The transition to clean energy and digital technologies can trace some of its beginnings to Germany in the 1980s and these beginnings culminated in Paris 2015, when 195 nations jointly agreed to accelerate this formidable journey, and signed the “Paris Accord”.
Their goal was to keep the increase in global warming to below two degrees by the end of this century: mainly by replacing fossil fuels with green energy.
The delegates, as stated, signed the Paris agreement and all rejoiced in the new world order to which they were signatories, but they were blind to some of the hazards inherent in their agreement!
They forgot that the Earth will always have the final say!
One of the major hazards and dark sides to the clean energy and digital technologies is the requirements for the use of Rare Earth Metals.
The requirements for Rare Earth Metals will eventually cripple entire swathes of economies, and may plunge hordes of workers into retrenchment, triggering social upheaval that will shake democratic foundations. Even military sovereignty’s may be compromised.
The energy and digital transition will devastate the environment in untold ways. Ultimately, the environmental price of obtaining the Rare Earth Metals needed to build these new clean energy sources and digital technologies is so staggering that there is no guarantee that they will succeed.
The message is real, and crystal clear: the 196 delegates in Le Bourget that day signed the Paris agreement and committed to this Herculean task without considering a few crucial questions.
Where and how are we going to procure the rare metals without which this treaty will fail?
Will there be winners and losers on the new chessboard of rare metals, as there were for coal and oil?
What will be the economic, social, and environmental cost of securing supply?
A recent article the Hong Kong Free Press (excerpt copied below) published on 2nd January 2022 regards deep sea mining and environmental catastrophe set out some of the hazards to be faced in chasing supply of rare earth metals:
Earth’s final frontier: China and the deep-sea gold rush set to cause environmental catastrophe
Scientists say that a highly controversial deep-sea “gold rush” risks potentially devastating consequences for marine ecosystems, biodiversity, coastal communities and climate change.
The deep seabed is Earth’s final frontier but this mostly unexplored, dark and pristine abyss is threatened by highly destructive deep-sea mining which could be at full throttle within months.
“Most, if not all deep-sea biologists are very worried about deep-sea mining,” says Dr Moriaki Yasuhara a deep-sea ecologist and associate professor at the Swire Institute of Marine Science in the University of Hong Kong.
The deep-sea mining agenda is being led by nations like China and private corporations desperate to extract polymetallic nodules from the deep ocean floor. They say these potato-sized nuggets rich in valuable cobalt, nickel and other battery metals could be the key to the world’s sustainable future.
There is a growing chorus of dissent which insists the environmental impact of these deep-sea mining operations has not been properly assessed. They involve giant mechanical seabed tractors, hoovering up nodules before crushing them and trailing long plumes of sediment.
Yasuhara explains that the deep seabed can be compared to a tropical rain forest or a coral reef in terms of biodiversity but is unique because of its vast size and great depth. Until recently, this mostly pristine and precious environment has remained beyond the reach of mankind. The problem is that it is so technically challenging to reach these remote subsea habitats, several kilometres beneath the surface, that research is thin and information scarce.
“We simply don’t yet know how many deep-sea species exist,” says Yasuhara. The fear is that this environment will be devastated even before scientists can fully evaluate and understand it.
It is this lack of knowledge which prompted Yasuhara to join the 617 leading ocean scientists and policy experts from over 44 countries who signed a statement calling for a pause to deep-sea mining.
The expert statement strongly recommends that “the transition to the exploitation of mineral resources be paused until sufficient and robust scientific information has been obtained to make informed decisions as to whether deep-sea mining can be authorized without significant damage to the marine environment and, if so, under what conditions.”
It’s not only scientists and experts like Yasuhara who are calling for a moratorium on all sea bed mining activity.
The Paris Accord and all of the similar sustainability conferences that have been held around the globe since then have been focused on controlling the effects of climate change yet the question that should be foremost in all people’s minds should be; “What level of environmental harm are we prepared to accept as a result of our requirements to have the current level of technology continue to be available going forward into the future?”
The sustainable green technology itself is actually one of the serious hazards to our natural environment particularly when we take into account the resources that will be required to expand and manage that infrastructure for the world’s burgeoning population.
As evidenced in the above article on sea bed mining, the world is rapidly seeking to identify and develop new and further resources that are required to allow for the expansion of our current technological infrastructure in line with rapidly increasing population growth.
The expansion of the infrastructure is just the beginning of the environmental hazards that we are faced with as once we have used the resources to develop the infrastructure, that infrastructure has a set lifespan and then has to be either discarded or recycled.
Although we are moving to so-called green sustainable electricity generation, currently our supply is primarily generated by; Hydro, geothermal, coal, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fuelled generators.
For the purpose of this analysis I will use an electric vehicle [EV] car battery as an example.
It is claimed by many that an EV is a zero-emission vehicle and this in fact is not true. Since a percentage of the electricity used to charge the batteries is generated from fossil-fuelled plants, it follows that the same percentage of the EVs on the road are effectively fossil-fuelled.
It takes the same amount of energy to move a gasoline-driven automobile a kilometre as it does an electric one. The question is what produces the power? It does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
There are two types of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types.
Those dry-cell batteries use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium.
We use millions of these two different battery types each year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills and when you throw your small, used batteries in the rubbish, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. When a battery runs down and can no longer power an object we think of it as dead; well, it is not.
It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill is toxic. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles etc. The good thing about those is that ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately we do not yet know how to recycle EV batteries like our example or take care to dispose of single-use ones properly.
For those of you excited about electric cars and the green revolution, you need to take a closer look at batteries and also wind turbines and solar panels. These three technologies share what are actually environmentally destructive embedded costs.”
Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. Batteries have embedded costs that not only come in the form of energy use but also as environmental destruction, pollution, disease, child labour, and the inability to be recycled.
The example battery weighs approximately 450Kgs and contains 11Kgs of lithium, 26Kgs of nickel, 20Kgs of manganese, 13Kgs cobalt, 90Kgs of copper, and 180Kgs of aluminium, steel, and plastic. Inside it is 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells.
All of those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV battery they must process 11,100Kgs of brine for the lithium, 13,300Kgs of ore for the cobalt, 2,200Kgs of ore for the nickel, and 11,100Kgs of ore for copper. All told, they need to mine approximately 230,000Kgs of the earth’s crust for just – one – battery.
Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of an EV battery, comes from the Congo where the mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. So should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the embedded cost of driving an electric car?
Currently California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and wind turbines. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating a future environmental disaster.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Wind turbines are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs approximately 1600 tonnes (the equivalent of 23 houses), contains 1300 tonnes of concrete, 250 tonnes of steel, 40 tonnes of iron, 20 tonnes of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earth metals neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 36,000 Kgs and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades so currently they are cut up and buried in landfills.
Wind turbines generate mountains of waste
Sadly both solar arrays and wind turbines kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.
There is a place for these green technologies but we need to look beyond the myth of zero emissions and identify the true embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them to allow for an accurate analysis of the benefits in comparison with the clean energy hazards.
We must remember that the Earth will always have the final say!
Andy Loader