Climate technologies require enormous amounts of metal. I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.
Meticulous metal mixtures in batteries, wind turbines and solar panels are slated to deliver fossil-fuel burners to redemption. These are the technologies that many expect will stem a surging assault on the atmosphere.
That means a lot of materials. The promise that minerals will save the planet is amassing hefty investment for mining companies. Many have branded their copper, lithium, aluminum, cobalt, and nickel projects as crucial to a sustainable planet. Lesser known materials like graphite, tellurium, indium, zinc, and iron ore (despite its ubiquity) have also been pulled under the climate action umbrella.
This newsletter tracks this well-endowed vision of a particular kind of climate action. For centuries, the mining industry has been linked to human rights abuses and the obliteration of ecosystems. So far, the energy transition presents an opportunity to see these destructive practices in a new [green] light. What other options are there? Who gets to decide?
Reporting on the minerals needed for clean energy is haphazard and disconnected. This newsletter brings it all together.
About Me
I’m Ian Morse, and I used to work as a journalist in Indonesia, and Seattle, but I now spend my days pursuing a PhD in geography in the Klinger Lab. I continue fieldwork on the island of Sulawesi, which is rapidly becoming the world’s source of battery nickel. My journalistic work traced battery nickel supply chains, published with The New York Times, Washington Post, Mongabay, and Al Jazeera. I put together a handy visualization.
The Green Rocks logo was created by Wawan Akuba.
The result of the above tangled posture, taken while reporting this story:
