Fuel For Thought Session 20 Recap
By Amal Pouzoulet
At the final session of the Fuel For Thought 2024–2025 series, Fuel Poverty Action collaborated with our close allies, London Mining Network (LMN) to co-create a discussion concerned with the material realities of the movement towards renewable energy.
At this session we were joined by Jake Simms, LMN’s Just Transition Coordinator, Diana Salazar, LMN’s Latin American Coordinator, and Councillor Andrew Long for Mebyon Kernow sitting on Callington Town Council.
“It’s a lie that we need vast increases in mineral demand for a system based on renewable energy”
Jake Simms – Just Transition Coordinator, London Mining Network
We first heard from Jake, speaking on the UK’s electric vehicle manufacturing sector and highlighting alternatives to the false binary of needing hugely harmful increases in mining or staying stuck with fossil fuels. Jake highlighted that unequal mineral demand, energy-use, and goods-production is being driven by vested business interests and the world’s wealthiest at the expense of the working class and global south.
“There is no corporate extraction that is sustainable”
Diana Salazar — Latin American Coordinator at London Mining Network.
Following on from Jake’s presentation, Diana launched into discussing the effect of mining and the transition on mine-affected communities drawing on different examples from across South America. Including deep and irreversible impacts on communities’ culture, economy, and environment, that link to planetary-scale environmental destruction and climate change.
“Cornwall has a rich history of mining, but the profit has never stayed in Cornwall”
Cllr Andrew Long — Cornwall Councillor for ‘Callington and St Dominic’
Last but not least, Andrew joined us to talk about the conflicts emerging from the prospect of two mines opening in Cornwall. On the one hand, raising hopes to address a desperate need for jobs and to lift people out of poverty, while raising concerns about environmental degradation and perpetuating a history of capital and resource theft.
Watch the recording here:
Resources:
- Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, Thea Riofrancos | YouTube
- The corporate electric vehicle transition: driving injustices for communities globally – London Mining Network
- People of El Melon VS Anglo American’s Legal Machinery – London Mining Network
- Cut and Run (2020) – London Mining Network
- Martial Mining (2020) – London Mining Network
- Not just transition? Coal and a Colombian miners union – Global Justice Now
- Exploring supply and demand solutions for renewable energy minerals
- What is energy for? Social practice and energy demand Elizabeth Shove and Gordon Walker DEMAND Centre, FASS Building, Lancaster
