Efforts to transition the energy system centre on the rapid expansion of renewable and other non-fossil fuel energy capacity, purportedly, at the expense of the existing dominance of fossil fuels.1 The current mainstream energy and environmental policy approach, as seen in the language and practices of government, industry and civil society, largely holds that such a change, alongside the sequestration of carbon-di-oxide, is necessary to mitigate worsening climate change and its multifaceted impacts. This paper focuses on one dimension of this transition, i.e. the value chain of critical minerals required for building the new energy infrastructure. Elements of this new infrastructure includes photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries for storage and for electric vehicles (EVs), electrolysers to produce green hydrogen, and the vast quantities of wires and components for the networks and control systems needed to integrate it all into a functional infrastructure for the modern world that can out compete the fossil-fuel energy system on technical and financial terms.

This paper asks whether this dimension of the energy transition manifest in the emerging critical mineral production-consumption system (or critical mineral value chains), is oriented toward sustainability as justice. We understand sustainability here as justice in the realization of human well-being outcomes on a shared and finite planet, i.e. within social-ecological limits. This question can also be asked as whether the emerging critical mineral production-consumption system is proceeding to reproduce the dynamics of “extractivism”2 that characterizes imperialism, dominated the era of colonialism and shaped the fossil-fuels driven industrialization that followed in its aftermath.