The BREAK—DOWN

ADRIENNE BULLER and PARIS MARX break down the AI and data centre boom, from the thirst for land, energy and water to the fantasies of Silicon Valley scions. From the material weight of the "cloud" to the communities resisting big tech's intrusion into their lives, they ask how the future of the planet is bound up with the digital world. PARIS MARX is a Canadian tech critic and host of the acclaime...

The supply and control of "critical mineral" supply chains is now a defining political issue, as the pace of the energy transition collides with rising militarism, geopolitical fragmentation and the AI boom, all of which are driving demand for extraction. In the process, contradictions have emerged, particularly as the pursuit of clean energy alternatives places pressures on both communi...

It is by now all but impossible to have a meaningful conversation about climate politics without including China. At the same time, misunderstandings and the astonishing pace of development with respect to China's role on the world stage mean that these conversations can easily collapse into a simplistic binary: China as the world's green energy saviour, or as its oppressive coal-burning bogeyman....

"The Left is in a serious crisis of ideas." Those are the simple and fairly damning words with which our guest, Joel Wainwright, opened his interview with our Editor Adrienne Buller. In a wide-ranging conversation, Adrienne and Joel discuss his extensive work trying to make sense of the specific relationship between capitalism and the climate crisis—drawing this connection not in some ge...

In April this year, the Colombian city of Santa Marta hosted the first Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. The conference was a landmark gathering which sought to shift the terms of the international climate debate away from technocratic squabbling to the far more pointed question of “How can we end fossil fuel use?”. Much of the impetus for that conference was led by then-Colombia...

In Canada, intensive resource extraction has long been baked into the country’s political economy and, arguably, to nation-building itself. Resource booms and policy choices have opened landscapes and livelihoods to large-scale mining and fossil fuel extraction, producing harms that are inseparable from the country’s colonial history. Today, as supply chains are restructured around critical minera...

The ratification of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994 transformed Mexico in profound ways. Over the next thirty years it deepened and expanded the resource frontier across the country, disproportionately benefiting national and global elites. Mining activity exploded, and with it the socio‑ecological violence that follows large‑scale extraction. Anti‑extractivist struggles ca...

The term “critical minerals" suddenly seems to be all over the headlines. Securing access to this group of commodities, from familiar metals like lithium and copper to more obscure “rare earth elements” like yttrium, appears to be a growing priority of world leaders—particularly for those who consider China, currently the world's main producer of most critical minerals, a threat. But what exactly...

Welcome to Continential Shift, a series from The Break—Down and Geopolitical Ecology, where we examine the global rush for critical minerals and the struggle for resource dominance on the North American continent. The phrase "trade regimes" may sound dry, but these rules and agreements are a defining architecture of the global economy. They determine who gets to exploit a country’s resources, and...

On Friday 26 June, The BREAK—DOWN, Transition Security Project, and King’s College London co-hosted a public panel called “Securing The Future? War and Peace in a Warming World” as part of the Climate Security Forum during London Climate Action Week. In a panel featuring Samar Al-Bulushi (UC Irvine and Quincy Institute), Adam Hanieh (Director of SOAS Middle East Institute and author of  Crude Capi...

Last night, after more than 100 days since the US and Israel went to war against Iran, the US and Iran reached a partial framework for peace. When the war began at the end of February, it was all but impossible to make sense of the irrational explosion of violence. In the months since, that sense of irrationality has hardly ebbed, not least as the economic impacts of the war and resulting closures...

We're celebrating the launch of The BREAK—DOWN's spring issue, Airborne! On May 6th, we hosted a live podcast where Adrienne Buller was joined by  Geoff Mann ,  Daniela Gabor  and  Oliver Eagleton  to discuss climate crisis through and beyond the contents of AIRBORNE. ISSUE #3: Airborne The engines of industrial production that power the modern economy release vast quantities of carbon and...

