The global transition to clean energy is just a shell game that moves pollution from one country to another.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
Energy Transition, or Anthropic Transfer?
SSRN · 6615305
The Takeaway
Green energy does not eliminate environmental disorder but merely displaces it into the Global South and into future technological debt. We treat the shift away from fossil fuels as a total solution to the climate crisis. In reality, the production of batteries and solar panels creates massive social and ecological costs in the regions that mine the materials. This anthropic transfer means that the clean air in wealthy nations is bought with dirty consequences elsewhere. True sustainability remains a physical impossibility under our current model of growth.
From the abstract
Existing critiques of the energy transition-extractivism, rebound effects, technological debt-are typically treated as separate problems, leaving unanswered how they connect as components of a single mechanism of disorder displacement. This paper applies the concept of anthropy-the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it-to the dominant model of energy transition. Drawing on IEA critical minerals data (IEA, 2023), IPCC consumption-based accounting frameworks (IPCC