The world needs to move from fossil fuels to renewable ones, but the narrative pushed by powerful financial, political, and environmental institutions — that it’s necessary to massively scale up mining of “transition” or “critical” minerals to achieve this — is false, a new op-ed argues.Not only do these minerals’ extraction cause countless environmental and community harms, the numbers cited about how they are used — and the number of new mines needed — don’t add up, a recent report has shown.“The vast majority [of critical minerals] are used in industries that are either unrelated — or in direct opposition — to the clean energy transition,” the author writes.This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
There is an insidious lie that has taken root in the energy transition narrative pushed by the world’s most powerful financial, political, and environmental institutions: we need to massively scale up “critical mineral” mining to secure a green future.
The World Bank claims that production of key minerals will need to increase by 500% by 2050 for the energy transition. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 250 new mines are needed to meet emissions targets (80 new copper mines, 70 new lithium mines, 70 new nickel mines, and 30 new cobalt mines). WWF says we need to dramatically increase the supply chain for a wide range of materials, including “transition minerals” as they’re also sometimes called.
