COP30 was an exercise in growth, critical thinking, and expanding perspectives on the global implications of climate change, allowing me to look for questions I had never seen before. COP, or the Conference of the Parties, is the United Nations’ annual climate summit where countries gather to negotiate and assess global climate action. It brings together world leaders, scientists, and advocates to look at challenges and shape responses to climate change. As someone whose COP30 journey was also my first experience leaving the United States, I felt a stark, and sometimes uncomfortable, confrontation with our global state around climate mitigation and adaptation, and the problems we still haven’t figured out how to solve.
On the first full day in Belém, our cohort went to a local market, mixed with locals and others there for the climate conference. There, a protest marched through the main building, and I quickly noticed it was all women, singing protest songs and handing out flyers. I made eye contact with an older woman, who smiled at me and handed me a flyer. While it was not in English, I pulled out my phone to translate the message: “Include Indigenous women in our climate solutions.” I took the flyer home with me, feeling even more nervous, yet excited, for our first day at the conference.
Every day, we would wake up early at our home, where we were staying (often I would wake up to the rooster outside my window), drink our coffee, and walk over to the conference. Every day, we had fascinating talks and discussions with people who had perspectives and lived experiences that I had never imagined before I was there. But perhaps my favorite part of the conference was the hours that we all went to different side events that interested us.
I found myself gravitating toward side events discussing the global transition to renewable energy. I heard promising numbers and phrases: $2.2 trillion in the renewable energy industry, 90% of new energy from renewables, and countries pushing for fossil-fuel phase-outs and net-zero industry transitions in sectors notoriously hard to decarbonize, such as steel and cement. Through this, the narrative was pushed that renewables are the solution, that it is necessary, inevitable, and our most assured pathway to 1.5º C. However, throughout the week, the cracks in this narrative began to emerge for me. I told Dr. Eri Saikawa midweek that it felt like my brain was growing three sizes every day, and I found myself thinking of things I never had before. The renewable energy sector was heavily tied to vague global supply chains, profit-driven systems, and had slow progress in hard-to-abate sectors.
This led me to start thinking more critically about the hidden layer of our renewable industry transition. Yes, renewables are a more sustainable option than fossil fuels, but they are not immaterial. The infrastructure requires metals such as lithium and cobalt, metals that are rare and have globally exploitative extraction systems. With around 135 billion tons of materials still extracted from the Earth in the last year, the facade of a renewable, perfectly “clean” transition began to fade. How much greenhouse gas emissions are generated from producing cement, steel, and aluminum used in the infrastructure and manufacturing of wind turbines and utility-scale solar systems? Where would the land be for this large-scale construction, and who does this land belong to?
Throughout the week, I uncovered a core paradox of the renewable energy transition. Even clean energy depends on the dirty extraction of mining, land use change, and industrial expansion. Many activists at COP30 reaffirmed this observation. Talks of how technologies for emission abatement are still relying on resource extraction, with mining practices reinforcing colonial systems of power, struck me and invited me to dive deeper. Renewable energy is a step in the right direction, and it is often said that we should not make the “perfect the enemy of the good.” However, these risks and trade-offs are real things we must consider and strategically plan for. Environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and social displacement from these extraction industries needed to create a mass of new infrastructure can hinder just transitions.
The global inequities present in our transition are stark. Less than one-third of green infrastructure is in the Global South, yet the resource extraction happens there with the benefits flowing elsewhere. Through side events and conversations with Indigenous activists and changemakers, I learned about the continued struggle Indigenous communities face worldwide with inclusion in major decision-making around how and where we will get the materials needed for energy expansion. From one event, I wrote down the quote: “If we’re not on the table, we’re on the menu.” This extractivism needed for energy infrastructure has historical ties to violence, land loss, and ongoing colonial patterns. Through this emerges an alternative: just transitions. With just transitions, we can prioritize not only switching energy sources, but changing systems of power, ensuring the fair distribution of costs and benefits and listening to community-led solutions so that we can begin to break the cycle of environmental exploitation.
During the discussions I witnessed at COP, this dilemma of an ethical infrastructure transition had several key priorities. Responsible sourcing, labor protections, and environmental safeguards can help curb unregulated mining and environmental degradation. Prioritizing actions such as recycling materials like batteries and metals, and designing our systems to reduce extraction, can point us towards a more circular economy and allow our systems to be more sustainable. Centering local and Indigenous knowledge and leadership allow us to learn new perspectives that can bring crucial insights into how this transition can work. Redefining our success around the justice and long-term resilience of the green transition, rather than its speed alone, is crucial.
