Mettle Detector

If climate protesters were serious they would demand higher sustainability from the companies that are cashing in on the crisis. By Will Jefferies.

A carbon-neutral economy powered by wind turbines, solar panels and batteries would not be as “clean” as its protagonists suggest.

Environmentalists invariably neglect to point out that their vision would also trigger a global boom in the mining of base and rare earth metals that could easily offset - to use one of their own favourite terms - whatever gains are supposedly made in the transition.

The World Bank warned environmentalists about this conundrum in 2017. “The technologies assumed to populate the clean energy shift—wind, solar, hydrogen, and electricity systems—are in fact significantly MORE [World Bank’s own emphasis] material intensive in their composition than current traditional fossil-fuel-based energy supply systems,” it said in its report, The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future.

Which metals? Well, the coil-driven generators in wind turbines require significant amounts of copper. Similarly, the direct-drive generators powered by permanent magnets in wind turbines use a rare earth metal called neodymium.

To meet the targets outlined in the Paris Agreement, the global production of neodymium will need to increase from the current 7000 tonnes a year to 50,000-380,000 tonnes by 2050.

Wind turbines also use aluminium, copper, chromium, lead and iron. The production of these metals will need to increase by about 250 per cent.

For batteries, the key resources are lithium, aluminium, cobalt and nickel. Extraction of these metals will need to increase at least tenfold.

More than half the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where mining and labour practices are not as high as they are in the countries where the batteries in which it is used are eventually sold.

Environmentalists conveniently overlook this moral dilemma, although The Guardian did report last year that there were about 255,000 creuserurs (people who dig with their hands in open mines), “35,000 of whom are children, some as young as six.”

They “toil in putrid conditions, endure pitiful wages, grave injury and risk death to mine their cobalt,” The Guardian said.

I wonder how many more African children will need to be employed to meet the targets being demanded by rich kids at Climate Strike meetings in the affluent West. Perhaps this is why there was no Climate Strike in the DRC. Perhaps young Greta Thunberg should take a trip down there to explain why the Congolese children are stealing her “dreams” and “childhood” by not taking “climate action”.

Environmentalists are excited about the potential of lithium-ion batteries. Currently lithium is used in only 2 per cent of car batteries and 5 per cent of decentralised energy storage. Its used in grid-scale storage is virtually non-existent. The World Bank says this will need to increase to 50 per cent in each of the three sectors by 2050, requiring extraction to increase from a paltry 37,000 tonnes to 18 million to 52 million tonnes a year.

Most of the world’s lithium reserves are in Chile and China. Similarly, the world’s reserves of copper, iron ore, silver, lithium, aluminum, nickel, manganese, zinc., platinum, manganese, bauxite, and chromium - all of which play a part in the “carbon-neutral” economy of the future - are evenly distributed geographically.

How do environmentalists know the mining industries in undeveloped countries are not going to compromise the gains supposedly made by clean energy? And are they aware of how energy-intensive such extractions are in the first place?

“A dialogue is required at the national and civil society levels within resource-rich developing countries, between the mining–metals and climate–environmental–clean-energy constituencies, to develop a path forward that aligns a potential growing market for key commodities with a sustainable future,” the World Bank says.

In other words, western environmentalists need to tell poor countries how to mine these resources to assuage the consciences of rich kids using mobile phones to organise Climate Strikes.

That was two years ago. The demand for these metals has since increased so environmentalists in prosperous countries can feel virtuous about their local environment while caring little for where and how their new technologies were made, and at what cost elsewhere.

The kids who joined the Climate Strike don't need to march on parliament to demand change. They should also be waving their placards and screaming their platitudes outside the headquarters of companies cashing in on the "clean" energy craze, demanding higher sustainability standards in these relatively new industries.

Or they could tell their parents they don't want a new iPhone.