The so-called green energy transition isn’t about saving the planet—it’s about preserving imperial domination. Behind the eco-friendly slogans lies the same colonial system: extract, export, exploit. The future demands not more copper—but revolutionary rupture and eco-socialist civilization.
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information
May 28, 2025
Part I – Copper-Colored Lies: How Green Propaganda Hides Red Extraction
The article we are excavating, titled “Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world”, was published by Earth.com on May 28, 2025. Written by Eric Ralls, the piece summarizes a study forecasting that over 3 billion metric tons of copper will be needed to electrify the world by 2050. Framed as a technical and ecological dilemma, the article laments the limitations of global copper supply in meeting both green energy goals and Global South infrastructure development. But beneath the scientific language and planetary concern lies a much older narrative: a justification for deepening imperialist extraction under the banner of climate progress.
Eric Ralls is not a journalist in any revolutionary sense of the word. He is a green capitalist entrepreneur and digital content magnate, emerging from a family legacy rooted in oil and real estate in East Texas. From RedOrbit to PlantSnap to EarthSnap, Ralls has built a career translating nature into data, and data into revenue—transforming environmental concern into branded tech applications for the algorithmic bourgeoisie. His outlet, Earth.com, markets itself as an eco-conscious media platform but functions in material terms as a greenwashing node of the imperialist media apparatus—a sanitized relay station for technocratic ideology, stripped of class analysis, historical context, or anti-colonial substance. Ralls’ life work is not ecological preservation—it is monetized mediation. He doesn’t confront empire—he digitizes its distractions.
Helping circulate and legitimize this narrative are research institutions like the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and the University of Queensland—academic arms of Western technocracy that help blueprint the material logistics of green imperialism. Meanwhile, corporate beneficiaries like Tesla, Apple, Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, and Google stand ready to convert that copper into batteries, data centers, and artificial intelligence empires—all wired to the cloud, all grounded in colonial soil.
The article’s framing is precise in its evasions. It presents the copper crisis as a technocratic bottleneck rather than what it is: the ecological reckoning of a global system founded on racialized theft and uneven development. It centers the problem of how to “electrify everything” while barely acknowledging the global structure of overconsumption and systemic underdevelopment that produced the crisis in the first place. It poses a false binary between decarbonizing the North and developing the South, without interrogating the violent history that left the South underdeveloped to begin with.
In classic technocrat fashion, the author highlights copper statistics and production gaps without contextualizing them within five centuries of imperial conquest, neocolonial plunder, and structural adjustment. There is no mention of labor exploitation, land dispossession, or the violently imposed role of African nations as perpetual suppliers of raw material. There is no mention of how the West’s “clean energy” agenda is fueled by the same extractive logic that powered its coal furnaces and colonial railroads. And there is certainly no acknowledgment that the so-called “green transition” is being designed to replicate—not resolve—the very system driving ecological collapse.
Ralls even attempts a moral balancing act by quoting the study’s lead author, who suggests that expanding healthcare in Africa should take precedence over adding electric vehicles to American roads. But this moral equivalence rings hollow when placed in a context stripped of imperial critique. There is no such thing as neutral scarcity in a world structured by accumulation. If Africa cannot electrify its hospitals, it is not because copper is scarce—it is because capitalism is organized around profit, not need. And the imperialist core has never built anything it wasn’t also willing to loot.
What we are seeing here is not journalism—it is ideological repackaging. This article functions as a soft-power artifact of green imperialism, laundering a new phase of planetary extraction through scientific language and ambient concern. It uses numbers to obscure power, development rhetoric to conceal dispossession, and climate urgency to justify recolonization. In doing so, it reinforces a world order where the South sacrifices its soil for the North’s servers—and calls it sustainability.
Part II – 3 Billion Tons of Proof: Uneven Development and the Crisis of Imperial Civilization
Let’s strip the copper down to its bare wires. The article gives us data, but not context. It tells us the world will need over 3 billion metric tons of copper to “electrify everything” by 2050. It tells us Africa would need 1 billion metric tons just to build the infrastructure the West already takes for granted—electricity, plumbing, healthcare. It tells us recycling won’t even make a dent, that new megamines must be carved out of the Earth, and that copper would have to double in price to even attract the capital to dig. All true. But what it doesn’t tell us is why the world is in this position to begin with.
