The Moral Economy of Resource Extraction and the Future of Industrialization

Helen Thompson

Professor of Political Economy, Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University

April 9, 2025 — 4:10 pm
Alumni House, Toll Room — UC Berkeley Campus

Add to Google Calendar 04/09/2025 4:10 pm 04/09/2025 6:00 PM America/Los_Angeles The Moral Economy of Resource Extraction and the Future of Industrialization

About this lecture The mis-named energy transition is an attempt to revolutionize the material basis of the industrial civilization established by the turn to the fossil fuels. It entails moving from the subterranean and maritime extraction of energy itself to … Continued

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About this lecture

The mis-named energy transition is an attempt to revolutionize the material basis of the industrial civilization established by the turn to the fossil fuels. It entails moving from the subterranean and maritime extraction of energy itself to the large-scale extraction of metals for energy purposes. The extraction of metals has always been a fundamental ecological and geopolitical problem for urban civilizations and was forcefully articulated by various Roman writers. The first world economy that emerged in the sixteenth century tied the Spanish empire’s resource extraction in South America to a world monetary system, the fall of which was part of the decline of imperial China. Fossil fuel energy dramatically raised the ecological stakes through carbon emissions, and, with the use of hydrocarbons, created a permanent exploration of the world even to maintain living standards that was largely imperial in form. The geopolitics of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries from the world wars to US-China relations to the Iraq war is inseparable from oil. China’s present dominance of metal mining and, in particular, metal processing led directly to the deterioration in US-China relations in the 2010s, and the reintroduction of rare earth mining in the United States. Since there can be no escape from the dangers of resource extraction, finding ways  at least to ameliorate zero-sum international competition and the ecological consequences, which did not happen over hydrocarbons, is a moral necessity for our times and entails recognizing the limits to the idea of Progress bequeathed by fossil fuels. 

 

About Helen Thompson

Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University.  Her scholarly articles have appeared, among other places, in Review of International Political Economy, the European Journal of International Relations, New Political Economy, Government and Opposition, Research in Political Sociology, and  the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Her last book Disorder: Hard Times in the Twenty-First Century was published by Oxford University Press in 2022 and with new material in a paperback edition in 2023. It has been, or is being, translated, into a number of European and Asian languages. Disorder was shortlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year. 

The geopolitics and political economy of energy from a historical perspective is the center of Professor Thompson’s current research and is foundational to the argument in Disorder. Since Disorder’s publication, Professor Thompson has presented this work to a a number of European governments. She has been a prolific writer in the public sphere with articles appearing, among other places in the Financial Times, New York Times, Nature, Foreign Affairs, Sunday Times, Guardian, Project Syndicate, London Review of Books and Nikkei. She is the co-host of the politics podcast These Times.

 

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