Sacred Headwaters #59: "More Mobility...Less Mining"
EVs are gaining momentum. But the current policy path entrenches car dependence and commits us to unrealistic, unjust and unsustainable levels of mining. Can we shape a better future with less mining?
Sacred Headwaters is a (roughly) bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity, the power structures blocking change, and how we can overcome them and build a future in which all of humanity can thrive. If you’re just joining, consider checking out the first issue for some context and head over to our table of contents to browse the whole library. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but they do build on concepts over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:
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Issue #59: “More Mobility…Less Mining”
By all accounts, the electric vehicle revolution is really (finally) taking off, even in reticent geographies like North America. And governments are finally giving it serious backing, too, with legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. They’re also beginning to take seriously what full electrification means for mining: the US, UK, EU, and Canada (undoubtedly other countries as well) now all have their own “critical minerals strategies” that attempt to secure long-term, preferably domestic (though this isn’t always feasible) access to the minerals required for this energy transition.
With climate progress (real or perceived), though, comes backlash. There’s an interesting emerging, or at least accelerating, trend on the right: highlighting the human rights impacts of “critical mineral” mining in the Global South.
This may sound out of character, and of course, it is: it’s part of a much bigger political project that has nothing to do with human rights or global justice. And the framing of this criticism tends to be both absurd and misleading:
The problem, unfortunately, is that while these attacks are clearly in bad faith, they’re not wrong: mining is the industry most responsible for human rights abuses globally and the EV revolution (on its current trajectory) requires growing the industry by multiple orders of magnitude. Heck, a Canadian mining company was sued for using slave labor in Eritrea (they recently settled out of court), and that’s par for the course, as far as the industry goes — except in so far as they were held accountable for it.
The current plan for decarbonizing transportation, particularly in car-centric countries like the US and Canada, involves massive expansions of mining over the coming decades. These expansions will likely be unimaginably destructive both ecologically and to the people unlucky enough to live near mineral deposits. They also might not be technically possible, at least not without new mineral discoveries and extraction technologies.
I’ve written about decarbonizing the auto industry in this newsletter a few times (see Issue #24: “Cars to drive or a planet to live in?” and Issue #25: The Intransigence of Auto Policy) and the one thing that’s clear is that, despite our policy trajectory here in North America, simply migrating the entire (perennially growing) personal vehicle fleet to electric will not reduce emissions to levels consistent with 1.5 or even 2 °C. But that warming calculus isn’t the only problem with this strategy of fleet replacement: it requires a massive, massively destructive, and perhaps not even possible expansion of mining for minerals like lithium and cobalt.
This comes with human rights abuses, as the right has so tactfully reminded us, ecological impacts, and also geopolitical impacts. As the authors of the report this issue focuses on note, the very idea of a “critical mineral” is militarist at its core. It’s a national security concept that has little to do with the minerals themselves or the energy transition and everything to do with a nationalist insistence on achieving what they call “supply chain dominance.” Can we really expect a just, livable future to emerge from a world where each powerful nation’s strategy seems to be to seize and restrict access to the minerals required to mitigate climate change?
The question we’re left with is this: if EVs can’t solve the challenges of decarbonizing transportation on their own and if their widespread adoption comes with a myriad of other problems ranging from neocolonial injustice to biodiversity loss to increased militarism and global conflict, how do we move forward?
The answer — to the extent there is one — is to reframe our goals and assumptions. Personal car ownership isn’t an end in itself. Cars are giant chunks of metal that cost a boatload of money, take up large amounts of public space, require regular maintenance, and kill people constantly. There are cultural and status-related reasons for ownership in certain countries (reasons that were manufactured over time by a combination of auto industry propaganda and deliberate government infrastructure decisions). But the only good reason we own them is for the mobility they provide.
Under most circumstances, that mobility can be provided in cheaper, safer, lower carbon, and lower mineral ways — and already is in many parts of the world!
In this issue, we’ll look specifically at the mineral dimensions of this question: what do “critical mineral” requirements look like under a variety of different decarbonization strategies? Who will bear the brunt of those requirements? And to what degree are they even possible to meet? The answer to the first question varies greatly by country, and it’s particularly important to look at that question in places like the US, both because of abnormally high levels of car dependence and because of the role wealthy countries play as norm-setters for the rest of the world.
Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining (1.5 hours)
Thea Riofrancos et al, Climate and Community, January 2023. This report is long! I found the entire thing valuable, but you can get the gist of it from the summary page on their website or the Executive Summary. You could conceivably skip some of the more technical sections as well.
A transportation strategy that foregrounds mass transit, cycling, and walkability—combined with a circular economy approach to raw material recovery and reuse— implies an overall reduction in new lithium mining and localized vehicle pollution, improvements in transportation equity, and a hastening of urgent planetary decarbonization...such a pathway provides a clear alternative to prevailing transportation scenarios, which rely on fasttracking new mines, intensifying environmental pressures on landscapes subject to mining, destroying Indigenous lands and livelihoods, or increasing pressure on globally fraught supply chains in order to power an expansive, electrified car fleet (p. 43)
The authors of this report rightly consider it settled that reducing car dependency is not only the most efficient decarbonization strategy for transportation in countries like the US, but a necessary one, and that simply replacing the existing fleet with EVs will not be sufficient to limit global warming to 1.5-2 degrees. Instead of making that case, they look at another facet of the problem: the potential environmental and human rights consequences of the lithium mining that would be required for a wholesale replacement of the vehicle fleet at our current levels of car dependence. The report focuses on the US market specifically because of its high levels of car dependence, a characteristic that makes it a major driver of these questions globally — and potentially a major beneficiary of efforts to reduce that dependence.
