The Hidden Tradeoffs of Climate Policy

Conflicts over the impacts of mining for the minerals needed to manufacture everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines to batteries are not limited to lithium in Nevada. In Sweden and Finland, none other than Greta Thunberg, the Swedish icon of climate activism, has protested cobalt mining on indigenous land that environmentalists say threatens the region’s reindeer population. In Greenland, a new government coalition has canceled a major mining project that would have supplied the European Union with uranium and rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium.

Critical minerals are not scarce. There are ample amounts of cobalt, lithium, uranium, and other minerals in the Earth’s crust to power an energy transition and much else. All else equal, a world powered by clean energy technologies will almost certainly involve less total mining than one powered by fossil fuels. But extracting critical minerals at the scale necessary to power the global economy with clean energy will nonetheless require a massive expansion of new mining, often in places where it is not presently occurring and almost always with environmental impacts that many environmentalists oppose.

The challenge is further complicated by growing geopolitical concern about sourcing critical minerals from China, which is the leading global processor of nearly every critical mineral. Hence it controls mineral supply chains that are reliably shot through with terrible environmental destruction and human rights atrocities. Insofar as the United States and other Western countries are serious about scaling up global critical mineral production without deepening dependence on Chinese production and the environmental and human rights consequences that come with it, there will need to be a lot more mining in places like Nevada, Sweden, and Greenland.

Lacking that, the likely result will be to simply default to the current mode of sourcing critical minerals. Without many more mines in the West, production will be outsourced to exactly the places that it comes from today: China and various developing countries where government enforcement of and civil society advocacy for environmental, human rights, and labor standards are deplorably weak. Already, leading climate advocates are fretting that growing U.S.-China tensions could undermine climate action and have criticized the Biden administration for raising tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, solar panels, and other clean technology.

This out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach reflects a dilemma inherent to present efforts to accelerate the transition to clean energy. China’s domination of virtually all clean energy supply chains means that going fast requires accepting human rights and environmental abuses on a vast scale. Weaning the world—or at least the West—off Chinese clean energy technologies means either going slower or accepting some level of environmental destruction associated with mining in places like the United States and Europe, and probably both.

The notion of a “just transition” has become something of a buzzword for environmental leaders in recent years. But it is far easier to talk about than to achieve. China’s treatment of its workers, minorities, and environment is neither necessary for an energy transition nor compatible with one that is just. But making the buzzword a reality will require trade-offs between the speed of the transition and the what, where, and when of clean technologies and supply chains—crucial trade-offs that the climate movement has thus far been unwilling to acknowledge.

Just the growth of wind and solar generation under this scenario would cumulatively require 25 million metric tons of copper, 72 million tons of aluminum, 14 million tons of nickel, and 93,000 tons of silver by 2035, consuming 10 percent of current global copper and aluminum smelter production, 40 percent of nickel mining, and 36 percent of global silver mining annually. All those batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage will require at least 8 million tons of battery-grade graphite and 0.6 million tons of lithium annually by 2030, four and three times, respectively, total global production today.

Many in the climate movement insist that this new demand might be mitigated by dramatically limiting global consumption and redoubling recycling efforts. Political scientist Thea Riofrancos calls for society to turn only to mining “once all demand-reduction strategies have been exhausted.” These, according to Riosfrancos, include shifting 30 percent to half of the U.S. population from low-density to medium-density neighborhoods, massively expanding mass transit, and cutting 50 percent to 75 percent of the U.S. automobile fleet over the next 25 years. Friends of the Earth, meanwhile, demands a planned end to economic growth in Europe and the reduction of per capita material usage by two-thirds.

At the same time, most environmental groups oppose nuclear energy, fossil fuel plants even if they capture their carbon, and atmospheric carbon removal facilities, all of which are included in the IEA’s scenario for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Under scenarios that forgo these sources of energy and carbon reduction entirely, and hence depend much more heavily on wind, solar, and battery storage, mining requirements are even higher.

One study by Austria-based researchers proposed slashing global energy usage by 40 percent between 2020 and 2050 to hit a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius without the use of technologies that would remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and only very limited use of nuclear energy. It would require roughly twice as much aluminum and copper as most mainstream modeling scenarios featured in IPCC reports that limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. An electrified global passenger vehicle fleet half the size of today’s gasoline and diesel-powered fleet, meanwhile, would still require battery mineral production vastly exceeding that of today.

