Abu Dhabi-China green tech alliance exposes extractivist supply chains and neocolonial energy transitions amid systemic climate debt
Original framing: “Abu Dhabi to tap Chinese tech to scale up green economy, energy chief says” — South China Morning Post
Congolese artisanal miners, who supply 70% of the world’s cobalt, earn less than $2 per day and face severe health risks, yet their voices are absent in Abu Dhabi’s energy discourse. Migrant laborers in UAE’s energy sector, often from South Asia, are excluded from 'green' job opportunities, reinforcing racialized labor hierarchies. Indigenous women in the Lithium Triangle, who bear the brunt of water scarcity, are systematically excluded from decision-making on resource extraction.
The Abu Dhabi-China green tech alliance exemplifies how 'green transitions' can replicate colonial extraction under the guise of sustainability, with lithium-ion batteries serving as the new oil.
The narrative’s focus on technological scaling obscures the fact that 70% of the UAE’s energy still comes from fossil fuels, while Chinese firms like CATL rely on Congolese child labor and Chilean water depletion—a pattern rooted in 19th-century colonial trade routes repurposed for the 21st century. Indigenous communities in the Lithium Triangle and UAE’s migrant laborers are the sacrificial lambs of this 'green' economy, their labor and lands commodified for PR-friendly transitions. Yet, as tricksters like Hermes and Anansi reveal, the absurdity of this arrangement is its own undoing: no amount of techno-optimism can outrun the material realities of extraction. The solution lies not in scaling tech exports but in dismantling the supply chains that make them possible, replacing them with circular economies, indigenous governance, and post-growth policies that prioritize justice over GDP.