I was one of the first few critics of how ESG was being done. Not because I was against its goals, but because I saw the façade—what masqueraded as virtue was often little more than compliance theatre wrapped in consulting jargon. Behind the metrics and the frameworks, the same extractive circuits powered the global economy, now simply rebranded as sustainable. Fast forward to today, and while the language has shifted, the underlying machinery has not. If anything, the pressure to transition has intensified the contradictions. The minerals economy—once a quiet backbone of industrial growth—is now exposed in full view, and what it reveals is uncomfortable: that the global shift to clean energy and digital infrastructure is being built on