Global fresh water demand will outstrip supply by 40% by 2030, say experts Landmark report urges overhaul of wasteful water practices around world on eve of crucial UN summit Fiona Harvey Environment editor Fri 17 Mar 2023 00.01 GMT Last modified on Fri 17 Mar 2023 15.18 GMT The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit. Governments must urgently stop subsidising the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water. Nations must start to manage water as a global common good, because most countries are highly dependent on their neighbours for water supplies, and overuse, pollution and the climate crisis threaten water supplies globally, the report’s authors say. Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and a lead author of the report, told the Guardian the world’s neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. “The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It’s a triple crisis.” Rockstrom’s fellow Global Commission on the Economics of Water co-chair Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London and also a lead author of the report, added: “We need a much more proactive, and ambitious, common good approach. We have to put justice and equity at the centre of this, it’s not just a technological or finance problem.” The report marks the first time the global water system has been scrutinised comprehensively and its value to countries – and the risks to their prosperity if water is neglected – laid out in clear terms. Like with the Stern review of the economics of the climate crisis in 2006 and the Dasgupta review of the economics of biodiversity in 2021, the report authors hope to highlight the crisis in a way that policymakers and economists can recognise. Many governments still do not realise how interdependent they are when it comes to water, according to Rockstrom. Most countries depend for about half of their water supply on the evaporation of water from neighbouring countries – known as “green” water because it is held in soils and delivered from transpiration in forests and other ecosystems, when plants take up water from the soil and release vapour into the air from their leaves. The report sets out seven key recommendations, including reshaping the global governance of water resources, scaling up investment in water management through public-private partnerships, pricing water properly and establishing “just water partnerships” to raise finance for water projects in developing and middle-income countries. More than $700bn (£575bn) of subsidies globally go to agriculture and water each year and these often fuel excessive water consumption. Water leakage must also be urgently addressed, the report found, and restoring freshwater systems such as wetlands should be another priority. Water is fundamental to the climate crisis and the global food crisis. “There will be no agricultural revolution unless we fix water,” said Rockstrom. “Behind all these challenges we are facing, there’s always water, and we never talk about water.” Many of the ways in which water is used are inefficient and in need of change, with Rockstrom pointing to developed countries’ sewage systems. “It’s quite remarkable that we use safe, fresh water to carry excreta, urine, nitrogen, phosphorus – and then need to have inefficient wastewater treatment plants that leak 30% of all the nutrients into downstream aquatic ecosystems and destroy them and cause dead zones. We’re really cheating ourselves in terms of this linear, waterborne modern system of dealing with waste. There are massive innovations required.” The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The UN water summit, led by the governments of the Netherlands and Tajikistan, will take place in New York on 22 March. World leaders are invited but only a few are expected to attend, with most countries to be represented by ministers or high-ranking officials. It will mark the first time in more than four decades the UN has met to discuss water, with previous attempts stymied by governments reluctant to countenance any form of international governance of the resource. Henk Ovink, a special envoy for international water affairs for the Netherlands, told the Guardian the conference was crucial. “If we are to have a hope of solving our climate crisis, our biodiversity crisis and other global challenges on food, energy and health, we need to radically change our approach in how we value and manage water,” he said. “[This] is the best opportunity we have to put water at the centre of global action to ensure people, crops and the environment continue to have the water they need.” Seven calls to action on water: Manage the global water cycle as a global common good, to be protected collectively and in our shared interests. Ensure safe and adequate water for every vulnerable group, and work with industry to scale up investment in water. Stop underpricing water. Proper pricing and targeted support for the poor will enable water to be used more efficiently, more equitably, and more sustainably Reduce the more than $700bn of subsidies in agriculture and water each year, which often fuel excessive water consumption, and reduce leakage in water systems. Establish “just water partnerships” which can mobilise finance for low- and middle-income countries. Take urgent action this decade on issues such as restoring wetlands and depleted groundwater resources;, recycling the water used in industry; moving to precision agriculture that uses water more efficiently; and having companies report on their “water footprint”. Reform the governance of water at an international level, and including water in trade agreements. Governance must also take into account women, farmers, indigenous people and others in the frontline of water conservation. This article was amended on 17 March 2023. An earlier version, relying on figures from a draft version of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water report, said agricultural and water subsidies totalled $1 trillion a year; this has been changed to $700bn in line with the final report. https://www.theguardian.com/environ...mand-outstrip-supply-by-2030?CMP=share_btn_tw
