The Green Transition: Balancing Carbon Emissions and Other Environmental Harms

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-255-2_13How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Green Transition; Mining; Carbon Emissions; Energy Usage; Material World

Abstract

The transition away from fossil fuels as the predominant source of energy in the world is arguably the 4th great energy transition in human history. It is necessitated by rising global temperatures and changing climactic patterns caused by the emission of Greenhouse Gases, with carbon dioxide being the most prominent. However, the global focus, represented by research and technological funding as well as policy man-hours dedicated to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions tends to obscure and hide the myriad other environmental harms that will be necessary to implement the Green Transition. In particular, this obscurity is facilitated by the complexity and opacity of supply chains and the reducing role of the ‘Material World’ in the economic growth figures of the developed West-phenomena downstream of neoliberalism. This paper will shed light on these comparatively obscured environmental harms which tend to miss the most ‘urgent’ headlines but may ultimately impact humanity much more than carbon emissions themselves. Such harms are causally linked to the Green Transition because moving away from energy-dense fossil fuels will require much more mining of critical materials such as Lithium, Cobalt, Copper and Sand. We will investigate the link between environmental harm to marginalised populations of the Global South having lesser salience to Western policy-formulating audiences, and the role of neoliberalism in hiding away vast swathes of this non-carbon emission environmental harm. The broad policy options available to lawmakers to balance out Climate Change (predominantly carbon emissions) with other environmental harms will be considered and assessed.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Akshat Gautam
AU  - Konark Pratap Gupta
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/06/13
TI  - The Green Transition: Balancing Carbon Emissions and Other Environmental Harms
BT  - Proceedings of the NDIEAS-2024 International Symposium on New Dimensions and Ideas in Environmental Anthropology-2024 (NDIEAS 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 145
EP  - 159
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-255-2_13
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-255-2_13
ID  - Gautam2024
ER  -