The green transition was meant to be the great moral project of this generation. Instead, it is quietly hardening into a new arena of power politics, where lithium replaces oil, cobalt supplants coal, and the old hierarchies of extraction threaten to be reborn in cleaner colours. Beneath the language of decarbonisation lies an uncomfortable truth: the minerals powering net zero are reviving the geopolitics of inequality.
Demand for critical minerals is exploding. The International Energy Agency estimates that under a net-zero pathway, demand for lithium will rise by more than 400 per cent by 2040, cobalt by 200 per cent, and nickel by nearly 100 per cent. An electric vehicle requires roughly six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, while an offshore wind plant needs almost six times more minerals than a gas-fired equivalent. These are not marginal shifts. They are tectonic.
Yet supply is dangerously concentrated. China controls around 60 per cent of rare earth production and close to 90 per cent of global processing capacity. The United States remains fully import-dependent for at least a dozen critical minerals and more than 50 per cent dependent for nearly 30 others. When Beijing briefly restricted exports of gallium and germanium in 2024, analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations warned of potential multi-billion-dollar shocks to advanced manufacturing supply chains. Minerals, once the domain of geology, have become instruments of statecraft.
Australia sits uncomfortably at the centre of this moment. The country produces nearly half of the world’s lithium and holds vast reserves of nickel, cobalt, manganese and rare earths. Canberra’s Critical Minerals Strategy openly frames these resources as both an economic opportunity and a strategic asset, promising to “move up the value chain” and build sovereign capability. New bilateral frameworks with the United States, Japan, India and the European Union position Australia as a trusted supplier in an increasingly fragmented world.
But supply security is only one side of the ledger. The deeper challenge is moral. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned, the minerals driving the clean-energy revolution are “often found in countries that have long been exploited… communities mistreated, rights trampled, nations stuck at the bottom of value chains”. Without reform, the green transition risks entrenching precisely the injustices it claims to remedy.
This is not a theoretical concern. From cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to lithium brine fields in the Andean highlands, extraction has too often followed a familiar pattern: environmental damage, weak governance, limited local value-addition and minimal community benefit. Think tanks such as the Natural Resource Governance Institute caution that many mineral-rich states remain locked into “port-to-pit” models, exporting raw materials while downstream processing and profits accrue elsewhere.
The language emerging from critical scholarship is stark. “Green colonialism.” “Decarbonisation by dispossession.” Analysts from Chatham House and the UN University argue that without new rules, the clean-energy transition will reproduce colonial logics under a climate banner. Land is deemed “empty”, labour is rendered invisible, and sovereignty is reduced to a signature at the bottom of a contract.
International law once tried to address this imbalance. The UN General Assembly’s 1962 declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources affirmed that nations have the right to control their own wealth for the benefit of their people. It underpinned post-colonial development strategies and resource nationalism across Africa, Asia and Latin America. But sovereignty alone has proved insufficient. In a hyper-globalised economy, isolated control does not guarantee justice, resilience or sustainability.
What is emerging instead is a crisis of trust. The producer states fear of exploitation and value leakage. Consumer states fear supply shocks and strategic coercion. Communities fear dispossession. Markets fear volatility. The result is a scramble: stockpiling, export bans, subsidy races and geopolitical bloc-building. Minerals are becoming the new fault line of the international system.
Australia cannot pretend to be a bystander. As both a resource superpower and a liberal democracy with a colonial past, the country embodies the contradictions of this transition. Domestically, the destruction of Juukan Gorge remains a reminder that economic logic alone cannot govern extraction. Internationally, Australia’s partnerships will be judged not just on reliability, but on fairness.
There are alternatives. UN University researchers have proposed the creation of a Global Minerals Trust — a cooperative framework to manage critical minerals as shared strategic assets, stabilise markets, enforce transparency and ensure equitable benefit-sharing. Others have called for mineral governance to be embedded directly into climate architecture, with binding standards on labour rights, Indigenous consent and environmental protection.
The G7 has begun to gesture in this direction, endorsing principles for “standards-based” critical mineral markets. Canada has linked its critical minerals funding to Indigenous participation. At COP30, resource governance is expected to feature prominently in just-transition negotiations. These are early steps, but they signal a philosophical shift: minerals are no longer merely commodities. They are the foundation of the global climate response.
For Australia, this moment demands diplomatic imagination. Mineral diplomacy cannot be reduced to securing offtake agreements and de-risking supply chains. It must grapple with distribution, consent and long-term stewardship. A foreign policy that champions a “fair go” at home cannot ignore fairness abroad.
The choice is stark. Critical minerals can become the new oil — hoarded, weaponised and extracted at immense human cost. Or they can become the basis of a cooperative transition, where sovereignty is respected, communities benefit, and the climate imperative does not override justice. The second path is harder. It requires new institutions, binding norms and a willingness to share power as well as profit.
But the cost of failure is higher. A green transition built on injustice will fracture the very international cooperation it depends on. Trust, once lost, is expensive to rebuild. In a world racing towards net zero, the minerals beneath the ground may determine not only who powers the future, but whose values shape it.