Recycling might ultimately mitigate some of the needed mining. But having sufficient lithium or graphite to recycle at scales that even begin to correspond with the demand for those materials will first require scaling up mining operations dramatically in the coming decades. Moreover, most low-carbon technologies have a relatively short lifespan. Current wind turbines may require replacement after 25 to 30 years. Batteries after perhaps 20 years. Recycling, for a variety of technological, economic, and logistical reasons, will not approach 100 percent. So even in a future with lower energy demand and high rates of recycling, a clean energy economy will require significant continuing critical minerals production for the substantial fraction of future demand that cannot be met with recycled materials.

When pressed, many environmental leaders insist that there is no necessary trade-off between better mining practices and a rapid energy transition. But most would be hard pressed to name any mining project on any continent that they would actually endorse.

The idea that growing concern about climate change would split the environmental movement into two camps—traditional conservationists concerned with things like wildlife, habitats, and wilderness and the new-fangled climate movement singularly focused on the existential threat of climate change—has been around for the better part of two decades. Although the two camps’ goals can conflict, in practice there hasn’t been much difference between them on issues like mining. Neither the old school environmentalists nor the new school climate hawks have been willing to offer an actionable plan for sourcing critical minerals in an ethical or sustainable manner at the scale that would be necessary for a rapid transition to low-carbon technologies.

In the grand scheme of global mining, critical minerals, even massively scaled up for a global energy transition, are a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of the world’s extraction for commodities involves neither critical minerals nor fossil fuels but ordinary materials like sand and gravel, which annually account for at least triple the mass of all industrial metal ores combined. After that, the single largest mined material is coal, which alone matches the total of all other metal ores. So a transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy will, on the one hand, not much move the needle on the overall environmental footprint of global mining and, on the other, almost certainly entail less overall mining than a world without such a shift.

But all mining, like all politics, is local. And while a major scale-up of critical mineral production for an energy transition won’t much affect the global picture in terms of mining impacts, it will unavoidably have significant impacts on people, ecosystems, and environments at the local level. The specific claims that environmental opponents often make may be contestable. It is hard to say what impact exploratory boreholes in Nevada will ultimately have on an endangered fish that lives in a nearby sinkhole or how cobalt mining will affect Sweden’s reindeer, particularly in the context of the many other threats that these species and ecosystems also face. But those impacts will almost assuredly not be zero.

At the same time, a world that achieves an energy transition but chooses not to risk disturbing reindeer in Sweden or poolfish in Nevada is not a world in which that transition will unfold weightlessly upon the land. The impacts of massively expanded nickel, lithium, aluminum, and copper mining will simply occur somewhere else, often in locations with very poor people, vulnerable ecosystems, threatened biodiversity, hazardous mining methods, dangerous processing technologies, and little in the way of regulatory oversight.

Many climate and clean energy advocates have been quick to praise China for industrial policies that have substantially cut the cost of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles. But they mostly ignore the extent to which cheap Chinese clean energy products are inextricably tied up with an economic system built on authoritarian rule, forced labor camps, and other human rights abuses, powered by some of the dirtiest coal plants in the world, and tied to ecologically devastating mining practices in China, Africa, and beyond.

In Xinjiang, for example, copper and other mines rely on Uyghur forced laborers who are required to undergo political indoctrination and perform harsh, hazardous manual work. In Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, Chinese-owned nickel refineries have commonly dumped waste tailings from high-pressure acid leaching of nickel ores directly into waterways and on abused workers. In Myanmar along its border with China, Chinese firms source rare earth ores from illegal mines controlled by rival militias fighting in the country’s ongoing civil war. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, much of the workforce employed by Chinese copper and cobalt mining firms is comprised of forced laborers and children.

When all is said and done, the raw materials to build a global clean energy economy must come from somewhere. And whenever and wherever the environmental movement has been forced to choose, it has effectively chosen the status quo, opposing efforts to expand critical mineral production in the developed, democratic world and embracing empty promises by China, developing countries, and the mining companies that do business with them to clean up their supply chains—the same sorts of promises that have repeatedly failed to produce better social or environmental outcomes.

And so solar, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturers tout toothless supply chain tracking protocols and audits while resisting actual regulatory requirements to trace their supply chains or limit Western imports of products and materials produced with forced labor. Prominent green academics, journalists, and activists condemn mining projects in the United States and Latin America for not meeting their high standards in one breath—only to criticize efforts to diversify away from cheap Chinese clean tech goods in the next. Green groups like Greenpeace, meanwhile, demand the consent of indigenous groups across the entire Pacific Ocean as a prerequisite for mining metals on the sea floor while remaining entirely silent about blatant human rights violations associated with clean tech supply chains in China.