Scientists uncover startling concentrations of pure DDT along seafloor off L.A. coast Rosanna Xia Thu, March 23, 2023 at 4:24 PM MDT·7 min read First it was the eerie images of barrels leaking on the seafloor not far from Catalina Island. Then the shocking realization that the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT had once used the ocean as a huge dumping ground — and that as many as half a million barrels of its acid waste had been poured straight into the water. Now, scientists have discovered that much of the DDT — which had been dumped largely in the 1940s and ’50s — never broke down. The chemical remains in its most potent form in startlingly high concentrations, spread across a wide swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco. “We still see original DDT on the seafloor from 50, 60, 70 years ago, which tells us that it’s not breaking down the way that [we] once thought it should,” said UC Santa Barbara scientist David Valentine, who shared these preliminary findings Thursday during a research update with more than 90 people working on the issue. “And what we’re seeing now is that there is DDT that has ended up all over the place, not just within this tight little circle on a map that we referred to as Dumpsite Two.” These revelations confirm some of the science community’s deepest concerns — and further complicate efforts to understand DDT’s toxic and insidious legacy in California. Public calls for action have intensified since The Times reported in 2020 that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, banned in 1972, is still haunting the marine environment today. Significant amounts of DDT-related compounds continue to accumulate in California condors and local dolphin populations, and a recent study linked the presence of this once-popular pesticide to an aggressive cancer in sea lions. With a $5.6-million research boost from Congress, at the urging of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), numerous federal, state and local agencies have since joined with scientists and environmental nonprofits to figure out the extent of the contamination lurking 3,000 feet underwater. (An additional $5.2 million, overseen by California and USC Sea Grant, will be distributed this summer to kick off 18 more months of research.) The findings so far have been one stunning development after another. A preliminary sonar-mapping effort led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography identified at least 70,000 debris-like objects on the seafloor. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, after combing through thousands of pages of old records, discovered that other toxic chemicals — as well as millions of tons of oil drilling waste — had also been dumped decades ago by other companies in more than a dozen areas off the Southern California coast. “When the DDT was disposed, it is highly likely that other materials — either from the tanks on the barges, or barrels being pushed over the side of the barges — would have been disposed at the same time,” said John Lyons, acting deputy director of the EPA’s Region 9 Superfund Division. He noted that the new science being shared this week is critical to answering one of the agency’s most burning questions: “Is the contamination moving? And is it moving in a way that threatens the marine environment or human health?” In recent months, Valentine, whose research team had first brought this decades-old issue back into the public consciousness, has been mapping and collecting samples of the seafloor between the Los Angeles coast and Catalina. Analysis of the sediment so far shows that the most concentrated layer of DDT is only about 6 centimeters deep — raising questions about just how easily these still-potent chemicals could be remobilized. “Trawls, cable lays could reintroduce this stuff back up to the surface,” Valentine said. “And animals feeding — if a whale goes down and burrows on the seafloor, that could kick stuff up.” Postdoctoral student Sebastian Krause, left, works with Valentine to retrieve a tube of sediment collected from the seafloor where DDT waste was dumped into the ocean decades ago. (Austin Straub / For The Times) On a chilly winter morning in between storms, Valentine and a team of students boarded the RV/Yellowfin and set out to collect more seafloor samples along key points of a hot-spot map that they’ve been piecing together. As his students sliced and cataloged each layer of mud, they gasped in wonder at the tiny worms, snails and sea stars that lived so deep under the sea. They