Going green isn’t going to be a walk in a pristine park. Decarbonizing the world means massive increase in the mining and extraction of minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt. It will also mean international tensions, and perhaps elevate the importance in the world of China, as the major processor of the mineral ores.
That’s the word from “environmental peacemaking expert” Olivia Lazard of Carnegie Europe, affiliated with the U.S.-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a recent TED talk in New York. She said, “I work in international security and in conflict resolution. And today, I’m here to talk about some of our blind spots related to decarbonization.”
The minerals needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, while vastly electrifying the globe are, Lazard says, are “pretty. And they can be deadly. Looking into their story tells us that confronting conflict and building new forms of international peace are going to be critical foundations to build a climate-safe future.”
Uncoupling the generation of greenhouse gases from the economy while continuing to provide economic growth, she says, means mineral mining on a much bigger scale than we have seen to date. “To harness renewables or renewable energy like the sun and the wind, we obviously need to build technologies such as solar panels, windmills, batteries, right? And to build those, we need to mine huge quantities of non-renewable materials” such as lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths. That means, Lazard observes, “Our ticket to green growth, in other words, is digging deep in the environment.”
According to Lazard, “History tells us that when the dominant source of energy changes, power relations change as well. Countries that can transform energy to their own advantage, can gain the upper hand economically and politically.” Coal created the industrial revolution and the British empire. Oil turned the U.S. into a global superpower.
Today, “We’re facing the challenge of implementing the biggest energy transition in the history of humankind under a ticking climate clock. The race is on for a new generation of power. At the heart of which you have all of the critical materials that we need to decarbonize on the one hand and digitalize on the other.”
How will the supply and demand for the critical materials change geopolitics? “If you look at a material such as lithium, countries like Chile and Australia tend to dominate extraction while China dominates processing. For cobalt, the Democratic Republic of Congo dominates extraction while China dominates processing. For nickel, countries like Indonesia and the Philippines tend to dominate extraction, while China, you guessed it, thank you, dominates processing. And for rare earths, China dominates extraction while China dominates processing.”
China, notes Lazard, “skillfully leveraged its geo-economic rise to power over the last two decades on the back of integrating supply chains for rare earths from extraction to processing to export. We tend to point fingers at China today for not going fast enough on its own domestic energy transition, but the truth is that China understood already long ago that it would play a central role in other countries’ transitions. And it is. The European Union, for instance, is 98 percent dependent on China for rare earths. Needless to say, this puts China in a prime position to redesign the global balance of power.”
In a related economic issue, the Wall Street Journal this week reported, “As more companies pledge to neutralize their carbon emissions in response to climate change, securing green power in the U.S. is getting much more expensive.
Surging demand has pushed up the U.S. price of renewable energy certificates, a financial instrument that lets companies say they bought clean electricity from the grid. The price of RECs more than quadrupled at one point last year and is still around triple its level for most of the past decade, data trackers say.”
–Kennedy Maize
Twitter (@kennedymaize)