Critical Minerals: rethinking extractivism?

Acceleration in funding and political support for critical minerals industry development is linked to securing resource supply chains essential to low carbon futures. This commentary reviews the Australian critical minerals agenda and scrutinises urgency claims engulfing the ‘rush’ to explore and extract critical minerals. First, we define critical minerals and examine their ‘criticality’ in relation to decarbonisation and geopolitical motivations. The idea that the emergent industry is premised on an ethics of climate action conflicts with evidence that reputational risk and market shifts are driving companies to pivot from traditional mining. Second, we problematise urgency claims fuelling the critical minerals ‘rush’, arguing that crisis narratives and regulatory fast-tracking mask serious ethical, social, and environmental justice concerns, while neglecting material blockages. We separate the idea of producing materials central to low carbon futures from localised social and environmental impacts of their extraction and processing, in order to raise concerns over the absolution work performed by urgency claims. The burgeoning critical minerals industry presents an epochal moment to reconstitute mining differently to meet social and environmental justice goals. Instead, as currently imagined, it threatens to extend a frontier mentality and existing models of extractivism, reproducing colonial-capitalist legacies. We conclude by advocating for counter-urgencies that foreground materiality and view critical minerals and decarbonisation as policy commons, enabling debates on the shape and ethics of the critical minerals industry before it is fully established. Geographers, presently less visible than industry advocates in the critical minerals discourse, are well positioned to contribute to such debates.