squinted at each tube that came out of the water and laughed apprehensively when asked about all the chemicals they were possibly holding in their hands. “The goal is to collect as much mud as possible so that we don’t have to come back out every time we have a question,” Valentine explained as the ship’s mechanical pulley churned for the eighth time that day. “We are starting to build a really exceptional data set … that will help us understand the time history of how things were transported, how they were transformed, and what their ultimate fate is.” Sediment samples collected from the seafloor where DDT was dumped off Catalina are organized into jars in a lab at UC Santa Barbara. (Austin Straub / For The Times) Other scientists have also been chipping away at the many pieces to this deep-ocean puzzle. Thursday’s research updates included plans for the next Scripps mapping expedition, which will scan the seafloor with advanced sonar technology and take hundreds of thousands of photos. Microbiologists shared their latest studies into whether deep-sea microbes could possibly help biodegrade some of the contamination, and chemical oceanographers discussed the many ways they’ve been trying to identify “fingerprints” that could help determine where the DDT is coming from — and how and if it’s moving. Biological oceanographers, marine ecologists and fisheries scientists also started to connect some dots on the various organisms they’ve found living in the contaminated sediment, as well as the midwater species that could potentially move the chemicals from deeper waters up closer to the surface. All of them noted that there were uncomfortably high concentrations of DDT and DDT-related compounds in the samples they studied. Even the “control” samples they tried to collect — as a way to compare what a normal sediment or fish sample farther away from the dumping area might look like — ended up riddled with DDT. “This suggests to us, very preliminarily, that there’s some connection potentially — there’s connectivity in these deep food webs across the basins and across the system,” said Lihini Aluwihare, a marine chemist at Scripps. On top of all this research, the EPA has been developing its own sampling plan, in collaboration with a number of state and federal agencies, to get a grasp of the many other chemicals that had been dumped into the ocean. The hope, officials said, is that the groundbreaking science now underway on the deep-ocean DDT dumping will ultimately inform how future investigations of other offshore dump sites — whether along the Southern California coast or elsewhere in the country — could be conducted. Mark Gold, an environmental scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has worked on the DDT problem since the 1990s, said that as he listened to the latest research discoveries, he couldn’t help but think that “our nation’s ocean dumpsites all have horrible contamination problems. And yet they are unmonitored.” There are also more shallow areas off the Palos Verdes coast and at the mouth of the Dominguez Channel that have been known DDT hot spots for decades. Figuring out how to clean up those contaminated areas in an underwater environment has been its own complicated saga. For Katherine Pease at Heal the Bay, an environmental group that has been making sure the public remains engaged on this issue in substantive ways, these latest revelations have been eye-opening. This is, after all, what it truly means to live with a “forever” chemical. After all these decades, scientists are still uncovering new and unsettling surprises about the full extent of the contamination. “We’re still grappling with this legacy of treating the ocean as a dumping ground,” said Pease, Heal the Bay’s science and policy director. “And the public — whether they’re folks that like to fish ... or people who like to swim and visit the ocean — we all need to understand the history that went on, as well as the impacts. And partly that’s to learn ... to make sure that we’re able to protect our public health, but also to think about how we are treating the ocean now, as well as into the future.” https://news.yahoo.com/scientists-u...6.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=tw&tsrc=twtr
umair haque Mar 23 The Doom Loop That’s Destroying Our Economy (Why) Our Economies Are Trapped in an Arms Race They Can’t Win Image Credit: IMF Take a hard look at our economies. What do you see? Here’s what I see: they’re trapped in an arms race they can’t win. What do I mean by that? Another month — another brutal round of interest rate rises. Don’t worry — this isn’t just going to be about that, dry finance. It’s going to be about the future of our civilization, and if we have one. So there go central banks, hammering up interest rates month after month. This is to stop skyrocketing inflation. But it isn’t. This approach isn’t working, and by now, we have not just one kind of proof, but three. Inflation goes right on soaring. Meanwhile, banks have started to fail, because of course, higher interest rates mean more risk. And at the same time, real incomes are falling. It’s not working. We are now trapped in an arms race of old-school economics. The theory goes like this. Prices rise, raise interest rates. The idea is that by raising interest rates, people will have less to spend — mostly frivolously. Inflation will