If this is what the climate movement means by climate justice, it is a recipe for ongoing—indeed deepening—social and environmental injustice. The result is likely to be continued Chinese dominance of current and future clean energy technology markets, with all of the troubling environmental, ethical, and geopolitical implications that this arrangement assures with virtual certainty.

Nuclear energy, for instance, is three to four times less mineral and material-intensive per unit of generated electricity than wind or solar energy. And that’s without accounting for the substantial additional minerals and materials required to produce and frequently replace battery storage needed to keep a grid powered by intermittent wind and solar energy stable. But building a less materials-intensive low carbon energy system using nuclear technology would require environmentalists to abandon two key positions—their opposition to nuclear energy and their commitment to an energy future powered predominantly, if not entirely, by renewable energy.

Whatever the mix of clean energy technologies, seabed mining also has the potential to dramatically reduce the environmental impacts resulting from terrestrial mining for critical minerals. Using submersibles to pluck metals-rich nodules off the seafloor requires virtually no excavation, and it typically occurs in deep-sea environments where living organisms are sparse. But environmental organizations around the world are virtually unanimous in opposing even exploratory mining for seabed nodules.

There are also a range of promising technologies for terrestrial mining and mineral use with substantially less environmental impact than conventional technologies, from replacing aluminum with lightweight magnesium isolated from seawater to directly extracting uranium or copper from underground ores using liquid solutions instead of excavators and explosives. And even without these whiz-bang, next generation technologies, we know that mining in democratic and developed economies is almost always far better regulated and less impactful to the environment than when it is conducted in places with weak regulatory oversight, little civil society scrutiny, and no democratic accountability.

Absent some combination of less material intensive clean energy technology, better mining technology, and better regulated mining and processing, the trade-offs between human rights, protecting local environments, and accelerating the energy transition are likely to become increasingly difficult to resolve. Whatever environmentalists say about their commitment to environmental, human rights, and labor standards, their insistence that the world is already in the midst of a climate emergency that trumps all other social, economic, and political concerns suggests that when push comes to shove, most will continue to look the other way, prioritizing cheap technology and raw materials over a just, equitable, and sustainable energy transition.

Ultimately, there can be no such transition unless climate advocates are willing not only to accept but to press for new mining and heavy industry closer to home. Doing so will allow the West to at least hedge against continuing Chinese hegemony in clean energy technology, manufacturing, and supply chains while giving Western policymakers, environmentalists, and human rights advocates far greater leverage to press for higher standards in China and elsewhere.

For that to happen, Western environmentalists would need to accept modernized permitting processes and other supportive policies for terrestrial mining that could enable expanded production of critical minerals with higher labor and environmental standards and better technology. No less controversially, they will likely need to concede some near-term deployment of cheap renewables and EVs in order to clean up the mining, mineral processing, and manufacturing processes that produce these technologies, not least by diversifying the global supply chains that they depend upon.

Over the longer term, diversifying supply chains and reshoring clean tech manufacturing will be a boon for both the climate and environmental conservation efforts, even if doing so slows the pace of domestic emissions cuts in the West in the short term. U.S. domestic content standards in the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, were imposed by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia as a condition for its passage. But those provisions helped the bill win crucial political support by promising new high-wage industrial jobs at home. New supply chain projects in nations with higher environmental standards will, in turn, promote greater materials and energy efficiency in the mining and processing industries, advancing both clean technology innovation and industrial decarbonization.

Yet many climate and clean energy advocates have instead pressed the Biden administration to water down sourcing provisions for things like solar panels and EVs in the name of meeting short-term climate targets. U.S. environmental philanthropy, meanwhile, has directed hundreds of millions of dollars toward environmental justice groups determined to thwart development of new mining and heavy industry in the United States, ironically in the name of climate justice.

Until that changes, green insistence upon an energy transition that is swift, just, and sustainable—all at the same time—will remain little more than empty rhetoric. Without decisive action to change course, the environmental movement’s de facto pathway to an energy transition based on low-cost and material-intensive renewable energy technology from abroad will in reality be predicated not on the elimination of labor, human rights, and environmental abuses but on their continuation.