Climate & Environment — DARKSIDE.EARTH

War’s Carbon Afterlife

War is not only a security and humanitarian shock. It is a climate regime. The bombs emit in the moment they fall, but the larger carbon bill often sits in the ruins, the rebuilding, the rerouted shipping, and the fossil rollback that follows. That is what the first weeks of the Iran war now make harder to ignore.

Clean at the Centre, Extractive at the Edge

The green transition is usually presented as cleaner, smarter, and more responsible than the fossil economy. But green industry also has to be built somewhere: with water from somebody’s watershed, electricity from somebody’s grid, minerals from somebody’s landscape, and labour from somebody’s body. That also means its costs are always located before its benefits are generalized. Climate promises only become real when they collide with land loss, resource conflict, and the question of who is made to carry the burden.

What Are Critical Minerals — and Why Do They Matter So Much Now?

The energy transition is often described as a path out of dependence. But electrified economies do not escape material dependence; they rebuild it around minerals, processing systems, and industrial bottlenecks controlled by relatively few actors. Critical minerals matter not simply because they are important raw materials, but because control over them is becoming a condition for industrial power in the post-fossil economy, and for deciding who gets to shape it.