grind to a halt. Presto, job done. Only, like I said, this isn’t working. The reason for that is very simple. This theory is about demand-led inflation: people having too much money, and madly bidding up prices. LOL — see anyone with too much money apart from billionaires? This theory doesn’t work when it comes to supply-driven inflation. And that is what we are facing now. It’s why this approach isn’t working. Now, some of you have heard me bang this drum before — but I want you to consider how much worse the situation’s gotten just in the last few months, let alone years. What’s causing inflation? We used to think it was Covid. But societies aren’t locked down anymore, so it can’t be that. We used to think it was Covid aid, but that’s long gone, so it can’t be that, either. The answer is hidden in plain sight — we’ve hit the planet’s limits, in incredibly dire and serious ways. Now, when I began to raise all this, you might have thought that I was talking about the future. But it turns out that I’m talking about now. What’s changed since the last time we discussed all this — which wasn’t even that long ago? The world’s first global water report was issued, and it concluded that — gulp — we’re running out of water. Supply’s going to exceed demand by 40% in…seven years. The UN issued its “final warning” on climate change, which said we’re going to hit the old target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and blow past it, in the next decade. Momentous, dire consequences are unfolding. And those who manage our economies are doing so like it’s the Industrial Age. You see, think about the distinction between supply and demand led inflation. What’s been true since the dawn of the Industrial Age, more or less? We haven’t had a really grave demand shock. A few tremors, maybe — the oil crisis of the 70s comes to mind. But since then, most inflationary bouts have been about demand, precisely because we were able to take supply — as in the planet’s ability to supply basics like water, food, air, energy, all that’s made from them, which is everything, really…for granted. So economics of the old-school kind doesn’t really see the world in any other way than “inflation? People must have too much money! It’s a demand issue! Quick, crush demand!” Which is what raising interest rates does. But what if the problem is on the supply side? More...
File under Novel Entities, planetary boundary # 3. This ‘climate-friendly’ fuel comes with an astronomical cancer risk Almost half of products cleared so far under a new US federal ‘biofuels’ program are not, in fact, biofuels. This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power Sharon Lerner The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a climate-friendly initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and the Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, one out of four people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer. “That kind of risk is obscene,” said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “You can’t let that get out.” All fish tested from Michigan rivers contain ‘forever chemicals’, study finds That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within three miles of the refinery that will produce the fuel in Pascagoula, Mississippi. ProPublica and the Guardian asked Maria Doa, a scientist who worked at the EPA for 30 years, to review the document laying out the risk. Doa, who once ran the division that managed the risks posed by chemicals, was so alarmed by the cancer threat that she initially assumed it was a typographical error. “EPA should not allow these risks in Pascagoula or anywhere,” said Doa, who now is the senior director of chemical policy at Environmental Defense Fund. In response to questions from ProPublica and the Guardian, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency’s lifetime cancer risk calculation is “a very conservative estimate with ‘high uncertainty’”, meaning the government erred on the side of caution in calculating such a high risk. That kind of risk is obscene. EPA should not allow these risks in Pascagoula or anywhere Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Under federal law, the EPA can’t approve new chemicals with serious health or environmental risks unless it comes up with ways to minimize the dangers. And if the EPA is unsure, the law allows the agency to order lab testing that would clarify the potential health and environmental harms. In the case of these new plastic-based fuels, the agency didn’t do either of those things. In approving the fuel, the EPA didn’t require any lab tests, air monitoring or controls that would reduce the release of the cancer-causing pollutants or people’s exposure to them. More...