Because copper isn’t the crisis. Capitalism is.
The copper “shortage” is the material symptom of a world economy forged in slavery, colonialism, and imperial war. For five centuries, the Global North has extracted wealth from the Global South—not just copper, but value: land, labor, lives, future. The present imbalance isn’t a developmental oversight—it’s a geopolitical design. Western civilization industrialized on stolen minerals and enslaved bodies. It built skyscrapers while the villages it looted drowned in sewage and debt. And now, having exhausted its own soil and poisoned its own skies, the imperial core promises salvation by demanding even more from the same people it left to rot.
The article mentions that the average U.S. citizen is embedded in over 400 pounds of copper. In India, it’s closer to 40 pounds. In many parts of Africa, it’s less than that. But instead of interrogating how this came to be, the study frames it as a logistical challenge—how to raise the per capita copper of the South while maintaining the obscene overconsumption of the North. It’s like asking how to share the pie without mentioning who stole it, baked it, or who still owns the oven.
This is where the numbers become weapons. The projected need for 3 billion tons is not a neutral forecast—it’s a blueprint for continued imperial dominance. The article positions electrification as a shared global project, but in material terms, it is the North’s digital infrastructure—AI servers, Tesla gigafactories, smart cities, crypto farms—that sets the demand curve. The “green transition” is driven by imperial logistics, not ecological necessity. And when Africa’s 1 billion-ton copper need is mentioned, it is framed as a secondary problem, not the central injustice of the entire system.
And yet there is another path—buried, but still visible. Some states have begun to resist the role assigned to them in this imperial script. Cuba has developed eco-socialist models of self-reliant medicine and agroecology under blockade. Bolivia nationalized its lithium. Zimbabwe banned the export of raw minerals. And most significantly, China, though navigating a hostile global order, has forged a socialist path with market features—lifting hundreds of millions from poverty, building state-led renewable infrastructure, and offering the world a multipolar alternative to the extractive model imposed by the West.
China’s role cannot be collapsed into the same framework as Western imperialism. Unlike the U.S. or Europe, China does not impose structural adjustment or back military coups for copper contracts. Its presence in the Global South, while complex, has enabled states to negotiate, not capitulate. It is not outside the contradictions of the global system, but it is not the architect of its violence. Rather, it represents a living contradiction: a state navigating capitalist terrain while attempting to construct socialist sovereignty. Its very existence expands the political imagination beyond the copper-powered empire.
So no, the copper doesn’t just speak to scarcity—it speaks to strategy. It reveals the fault lines of a global order in decay. It proves that the capitalist model of development, grounded in colonial contradiction, has reached its ecological and moral end. And it invites us—not to double down on extraction—but to rupture the system entirely.
Part III – Digging Deeper: From Green Extraction to Eco-Socialist Civilization
If you read this story the way the empire wants you to read it, it sounds like a call to action. Electrify everything. Build the grids. Save the world. But behind that slogan is the same old order—one that has spent 500 years dressing theft as development and calling it civilization. The real story isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about saving a dying system—capitalist-imperialism—by giving it a new green costume and the same blood-soaked boots.
The copper crisis doesn’t demand more mines. It demands an entirely different model of human life. One that starts by acknowledging what this system has done. That the so-called “developed” world developed only by underdeveloping everyone else. That its modernity is built on Indigenous graves, African minerals, and plantations disguised as supply chains. That even its clean energy is stained red.
To reframe this moment is to refuse its logic. We do not accept the idea that decarbonization requires recolonization. We do not believe that the Global South must once again bleed so the Global North can electrify its luxuries. And we reject the lie that resource extraction is “inevitable.” What is inevitable is collapse—unless we rupture the very system that brought us here.
That rupture must be revolutionary. Not just in name, but in form, function, and foundation. It must destroy the architecture of hyper-imperialism: the mining conglomerates, the debt regimes, the digital monopolies, and the trade agreements that lock nations into roles as sacrificial zones. It must center anti-imperialist sovereignty, resource dignity, and planetary justice. And it must elevate those already building the future—farmers practicing agroecology in Zimbabwe, Indigenous defenders in the Amazon, workers organizing in Congolese cobalt mines, and scientists in Cuba designing sustainability without imperial subsidy.
