no no your question is very valuable it’s very valuable obviously there’s also a number of my students in this room who are like god yeah sometimes it’s like a bit dense so I do appreciate it here’s another rep how am I even done uh 7 minutes um this is like another so to to jump back again right I’m really like building I’m tracking a set of representations here set of representations that map these supply chains in various ways and not no no one of these representations is sufficient but I think you start to get like an interesting picture about compulsions what is being compelled in this transition literature the scale of the of the transition this all of the different geographies and ecologies that are drawn into this map of the future what specific kinds of social activities are actually bearing the weight of this compulsion this norm, the social activities represented here, we tend to think of the twin transition as primarily about primary energy production, but actually the material supply chains that are being called into or summoned into focus to bear it are mostly about a very particular kind of social form, right?

27:25 A unit of the subject, the subject of European prosperity. The subject who has a car, probably has a nuclear family, probably has a single family dwelling, requires an automoility infrastructure in order to perform its duties as a subject to produce as an economic subject. Right? So, a lot of the assumptions that are built into the twin transition reproduce existing ideas about normative social relation that I think is also like a site where we should contest this. I’m also playing a game in the background. I’m playing a game of poetry. I’m trying to reduce the definition down to its barest form. I’m trying to think about all of these verbs. Uh what it is a mind does, right?

28:07 And how we might describe the verbing of a mind, what it does in the world otherwise beyond the kind of empirical description of what it does. So I’m just like cutting out words to see what the verbs feel like. I like the grinding as well, but this video doesn’t work anymore. Okay, let me I have so much more to share with you. Let me end on two thoughts. One is maybe to answer your question in a different way to provide an example of the kind of normative language that I think the social science and the humanities might be useful in thinking through to finish the thought of a normative concept is the concept of criticality.

28:56 That is to say how criticality is established as a as a core um criteria to secure these supply chains to create laws and business partnerships and geopolitical realities to make them possible. Right? So critical in the language of the European Commission is the result of two axes. supply chain risk, which I’ll unpack, and economic importance. Supply chain risk simply means either that the European Union does not have domestic supply, or that those it might turn to to create trade deals don’t have enough or are non-compliant states, that is to say, they’re not interested in selling it to the European Union for one reason or another. And then as we saw already the economic importance is its function in producing these composite commodities right these these 15 commodities we looked at before let’s just linger on this language for a moment though the OECD forecasts that global material demand think about try to imagine this amount of matter moving through the world will more than double from 79 billion tons today.

30:22 That’s just all the stuff that moves through ports on ships. 95% of these materials move by ocean war vessels from 79 billion tons today to 167 billion tons in60. Global competition for resources will become fierce in the coming decade. Raw materials are indispensable for the EU’s industry and stand at the very beginning of each value chain, including renewable technologies and digital technologies. Two, supply risk is measured at the bottleneck stage. So where are these bottlenecks geographically? Try to imagine bottlenecks in logistical spaces. The Suez Canal is a very obvious and sort of emblematic example of this, a bottleneck. and think about how solidarities might be constructed through the spatial patterns of bottlenecks. Why? Because these supply risks involve contested territories.

31:25 people who say this territory does not belong to you and your value chain or labor and logistical disruption including a ship that turns sideways in the Sewish Canal for instance or a pipeline that is blocked or a watershed that floods a refinery or militant refusal and in each of these I’ve with various com collaborators written case studies about um with more time we could talk about those maybe in question and answer Harry, we could also bring some of those into focus, but there are examples of all of these and this is what the European Commission is a little bit nervous about. So the question is like how do you build solidarities with these prospective supply chains in the future with 3 minutes to go.

32:12 This is a very mediarich example of some of those source geographies and how they find their how these matter these materials find their way into the European Union specifically into the court of Roderdam and the port of Amsterdam. And I want you to also just like quickly quickly note that for each of these mines, one in formerly western formerly occupied territory of the western Sahara uh and here in the Nad desert um where phosphorus is phosphate rock is uh produced and um uh imported into the European Union for industrial fertilizers in the agricultural sector. I want you to think about how each of them are preceded by these mining licenses. these tenders to mine, right?

33:00 And the tender itself as a kind of technology through which to think about an anticipatory solidarity. The tenders that go out as a medium to read these perspective futures before they happen. a bit more philosophy, bit more social science. But let me get to the end of the story because I believe I’m out of time and offer you this. That’s my turn. Um just as a way to like invite you into sort of thinking more about one of these supply chains, right? Um, this link will send you to a European Commission website where you have basically a kind of what I would interpret as like a social media page for each of the materials. Um, in the profile for each of the materials, first of all, why this is useful, I think, because many of us in this room I my I mean, I’ll just talk about myself.

34:01 I don’t know what half of these materials are, where they come from, what they do, and yet they appear to be absolutely central to the reproduction of my subjectivity. So, I’m just like interested in learning what they are and where they come from. But second of all, I want you to think about what kind of information is provided there. Specifically, information about the supply risk and the economic importance. Most, if not all, will have an HHI index. If you scroll down, that index is a measure of its supply risk. If it’s over 2,000, it’s it’s incredibly scarce or difficult for the European Union and its business partners to acquire. If it’s over 2,000, that means that it’s like really the bottleneck is is extreme.

34:42 Either there’s very little of it or China has a monopoly on its supply, right? Or it’s it’s we have proven reserves in places where there’s like civil war, where there’s conflict or non-compliance states. Those are the ones that I think are really interesting to think about why they have such a high HHI index. Um and uh and with more time which we don’t have I would invite you to sort of pair up and think a little bit about what um what geographies specifically what parts of the world and what parts of the countries named in its description of source geography in each of the profiles um are going to be drawn into this larger cgraphy of the twin transition as a way to anticipate some of the conflicts that I think are largely going to go invisible.

35:31 into the story. Conflicts that my sense is in a 100 years we will be talking about in retrospect. We’ll be talking about the history of these supply chains as sources of conflict, sources of racialization, sources of ecological damage. And the the thing I want to say in closing is as a humanity scholar, I’m sick of always being too late. I’m sick of only ever thinking backwards about need about injustices that need to be redressed. I want to start thinking about what kinds of literacies we have now to build those solidarities before they happen. And that’s the point of this project. Thank you.