"...electrifying the Titanic won’t melt the icebergs in its path." https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-10/the-rising-chorus-of-renewable-energy-skeptics/ Energy The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics By Andrew Nikiforuk, originally published by The Tyee April 10, 2023 Sometime during this century, it is highly likely that worldwide depletion of natural resources will force an entire reorganization of social and economic structures, perhaps violently.” — Walter Youngquist, ‘Our Plundered Planet’ We are going to have to dramatically downsize the dream of a future in which we replace 150-year-old fossil fuel infrastructure with “clean energy” by 2050. That’s the message in a number of recent important reports and books. They underscore a number of problems with the renewables illusion, including the complexity of the task, the toxicity of rare earth mining and the scarcity of critical minerals. These grounded realists, including the French journalist Guillaume Pitron and the Australian geologist Simon Michaux, all have three basic messages: There are dramatic limits to growth. And the world needs a better plan to avoid collapse other than replacing one unsustainable fossil fuel system with another intensive mining system powered by even more extreme energies. In other words, electrifying the Titanic won’t melt the icebergs in its path. ‘Doubling down on the wrong thing’ For largely ideological reasons many greens and “transitionists” have presented the transition to renewables as a smooth road with no potholes. In so doing they have ignored much basic geology, energy physics and even geopolitics. As a consequence many imagine the construction of millions of batteries, wind mills, solar panels, transmission lines and associated technologies, but they downplay the required intensification of mining for copper, nickel, cobalt and rare minerals you’ve probably never heard of such as dysprosium and neodymium. One of the great lies of modern technological society is that of endless mineral abundance. Urban consumers, who have little knowledge of energy realities underpinning their existence, have swallowed the idea that digital gadgets and automation will somehow detach society from the physical world and allow us to do more with less, leading to a dematerialization of society. But that’s a wholesale fiction long debunked by the likes of the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil and the late geologist Walter Youngquist. The average North American citizen not only consumes 1.3 million kilograms of minerals, metals and fuels in their lifetime but has no idea where they come from or at what cost. The current global mining footprint is already “unsustainable” if that plastic word has any meaning left. In his book Extraction to Extinction the British geologist David Howe politely notes that current mining operations have now become their own geological force, scraping, sorting and collecting more dirt, rock and sediment than the world’s rivers, wind, rain and glaciers every year. But you can’t build solar panels, wind mills or electric cars without mining more copper, lithium, iron and aluminum along with the rare earth technology metals that only appear in small concentrations. That means vastly more destructive scraping and digging of ocean floors, rainforests and tundras on a scale inconceivable to most environmentalists. Already the industrial global machine that serves our shop till you drop culture has dug up more materials and metals than the globe’s total living biomass. In other words our machines, cellphones, buildings, cars, asphalt roads, concrete, plastic, gravel and bricks started to outweigh the world’s plants, fungi, animals and bacteria by 2020. If we continue on this extractive course the pile of human mined materials on this groaning planet will triple global biomass by 2040. Will it really matter if we reach net-zero emissions by extinguishing the last remnants of biodiversity in the process, asks the U.S. physicist Tom Murphy in a recent essay. He considers the current prescription for stopping climate change with a mining boom to support an industrial production of renewable technologies a dangerous course. “It’s doubling down on the wrong thing: propping up and accelerating the machine that’s eating the planet alive. Barrelling forward on renewable energy is the last thing Earth’s critters would vote for, and would be considered one of the more disruptive decisions we could make.” Murphy is far from alone in that assessment. After the U.S. renewables skeptic Alice Friedemann tabulated the mining costs of rare earth mineral mining needed for renewables, including enormous tailing ponds, poisoned groundwater, radioactive waste and volatile geopolitics, she flatly concluded, “Our quest for a more ecological growth model has resulted in intensified mining of the Earth’s crust to extract the core ingredient — rare metals — with an environmental impact that could prove far more severe than that of oil extraction.” Making a pile Years ago, the U.S. historian and technology critic Lewis Mumford argued civilization’s dependence on intense mining had dramatically changed its values. As the extraction business became more important to empires, it contaminated economic thinking with an ethos dedicated to making a killing as opposed to a living. In mining the ends always justify the means. And in a technological society everything is now mined, from soils to people’s behaviour on the internet. In 1934 Mumford described what this destructive ethos entailed: “The miner works, not for love or for nourishment, but to ‘make his pile.’ The classic curse of Midas became perhaps the dominant characteristic of the modern machine: whatever it touched was turned to gold and iron, and the machine was permitted to exist only where gold and iron could serve as foundation.” So when you strip away all the plastic words and inflated claims, what you find in the enthusiasm for a new era of renewables is the prospect of making another pile. In Canada, mining companies already are licking their chops with more than 50 rare earth mining projects now on the books. The Mining Association of Canada declares without a hint of irony that “there is a natural synergy between mining” and so-called “clean technology.” Yet neither mining nor technology are green or clean. In Australia geologists now gush without embarrassment that, “We will need more mines to save the planet.” But more mines will have the opposite effect. More destroyed landscapes, debased watersheds and displaced rural communities. All to sustain our technological dependence on minerals. The average smart phone contains at least 40 elements from the periodic table including cobalt and six rare earth minerals that make the screen glow. The average electric car uses six times more critical minerals than a combustion car. An onshore wind plant needs nine times more mineral resources than an equivalent gas-fired power plant. An e-bike is more mineral intensive than an ordinary bike. And so on. Renewables just haven’t accelerated the demand for rare earth minerals but a variety of base metals such as copper, silver and cobalt. Mining conflict expert Olivia Lazard: ‘We could actually lose the future of humanity trying to save it on behalf of the climate. And this is the ultimate irony, right?’ Screen shot from a TED Talk. Every electric vehicle contains about 75 kilograms of copper or three times more than a conventional vehicle. A single wind turbine generally contains 500 kilograms of nickel. That nickel requires 100 tonnes of steelmaking coal to be refined. And every crystalline silicon solar panel contains 20 grams of silver paste. It takes 80 metric tons of silver to generate approximately a gigawatt of solar power. (In power terms that’s equivalent to 9,000 Nissan Leafs.) Demand is projected to spiral upwards. A recent U.K. report on critical minerals estimated: “Global demand for electric vehicle battery minerals (lithium, graphite, cobalt, nickel) is projected to increase by between six and 13 times by 2040 under stated policies, which exceeds the rate at which new primary and secondary sources are currently being developed.” Calculating inconvenient truths Simon Michaux is an Australian-born geologist who now works for Finland’s Geological Society. Over the last couple of years Michaux has produced a number of comprehensive papers that challenge the assumption there is enough energy and minerals to replace combustion engines with electric ones and fossil fuels with other forms of “green” power. Michaux recently made an important calculation on what would be needed to replace a system run by fossil fuels with a “renewable” one based on 2019 consumption figures. The scale of the thing is mindboggling. Just to replace 46,423 power stations run by oil, coal, gas and nuclear energy would require the construction of 586,000 power stations run by wind, solar and hydrogen. That’s 10 times greater than the existing system due to the low power density of renewables. Building such infrastructure will require an incredible volume of metals and rare earth minerals and a vastly larger scale of mining. No wonder billionaires talk about mining asteroids, Mars and the ocean floor. Since 400 BCE, various civilizations dug up 700 million tonnes of metals (everything from bronze to uranium) prior to 2020. But a so-called green transition will require mining another 700 million metric tonnes by 2040 alone, calculates Michaux. Copper tells the grim story here. (Trying running a phone or a windmill without this metal.) Current copper reserves stand at 880 million tonnes. That’s equal to approximately 30 years of production. But industry will need 4.5 billion tonnes of copper to manufacture just one generation of renewable technologies, estimates Michaux. That’s six times the volume of copper mined throughout history. After that generation comes many more, and sooner than you might imagine. On average a windmill and solar panel has to be replaced every 25 years and that’s why energy critic Nate Hagens has called them “rebuildables” instead of renewables. Global reserves for battery metals such as water-intensive lithium in Latin America and slave-labour extracted cobalt in the Congo present even more problems. They represent less than five per cent of what society needs for an energy transition. And so, as Michaux highlights in his research, society will need to develop different materials for batteries than lithium. “The message here,” he states dryly in one presentation, “is that we need to come up with a different plan.” Declining ore quality complicates this picture. The world’s industrial machine has already exploited the easiest metal reserves to extract. As a result the volume of rock processed for gold increased between 20 and 50 per cent between 2000 and 2009 while production declined by 11 per cent or did not change. Costs, meanwhile, climbed significantly. Diminishing returns haunts the entire metal mining industry. Paying more for less comes with extreme energy costs. As ore quality declines, industry must use more energy to mine it. Recent studies show that the average ore grade of copper mines has decreased by about 25 per cent in just 10 years. That means more fossil fuels must be burned to haul and crush more rock. As a result total