Advice from a Green New Deal of the global South
And green activist deaths linked to mining as Elon jokes about a coup
The global North has a tendency to believe it can accomplish everything alone.
That includes the Green New Deal, the US progressives’ plan to cut off carbon emissions while equitably creating jobs in the US. The lens in Europe’s Green Deal is similarly focused on consumer countries.
Anything the most energy-consuming countries can do to limit their climate pollutants is good for the world. But the solar panels, wind turbines, electric transport will not be produced in the same place where those carbon savings will be counted. The goal is to “save the planet”, but plans in the global North are separated by borders.
Among the Green New Deal tenets, for example, is heavy investment in programs that will boost zero-emission transportation like battery electric vehicles. Joe Biden, who has supported the deal, falls short of envisioning anything other than making the US a leader in energy policy. In one tangible element, his climate plan wants every city with more than 100,000 residents to have access to “high-quality” zero-emission transportation.
Both plans refrain from including detail, but that’s where the issues lie for the rest of the world. (There are many other plans to decarbonize US transit and energy.)
While these plans have been circulating in the US, something has been brewing in the global South that wealthy consumers may need to pay attention to.
A group of Latin American researchers and activists have put forward the “Ecosocial Pact from the Global South.” It’s a short, 9-point spark for discussion between governments and citizens across Latin America, but it’s also speaking to the world. When I last checked, it had 3,506 individual and organizational signatories.
The pact grew from conversations between Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa (below) and lawyer Enrique Viale (above).
The two are uniquely familiar with the view from the extraction end of the consumer-focused supply chain. Viale fought in court against Monsanto and set up the Environmental Lawyers Association of Argentina, and Svampa has researched and published widely on the socio-ecological crises of extraction.
Similar to the Green New Deal, the global South pact understands that social justice and climate neutrality are inseparable. But there are a few things that make it a unique learning opportunity for those interested in just energy policy in the global North.
To understand those things, I spoke with Thea Riofrancos, who is optimally positioned to understand how a poorly planned transition can end up exacerbating global inequalities. She’s a political science professor at Providence College, she co-authored a book last year in support of the Green New Deal, and next month her book on resource extraction in Ecuador will hit the presses.
At the very least, she says, cries for global justice from areas historically sought for their minerals should call attention to the impacts that a green push will bring. In our not-so-brief conversation on Tuesday, Riofrancos said:
There’s no such thing as a solely domestic policy.
Last month, she joined a panel of speakers (Spanish) to put the conversations in the global South in the context of the Green New Deal.
For the most part, when people use that term, they’re thinking of a transformation that would take place within US borders. The difference with the Ecosocial Pact is that from the get-go, it’s not just a national thing in one country. It’s a regional idea.
There’s a way in which whenever you’re speaking from the global South you’re perspective tends to be internationalist, because of the international structures that reproduce inequality and that affect the global South that are very clear. Whereas in the US, there are these kinds of national blinders that our wealth and resources allow us to think that we can go at these things alone without thinking about the implications elsewhere.
A country like Chile, always in the investor crosshairs for its lithium and copper deposits, public debt hangs over any talk of overhauling their own infrastructure. The global South pact calls for the cancellation of external debt, which has also been proposed by the UN Conference on Trade and Development.
It’s immediately clear that global changes need to happen in order for national or local changes to also happen.
Widely supported transition roadmaps in the US are planned as if they are insulated from the rest of the world — and sometimes from the neighborhoods next door.
For example, the newly unveiled plan for electrifying transit in New York state. People who buy electricity are expected to subsidize the construction of EV charging ports all over the state in a $750M push to make the state friendlier to individually owned battery EVs.
As Riofrancos points out, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plan doesn’t question the infrastructure in place that has made the US a top energy consumer (and demander). What if instead the money were given to public transit, which has already had budget shortfalls? As Green Rocks readers know, electrifying different types of transportation, especially earlier, could result in very different demands on minerals extracted.
The question is what kind of vehicles, and how many of them? What type of built environment are they inserted to? How can we make that greener, more equitable, more just?
Those questions lead to very different amounts of resource use and the associated social and environmental costs of resource extraction.
And that does not look like everyone owning a Tesla, which is not even possible given peoples’ income levels. Even with substantial rebates, it’s expensive.
Creating the infrastructure for individually owned electric vehicles now may only serve later to spike pressures on the world’s mines — often in the global South — to feed consumers who don’t have other walking, biking or public transit alternatives.
The Green New Deal and others have not considered the impacts of its green push, but Riofrancos believes they should.
The inequalities exist, so you have to intentionally want to change them otherwise everything happens within the grooves of the structures of the preexisting economy, which is extremely unequal, and getting much more unequal by the day from the pandemic.
I think we just need to have these conversations more as environmentalists and researchers, because we can unwittingly be swept along into a form of decarbonization that actually has some nefarious consequences.
