Understanding the legal regulation of the extraction of natural resources - like oil and gas or critical minerals - is becoming more urgent in the context of climate and geopolitical energy crises. A planned, and necessary, energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources raises questions on whether a break with fossil fuel extraction is possible, and under which circumstances critical minerals are mined. Various geopolitical crises, prompted by inter-imperial rivalries over natural resources, from Ukraine to Venezuela to Iran, have caused higher energy prices and a global fear of (and competition for) energy security. These prompts alone should suffice to draw attention to extraction as a field of study.
For critical lawyers, though, there is even more urgency to attend to an understanding of the laws that extractives mobilise to protect their interests. Critical lawyers, who draw their critical analysis from global social dynamics and history, understand that the extraction of natural resources has under late capitalism often turned into extractivism. Extractivism, deriving from extractivismo, a term employed in the Latin American context of extraction, is a social system of dispossession, exploitation, pollution, and resistance. This social system of capitalist expansion regularly targets peoples - often Indigenous peoples -, and places - often fragile ecological spaces -, deemed not worthy of protecting over capitalism’s accumulation needs.
When it comes to the green transition and the minerals required for electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines, extractivism means pollution and ecological exhaustion of the earth and displacement and appropriation of the peoples in the capitalist periphery for the seeming benefit of those in the capitalist centre. Even in the capitalist centre, rifts are occurring, where laws increasingly benefit only a small elite. It is the urgent task of critical lawyers to identify which laws make these dynamics legal; in other words, it is crucial for a just transition to identify the Laws of Extraction.