energy consumption in copper mining has increased at a higher rate than production. Growing energy intensity translates into higher emissions for lower returns. Multiply the problem of depleting ore quality for other essential metals for renewable energy and you have a major global crisis in the making. Michaux estimates that the carbon footprint of the world’s mining industry could soon surpass that of industrial agriculture. The goal of weaning off the world off fossil fuels with renewables runs into another geological problem. Mining is not an app that you can download overnight. Of 1,000 potential deposits, only one or two become economic mines. On average it takes 10 to 20 years to develop a workable deposit. Furthermore, increasingly volatile market conditions shut down two of every 10 operating mines. Extracting technology metals is also a high energy and high emissions affair. Even the International Energy Agency recently admitted in its minerals report, “Production of energy transition minerals can lead to significant GHG emissions. These minerals typically require much more energy to produce per unit of product than other commodities, which results in higher emissions intensity.” In response to Michaux’s work and the IEA report, a group of academics with no background in geology recently wrote a paper in the journal Joule claiming that people had nothing to worry about. “Historically, mineral markets have adjusted to accommodate growing demand over time.” The paper unfortunately pretends that depletion, corruption, wars, water shortages and geopolitics don’t exist in global mining markets. Moreover, it leaves out the minerals needed for batteries and only addresses a tenth of the demand needed for an energy transition. Rare earth realities Now let’s add more complexity to this picture and examine the unique case of rare earth elements, or REEs, which occupy 17 spots on the periodic table. These so-called technology metals can be found throughout the Earth’s crust in small quantities — which means industry has to use more energy to mine more ore to get less of the desired product for refining. This explains why the rare earth elements needed for “clean energy technologies” as well as most military systems generate 2,000 tons of toxic waste for every ton produced, including one ton of radioactive waste. The Japanese refer to REEs as “the seeds of technology” because they possess unique catalytic, metallurgical, nuclear, electrical, magnetic and luminescent properties. Neodymium and praseodymium, for example, are used to make permanent magnets essential for electric motors and wind turbines. Conventional vehicles don’t need these minerals but EVs do — about one kilogram per vehicle. Rare earth metals are dirty to mine and dirty to process. A recent Canadian environment review highlighted that REEs are anything but green, noting, ”radioactive contamination and REE toxicity are unique potential risks compared with other types of mines.” It added, “These potential risks are cryptic and of high risk for public health because there are few proven mitigation strategies appropriate for Canada to reduce or minimize their adverse impacts.” For the record there are no Canadian federal water quality standards or guidelines for REEs. One of the reasons most digital consumers and many greens know little about the destructive mining practices required to supply their phones and electric cars with REEs boils down to Chinese politics. Decades ago this authoritarian state made the strategic decision to concentrate on REE production as part of its imperial ambitions. To dominate global markets (and it has done so), the government largely ignored the horrific environmental costs, writes Guillaume Pitron in The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy. As a consequence China has provided the REEs necessary for the technological gadgets that North Americans relentlessly employ in their daily life. Distant supply chains and China’s lack of transparency hid the environmental costs in rural China and consumers wrongly assumed their electrical cars and phones were the products of immaculate conception. Pitron exposes the results in his book. “Concealing the dubious origins of metals in China has given green and digital technologies the shining reputation they enjoy. This could very well be the most stunning greenwashing operation in history.” Another blindness has also taken hold: “in contrast to the carbon economy, whose pollution is undeniable, the new green economy hides behind virtuous claims of responsibility for the sake of future generations.” So here’s what green revolution actually looks like. If you’ve owned a cellphone or a computer over the past 25 years, your gadgets were probably assembled with rare earth minerals from Bayan Obo, the largest rare earth element mineral deposit in the world. Once a sacred mountain in Mongolia, the Chinese government reduced its geography to ruin as part of its strategy to dominate rare earth markets. Over a 10 year period the cancer ridden population of the region has fallen from 2,000 to 300. “First the animals got sick, then the infants, and then everybody else,” went the local refrain. One village near the mine’s radioactive and acid tailings pond was known as “death village” because 60 of its residents died of brain or lung cancer between 1993 and 