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The transition is often presented as though it represents a departure from extractive industrial systems, while simultaneously depending on a significant expansion of extraction itself in order to function. The technologies may operate more cleanly once deployed, but the industrial foundation beneath them remains heavily resource intensive. That distinction matters because operational cleanliness is not the same as systemic sustainability. Reducing emissions in one layer of the system does not automatically resolve the wider material pressures being created elsewhere. If a transition depends on continuous large-scale extraction, continuous infrastructure replacement, and unresolved end-of-life recovery systems simply to sustain itself, then the question is no longer whether it is cleaner than what came before. The question becomes whether the underlying industrial logic has changed at all. And so far, much of that logic appears remarkably familiar. Extract. Manufacture. Deploy. Replace. The technologies evolve, but the behavioural structure underneath remains largely intact. Which raises an uncomfortable possibility: that future generations may inherit not the end of industrial dependency, but a more technologically advanced version of the same dependency, requiring continuous extraction and increasingly complex recovery systems simply to maintain the infrastructure designed to solve the previous crisis.