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.
I have had so many debates about so-called minerals depletion that I ended up giving people quick advice:
If you think a mineral is problematic, do two things:
Find the appropriate report of the USGS on that mineral. Here is the link. Note that “rare earth” is a report of its own but some of the minerals called that have a separate report.
Go read their definition of reserves and resources. This is not an optional step because that’s where a lot of misunderstanding comes from.
I said step 2 is not optional, but in case you skipped it, here is a dumed down version