2005. Radioactive tailing waste, fluorides and arsenic have contaminated both food chains and drinking water. Even reticent Chinese scientists now warn that “intensive geological prospecting for REE ore deposits… causes extreme damage to the environment.” They also now “worry that there would be widespread tailing facilities concomitant with serious pollutions” due to rising demand from “green high-tech industries.” The pathway to a low carbon economy looks just as ugly and destructive in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where men, women and children mine cobalt. About 72 per cent of the global supply of cobalt comes from either giant Chinese-owned mines or so-called artisanal miners who scramble for ore in a colonial hell. In his book Cobalt Red, the British researcher Siddharth Kara details the razed forests, the polluted watersheds, the impoverished communities and the legacy of theft. Ask any Congo miner and they will tell you that the face of the renewable revolution is not virtuous or clean. Concludes Kara: “The ongoing exploitation of the poorest people in Congo by the rich and powerful invalidates the purported moral foundation of contemporary civilization and drags humanity back to a time when the people of Africa were valued only their replacement cost.” Let’s add another brutal reality about the geopolitics of technology mineral resources on the planet. They tend to be concentrated in Latin America, Africa, Central Asia, North America and northern Europe. The deposits are often located in jurisdictions that are corrupt, water challenged or highly vulnerable to climate events. In fact the mining industry boasts one of the highest rates of corruption on the planet. Both China and Russia have both realized that the technologies that drive modern life require rare earth minerals, and they are scrambling to monopolize these resources in Africa and other regions. These tyrants realize that a global owner and refiner of these precious minerals will have more power than a global shopper such as Europe. Russia didn’t just invade the Ukraine because of Putin’s delusions of grandeur; the Ukraine is one of the most resource-rich places in Europe. Olivia Lazard, an expert on the political ecology of conflict, recently emphasized these dark developments in a TED presentation and in an subsequent interview: “If we delve into a scramble for rare earth minerals (and that process has already begun) then various governments and corporations could well plunder what’s left of the planet as well the seabed and distant asteroids on the much vaulted path to decarbonization,” noted Lazard. “We could actually lose the future of humanity trying to save it on behalf of the climate. And this is the ultimate irony, right?” The ultimate irony is also an ultimate hell. Given that the “pathway to a low carbon economy” requires a toxic and unsustainable mining boom, experts have been quietly raising red flags for years. The Kleinman Centre for Energy Policy, for instance, warned in 2021 that “the clean energy transition will require economic mobilization on a scale not seen since the industrial revolution, and will strain the global production of silicon, cobalt, lithium, manganese and a host of other critical elements.” The centre added that failure to avoid the toxic realities of China and the Congo “would jeopardize the sustainability of renewable energy technologies utilizing REEs and could partially offset their emissions benefits.” ‘We need a frank discussion’ So here’s the basic problem as eloquently summed up by Michaux. Over 150 years civilization has built a highly complicated industrial system based on cheap fossil fuels. The cheapness of those fuels created a robust banking system and an industrial agricultural system. It fuelled urbanization and globalization. Moreover cheap energy sustained the illusion that resources are inexhaustible. Now that fossil fuel emissions have cooked the climate and decimated biological diversity, our fearless leaders want to replace that entire system with one that is more mineral-intensive and complex. They want to do so at a moment when economic flows have slowed down due to the rising cost of extreme fossil fuels such as fracked shale gas and mined bitumen. The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics. Meanwhile climate events are destroying infrastructure and producing great waves of homeless migrants from failing states. All of these incontestable realities highlight the fact that our dreams of a renewable powered boom are illusory. We need a different conversation than fossil fuelled business as usual or a Green New Deal. Michaux has offered some starters. “We need frank discussion about what minerals we think we need versus what we’ve got,” he said in an excellent interview with Nate Hagens on his podcast, The Great Simplification. “And then we’re going to realize that what we got won’t work with the existing plan.” Fundamentally, we need to talk about a future of less instead of a future of more. Society will have to build simple products that last and that can be easily recycled. “And we will scale back our needs and our society will simplify,” adds Michaux. That is the conversation we should be having now. The one we continue to avoid. Teaser photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...o.jpg#/media/File:Kamoto_Mine_-_panoramio.jpg