This rupture also demands that we think beyond reformist fantasies. The West cannot be reformed into a green partner—it must be defeated as an imperial force. Its economic and technological dominance was not earned. It was looted, enforced, and is now maintained by necro-extractivism and digital colonialism. No amount of recycled rhetoric can hide the fact that its version of climate “leadership” is structurally genocidal.
Amidst all this, China stands not as a perfect state, but as a living contradiction—one that offers the world a historical opening. Through state-led planning, mass poverty eradication, and South-South cooperation, it has demonstrated a path that breaks with neoliberal dogma. China’s Belt and Road is not a charity—it is a battlefield. Its ecological ambitions are not propaganda—they are strategy. And its existence proves that a world beyond Western domination is not only possible—it’s already being built, unevenly, and under siege.
So let us be clear. The choice before us is not “green capitalism” or collapse. That is a false choice crafted by the same class that created the crisis. The real choice is eco-socialist civilization or extinction. The former requires decolonization, reparations, and revolutionary transformation. The latter is what we are already living under.
The future will not be wired with copper stolen from the South. It will be forged through struggle—by the colonized, the exploited, the defiant. It will be measured not in metric tons, but in liberated territory, reclaimed sovereignty, and revolutionary rupture. And no empire, no summit, no scientific study can stop what history demands next.
Part IV – Mobilization: From Copper Chains to Revolutionary Earth
We are not just exposing a contradiction—we are living in it. The copper beneath our feet connects not only wires, servers, and engines, but also histories of struggle and futures still under construction. The time for analysis is never separate from the time for action. If imperialism digs, we must build. If capitalism electrifies its death machine, we must short-circuit it with the currents of revolt. The global South has paid for the empire’s wealth in minerals, sweat, and blood. We say: no more.
We declare ideological unity with all workers, peasants, and nations resisting the copper claw of green imperialism. From the hills of the Congo where miners strike against Glencore, to the streets of Santiago where Chileans demand the return of their national wealth, to the policy chambers of Bolivia and Zimbabwe where leaders assert the right to control what lies beneath their soil—these are not isolated movements. They are fault lines cracking the foundation of empire.
This is not about asking the system to be nicer. This is about ending it. It is about dismantling the infrastructure of hyper-imperialism that sells climate catastrophe as opportunity and trades minerals for blood. It means breaking with the IMF, shutting down the greenwashing NGOs, defunding the climate colonial think tanks, and confronting the tech monopolies that make war look like progress. It means elevating the struggle for anti-imperialist sovereignty as the ecological frontline.
Support the call for a global alliance of resource-sovereign states—an OPEC for copper, lithium, cobalt, and rare earths—organized around shared resistance, not market logic. Demand reparations—not in symbolic language or carbon offsets, but in infrastructure, technology, and the unconditional return of what was stolen. Build campaigns to expose companies like Tesla, Apple, Glencore, Rio Tinto, and Google as engines of neocolonial destruction. Boycott their “green” products. Name their crimes. Build people’s tribunals.
Within the imperial core, defect from comfort. Organize base-building work among workers, renters, students, and gig laborers. Expose the role of your own governments and corporations in ecological violence. Uplift revolutionary internationalism over lifestyle environmentalism. Understand that solidarity with the South begins by dismantling the North’s empire from within.
In the Global South, deepen coordination among BRICS+ states, regional trade blocs, and revolutionary parties. Delink from Western finance. Invest in sovereign digital infrastructure. Share ecological science outside the patent system. Build infrastructure not for export logistics but for human need. Protect and elevate Indigenous ecological knowledge as revolutionary technology.
And across all fronts—media, education, art, agriculture, labor, and governance—advance the construction of an eco-socialist civilization. A civilization that respects the Earth not as a resource but as a relation. A civilization where the mines are shut, the waters are clean, and the land is returned. A civilization rooted not in growth, but in liberation. Not in profit, but in life.
History is moving. The question is: with whom are you moving? With the empire as it electrifies its collapse? Or with the people, as they rise from the mines to build a world without masters, borders, or burn pits? The next megaproject is not a battery. It is a revolution.
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