Energy transition materials, climate knowledge, and the imagined supply chain: Escaping the productive paradox of necessary mining

Much scholarship, public discourse, and policymaking on ‘energy transition materials’ (ETMs) imagines a supply chain from material production to climate mitigation, despite the absence of any mechanism ensuring that mined materials will become an electrification technology, let alone replace fossil fuels or avoid warming impacts. Scholarship about energy transition material (ETM) discourse, including criticism, largely neglects this material-discursive contradiction and truncates final analyses to paradoxes productive toward extractive futures. Leveraging a review of 99 peer-reviewed articles published between 2013-2025, this article brings mining scholarship into conversation with climate knowledge politics. It charts the dematerialization of climate knowledge from warming impacts to values negotiated along three spectra (urgency, scale, and sacrifice) and rematerialization reflected in extractive rationales (developmental, Indigenous rights, nature, and futures). Most ETM discourse is enclosed in three narrative boundaries, which lean on the imagined supply chain and foreclose non-extractive possibilities: (1) The contingencies that link climate policy and mining, such as materials science, technological manufacturing and use, are taken for granted; (2) Scalar formulations separate and compare anthropogenic climate change and mining impacts; and (3) ETMs wield climate knowledge itself as a supply chain, dialectically illustrating a problem to its own solution. Pathways to overcome the boundaries can center the materiality of mining and climate change over the abstractions of supply chains and imagined climate benefits, critically reflect on the relationships between material production and technopolitical knowledge, and take seriously actually occurring alternative livelihoods.