Green energy? Get ready to dig - Environmental and social costs of renewable energies
Giovanni Brussato
Publisher: Giovanni Brussato
Summary
A rapid and deep decarbonisation worldwide to limit global warming is the scenario drawn up by the IEA (International Energy Agency) to contain the rise in average temperatures as quickly as possible by means of what are known as green technologies: photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, storage systems and electric mobility. Building this equipment will require huge amounts of non-renewable resources. To meet this demand, the World Bank estimates that the colossal extraction of 3.5 billion tonnes of metals will be required over the next 25 years: we will mine more copper in the next quarter of this century than we have done in the last 5,000 years. In addition, the lack of effective technologies for recycling materials from obsolete equipment will lead to the production of huge amounts of waste. The author analyses the consequences of this on several levels, from the point of view of mining, he takes a journey across the planet to describe the environmental and social impacts of the mining industry: from the Alaskan forests to the Ecuadorian Andes, from the Atacama Desert to the island of Sulawesi, ending to the declared intentions to mine the ocean floor. He describes the main impacts of mining: from acid drainage contaminating water resources, to potential tailings dam disasters such as the recent one in Brazil, to the impact of extractivism on local communities. The uncomfortable truth is that most metals are consumed by the citizens of a handful of rich nations, while the social and cultural environmental consequences fall on the populations of the poorer nations where they are mined. The analysis is rounded off by geopolitical considerations that show how these critical raw materials, which are essential to achieving the goals of the Paris climate change agreements, entail a dependence on supplies from countries that are directly competing for the same goals, such as China, and therefore how the current dependence on fossil fuels could be replaced by a dependence on raw materials.
Available since: 09/02/2023.
