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.
Isn’t the copper largely an easy one to recycle though? Just offer some drug addicts their next hit and they will provide you with recycled copper.
Yes, copper recycling totally works, just like Fe, Al, Pb, Au and Ag. It’s just that the total mass of copper currently in circulation isn’t enough for our ambitious plans. We need a lot more of it to electrify everything. Also, more HVDC lines need to be built, and normally they are made of aluminum, so we’re going to need more of that as well. For example, North Africa could produce absurd amounts of solar power, and with HVDC lines you could transfer the energy over to Europe.