For the Wayuu indigenous community in La Guajira, Colombia, the winds are people: ancestral beings with distinct personalities who shape the surrounding environment and must be respected. For the Colombian government, wind is a resource to harness for environmental progress, jobs, and growth.
As renewable energy accelerates worldwide, tensions like this are intensifying. During this year’s New York Climate Week, 350.org and the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) convened indigenous movement leaders, climate activists, and clean energy advocates for a frank conversation about the renewable transition we actually need. Here are my reflections.
The growth paradox
In other rooms during Climate Week, the talk centered on how renewable energy enables economic development. The case is compelling: for every dollar invested, renewable energy creates three times as many jobs as the fossil fuel industry. By cutting energy bills, it boosts families’ disposable income and invigorates small businesses.
That all adds up to growth. Case in point: clean energy contributed a full one-third of the European Union’s GDP growth in 2023. That’s good, right?
But wait: isn’t our addiction to growth what created the climate crisis in the first place?
Global energy demand has grown by more than 70% since 1990 and continues climbing, driven by rising temperatures and the artificial intelligence boom. That’s why, despite rapid solar and wind deployment, the world still burns more coal, oil, and gas each year. Overall energy use keeps rising faster than renewables can replace fossil fuels. It’s one of the climate movement’s biggest challenges.
The equity mismatch
Indigenous Peoples are already paying the price. Most minerals required for batteries and electric vehicles are located on their lands: 85% of global lithium deposits and 66% of copper deposits. Having fought fossil fuel extraction for decades, Indigenous communities now face the same threats from wind farms and mining companies: soil and water degradation, deforestation, destruction of livelihoods, dispossession, and displacement—all without free, prior, and informed consent.
Allegations of violations of human rights and labor laws are high in places where critical mineral reserves are located. Data from: Transition Minerals Tracker – 2025 Global Analysis
There’s no easy answer. Slowing the renewable transition isn’t one. We just passed a devastating climate tipping point with the irreversible decline of coral reefs, which not only support the livelihoods and culture of many indigenous people around the world, but also help the ocean absorb carbon dioxide.
Much more is at risk. Rainforests, another crucial carbon sink protecting us from global heating, could be next. We can still save them. But only if we end fossil fuel use now—before nature stops protecting us and begins tipping us into climate chaos. Ending oil, gas, and coal requires more clean energy everywhere, sooner.
Across the Amazon, oil, gas, and mining concessions overlap with areas of high ecological and social value. Data from: Closing Window of Opportunity: Mapping Threats from Oil, Gas, and Mining to Important Areas for Conservation in the Pantropics
Some participants in our dialogue argued that degrowth is the answer. They are certainly right that not every additional dollar of GDP or every kilowatt-hour of electricity makes the same contribution to human thriving. Affluent Californians use 10 times as much energy a month just to run their swimming pools as the entire annual electricity consumption of the average person in Burundi.
That means many Californians can and should consume less, but it doesn’t mean Burundians – or the other 2 billion people around the world trapped in absolute poverty – should stay where they are now. They need growth; and clean energy, especially locally controlled projects, can raise incomes and create jobs both indirectly and directly:
- In Ecuador, Achuar Indigenous peoples are the engineers, installers and creators of solar-powered river transport that enables them to get forest products to market without building new roads through the Amazon.
- In Ngoma, Rwanda, where more than half the population is below the poverty line, solar water pumps have enabled smallholder farmers to double their yields, raising incomes and boosting food security.
We need a transition that is fast, fair, and finite
Fast because physics isn’t waiting. Fair because people and places are not expendable. Finite because energy and material use must level off, then fall, in wealthy economies to open space for those with too little.
This is hard. It requires open debate and tough compromises – based on objective data rather than industry narratives. Mining companies relentlessly promote the idea of a global crisis in critical minerals availability. But these are the same actors who claimed the world was running out of oil in the 1970s—and again in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s—to push for aggressive licensing and financial concessions.
Likewise, energy projections are often inflated. GDP and energy use are assumed to move in lockstep, so projected growth auto-translates into higher demand. Efficiency assumptions are often outdated or based on under-ambitious targets. In the United States, utilities and grid operators consistently overestimated load growth by double digits between 2005–2015, leading to unnecessary fossil capacity and higher bills.
By focusing solely on GDP, models also fail to distinguish between energy for economic activity that enhances human development and energy for economic activity that concentrates wealth. AI data centers, for example, consume massive amounts of power with few permanent jobs and high profit concentration.
More electricity – even if it’s powered by the sun and the wind – doesn’t always mean better livelihoods. And if we keep pursuing growth for the sake of growth, no number of solar farms, wind turbines, and batteries will be enough.
National and global decisions about what to build or block must ensure that project benefits truly outweigh harms. That requires independent, rigorous, openly available data and modeling. It means enforcing, and resourcing, the free, prior, and informed consent of those most harmed by new energy developments. Indigenous stewardship is climate action, and mustn’t be bypassed.
But we must also find fair ways to balance harms to those most affected by renewable projects against harms to those paying the heaviest price for the current energy system: communities suffering chronic disease and premature deaths due to living in the shadow of coal plants; women and children in the Global South who die in large numbers annually from indoor wood smoke exposure; the one in three U.S. households who have to forego food or medicine to keep their homes warm; entire island nations that are disappearing beneath the rising seas.
Most importantly, we need to democratize energy systems. All citizens need the right and real power to participate in and oversee energy decisions: how much we use, who owns it, who has access, and who is impacted by its production.
Less extraction, more imagination. Less inequity, more inclusion. Let’s not just power the world differently — let’s change who the world is built for, together.