You may never have heard of private equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, Bain Capital or the Carlyle Group, but in recent decades they have quietly become some of the most powerful companies in the world. They own your hospitals, your nurseries, your energy systems. Their reach stretches from formerly public utilities to the home you rent and the food you eat. In their rise to power, they have resha...

In the mid-20th century, nuclear energy was seen as the technology of the future. Then, questions about its environmental impact and waste, alongside crises like  Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, created a major public backlash, and the construction of new nuclear in places like the US stalled altogether. But as the climate crisis pushes demand for non-fossil fuel energy, nuclear is once again bei...

We’ve all heard it before: any time a politician tries to put forward a policy that might finally improve people’s lives—think Mamdani's fast free buses, affordable homes, or renewable energy infrastructure—they’re met with the same line: we can’t afford it. Media pundits and technocrats alike obsess over the national debt, balancing the books and not “spooking” the ever mysterious bond vigila...

The history of the climate crisis is often told as a story about technology.  Growing out of the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution, and accelerating along with new forms of production and consumption in the mid-twentieth century, we often hear that is technological development and innovation that got us into the mess we’re in. But it can also, apparently, get us out of it: what’s nee...

Capitalism is often defended on the basis of freedom — “free markets”, free choice, as well as being credited with producing the wealth and material abundance that has freed countless people from poverty. Marx, meanwhile, described workers under capitalism as “free in the double sense” : “free” to sell their labour power in the market, and “free” or divorced from the means of production: the land,...

We hear a lot about “sustainable development”—it’s the buzzword of virtually every UN convening—but often with little clarity on what it means in practice.  Countries like the US, Canada or the UK hardly developed “sustainably”, so to demand that others organise their economies and societies in ways that we never did can feel like pulling up the ladder behind us. Moreover, how is “development” rea...

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, was re-elected as the President of Brazil in 2022, defeating Jair Bolsonaro in a tense election, the Brazilian left and many around the world breathed an almost literal sigh of relief. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil’s ecological and climate record was scorched, with deforestation in the Amazon reaching record highs. Hopes were high, and for good reason: Lula campa...

To celebrate the launch of The BREAK—DOWN ISSUE #1, editor Adrienne Buller was joined by Quinn Slobodian and Geoff Mann for a timely conversation on the afterlives of neoliberalism, the climate crisis, and the global rise of the far right. ISSUE #1 The BREAK—DOWN is dedicated to exploring the political economy of the climate crisis. We bring together personal stories, cultural critique, expert ins...

In much of the media, the importance of the legacies of empire and colonialism are often dismissed, with the public conversation dominated by the "culture war" elements, from debates about statues to institutions like the National Trust becoming " woke ". The implication within much of this discourse is that empire and colonialism are features of the past, and should be left there. In reality, it...

Around the world, politics is incredibly polarised, but if there’s one thing politicians of all major parties can agree on, it’s growth — that their political rivals failed to deliver growth, that we need more of it, and that getting it will solve all of our problems, from inequality and poverty to crumbling public services and stalling investment. But not everyone agrees. For a growing movement o...

A lot has happened in the six months since we launched this project. It feels like every week of 2024 has packed a decade’s worth of news. In just the past few weeks, we've seen crises hit the French and German governments, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, a day of martial law in South Korea, and, of course, Trump’s reelection to the White House. Amidst all of it, climate has generally taken...

In 2024, we’re set to break a major climate threshold for the first time: this will be the first calendar year in which global average temperatures breach the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold enshrined in the Paris Agreement. Importantly, while one year at this temperature doesn’t mean all is lost, it does fire a profound warning shot over our faltering progress on mitigating and adapting to the clima...

In the wake of the US election, hot takes and autopsies of the Democrats’ fairly spectacular loss are a dime a dozen. Amid the swirl of diagnoses there has also been real fear about what a Trump presidency means for the climate — an issue that felt almost entirely absent from either campaign, despite its significant role in Biden’s policy platform.  How should we understand what just happened? Wha...