The authors modeled four different scenarios for the total lithium required by the US auto market in 2050 and found that a handful of different policy approaches could radically reduce the total amount of lithium required, especially if used in concert with each other. The largest reduction could come, unsurprisingly, from a focus on reducing personal vehicle ownership, but the contributions made by both ensuring that lithium batteries are properly recycled and limiting the maximum size of car batteries would also be significant. The average EV battery size in the US has doubled since EVs were first introduced, and the average size in vehicles sold in the US today is nearly double the global average. (In other words, the trend towards larger, longer-range vehicles like the Rivian R1T, Ford F150 Lightning, and the “e-Hummer” — god, really? — is quite problematic from a “lithium efficiency of transport” perspective).
The policy prescriptions this report recommends are probably not surprising to most people. But three things really stuck out to me: first, the sheer volume of lithium we’re talking about, especially when compared to the total known, technically extractable lithium on Earth. Second, the report’s careful focus on the impacts on communities that lithium mining has today, particularly on Indigenous peoples in Chile and Nevada, and the framing of the potential of radically expanded mining within that context. And third, the way the authors explain — and challenge, by the very act of writing this report — how demand forecasts aren’t simply descriptive tools, but political ones that have a discernible impact on policy decisions made today. The flurry of “critical minerals strategies” and massive subsidies for expanding domestic mining, especially in countries like the US and Canada, are a response to economic forecasts of mineral demand. But these forecasts all make one basic assumption, the same one that seems to undergird most climate policy today: nothing will fundamentally change over the next three decades (except the energy source of cars). When these forecasts are allowed to dominate the narrative, they drive political action that makes them self-fulfilling. By attempting to predict the future, they actually narrow the space of available futures to those that maintain their unwritten assumptions.
forecasts are not just about the future; they shape behavior in the present (p. 17)
We can — and must — make decisions that prove those forecasts wrong.
Other Resources
Protect Thacker Pass; People of Red Mountain — a coalition of Indigenous people, environmental groups, and ranchers are fighting a massive proposed lithium mine in Nevada, one so large that it will increase global lithium production by 25% (if it produces as much as its Canadian-owned proponent claims it will)
“The limits of transport decarbonization under the current growth paradigm” — this 2020 paper looked at global lithium demand through 2050 under a variety of different policy scenarios ranging from full EV adoption and current levels of car ownership through to degrowth, including specifically analyzing a "high e-bike scenario" (in between the two ends of the spectrum). They found that high levels of EV adoption coupled with no change in car ownership rates would virtually exhaust known, economically viable lithium reserves. The degrowth scenario would require just 1/6th of that amount of lithium. As Riofrancos and her coauthors point out, this paper assessed these questions at a global level; by looking specifically at car-dependent markets like the US, one can see that in certain contexts the gains (in terms of lithium efficiency of transport) stand to be much larger.
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Dear Nick - thoughtful as always. I'd like to suggest 3 things.
1 You start your articles by recognising that 8 billion people is about 7 billion too many, and we need to prioritise getting the birth rate under replacement, and limiting immigration of countries with falling populations, like Canada, to under replacement. A falling population, however gently, changes everything, by halting housing starts, and growth. Stopping growth is primary, and growth starts with population. I think you are going here with trying to change from a consumption culture, and both avenues are good. But population is the main driver.
2 This isn't an increase in mining, it is a potential switch from extracting oil to burn, to mining minerals which can be re-used. I think you're backing into the false message of the German politician, and I don't like that you platformed his bad trope. I'm glad you are noting human rights abuses, but they are not a reason to not switch from fossil fuels to EV cars. Qatar, Russia and Saudi Arabia are just as bad as mining companies. Let's starve Putin, so we can confront Teck at home.
It is interesting, that the elites are starting to jump ship, and switch from one resource they can dominate to another, but renewable energy is different. Big wind farms are bad, but I live off grid and get all my power from wind and sun. I have enough to charge an EV car. Most of my batteries are lead carbon, which are readily available and recyclable. Everyone could do this.
3 I highly recommend not getting too caught up in the details like "how much lithium do we think we need". How much oil are we already using? Nobody thought to care.
The only thing that matters, is stopping clearcutting and burning fossil fuels, and trying to get the population to adopt local, resilient technology, like insulation and solar power. The fossil fuel companies are circulating propaganda against renewables. That's who fed the German politician, an LNG lobbyist. We shouldn't be amplifying their message.
IN SHORT: Mining abuses are bad, but population reduction and switching from fossil fuels to solar power are good. We can strive for all of the things we want at once.
peace
Dear Nick we can’t all get electric cars.