The Hoover Chair Seminar Research by Jamie DRAPER (Utrecht University; Hoover Chair Visiting Fellow)

Decarbonisation is creating significant demand for so-called ‘critical minerals’ such as lithium, cobalt, and copper. These resources are highly valuable in the context of the climate transition, but their extraction also creates significant ecological and social costs and involves exploitative economic arrangements. This appears to create a climate–extractivism dilemma: on the one hand, aggressive climate mitigation appears to come at the cost of imposing significant harms from extractivism; on the other hand, avoiding the harms of extractivism appears to hold back the project of climate mitigation. In this paper, I examine three possible responses to this apparent dilemma from a broadly egalitarian point of view: reducing, onshoring, and reforming extraction. I argue that an egalitarian justice requires a judicious combination of all three, but that reforming is generally preferable to onshoring and reducing extraction, at least where it is feasible and does not conflict with the morally legitimate claims of local communities. But the precise combination of measures that egalitarians should endorse will depend on a set of assumptions about political feasibility and on the claims made by communities on the extractive frontier.