The pact has also been translated as the “Southern Ecosocial Pact.” I used global South, because the term described what Thea and I discussed. It’s a term that is defined by its use, and because it is vague (hence the lowercase g), it presents ample flexibility to escape boundaries that are only geographic. The authors of the pact also used “global South.”
Weekly InQuarry
China produces most graphite. Who is challenging its control?
Louisiana. And Mozambique. And Tanzania. And Australia.
Graphite is a critical component of a lithium-ion battery. The cathode and its raw materials usually make headlines, but the anode, which also stores electric charge, is most often graphite. Some battery experts even think an equally plausible name for some lithium-ion batteries could be nickel-graphite batteries, highlighting materials in the highest concentrations.
In 2018, Australian company Syrah Resources finally settled in the town of Vidalia, Louisiana, for its graphite processing center. There, it ships Mozambique-mined concentrate to be made into graphite anode material, after which it would be sent to battery makers. Last November, it produced its first round of anode graphite.
The project took two years to find a local Louisiana community that allowed its potential hazards and a local government that would issue permits. Locals still worry about its wastewater disposal and air pollution.
Another graphite producer, EcoGraf, will mine ore in Tanzania and send it to Western Australia for processing, which will send it to Germany for manufacturing. These two Australian companies are deliberately trying to offset China’s dominance, as highlighted in a recent Nikkei Asian Review piece.
Environment & Human Rights News
Countless people in villages around the world have long been on the frontlines of the battle against the industries warming the planet. Those businesses — some of whom rake in cash from clean energy industries — have been linked to the deaths of hundreds of those activists, according to investigative nonprofit Global Witness.
Last year was the deadliest year on record for environmental defenders. Read their report on the toll of environmental activism in 2019.
For example, Read about Bai Bibyaon Ligkayan Bigkay and Datu Kaylo Bontolan in the Philippines. Bai Bibyaon is the only woman chieftain in the history of her peoples. She and her friend Datu Kaylo had long documented violence from security forces in a region slated for mining and agribusiness.
Datu Kaylo’s death and half of all killings in the Philippines have been linked to mining. Miners in the Philippines, a top supplier of nickel, have been pushing to dig more projects for years, but the government has on occasion strong-armed open-pit miners, and at other times ushered them in.
Mining was the sector linked to the most murders, with 50 defenders killed in 2019. More than half of them were from mining-affected communities in Latin America. The Philippines was the country with most mining-related killings, with 16 deaths.
More
Indigenous communities around copper and lithium mines in Chile have raised concerns that continued operation of the mines puts workers and locals in danger of becoming another Covid-19 hotspot. From the translation obtained by Earthworks:
At the time of sending this report, the copper and lithium companies which operate in the Atacama Salt Flat and its surroundings, have not ceased their operations which represents a serious threat of spread of COVID-19. Many of the community members of elderly people, the population at heightened risk for contracting the virus.
The Mining Observatory, a center for investigative journalism in Brazil’s mining sector, report that mineral giants Vale and BHP may be evading their pledges to repair damage from one of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters after their tailings dam collapsed in 2015.
Two rare plants in the Nevada desert are throwing a wrench into the plans a proposed lithium-boron project. After conservationists requested the two plants be listed as endangered, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said there was enough evidence to undertake a year-long review of the risks to the plants.
As Chile awaits the decision on Chilean miner SQM’s fate, a judge called for more studies on what lithium extraction actually does to the Atacama salt flats (Salar). There is very little public information on its impacts, despite producing a quarter of the world’s lithium. “To the court, it seems like commonsense if we want to do sustainable mining in the Salar that we effectively need to have all the elements on the table,” the judge wrote.
Mining Industry News
Two rare earth elements projects — MP Materials in California and Lynas/Blue Line in Texas — have secured funding from the US Department of Defense. It’s a long-awaited baby step toward drawing the supply chain away from China, and it has been led by the Pentagon.
Companies in France began building the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor, an energy source that has been theorized to produce nearly unlimited energy. At its core are temperatures 10 times hotter than the core of the sun, and it requires 3,000-tons of magnets.
A worker at a Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo has died of Covid-19. Huayou, China’s top refiner of cobalt, declined to comment.
Elon Musk’s call to mine more nickel is mostly a non-story, because mining doesn’t just respond to a producer’s request. Musk also joked about starting a coup. But I was concerned that he forgot to loop me into his conversation that Indonesia is “great” on nickel. Indonesia is the top producer of nickel, but as my reporting has documented, only by sacrificing local communities, their ecosystems, and the “clean” in clean energy. There are alternatives that deserve attention.
A Canadian company planning to mine vanadium and uranium in Nevada is using Trump’s 2017 order to fast-track environmental reviews for critical minerals from several years to one year. Vanadium has promise from a range of battery chemistries for large-scale storage, but it’s also used in a number of construction and computer materials, including many defense technologies.
Reads
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Hi! I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, the newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.
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I've just found this blog and I'm mightily impressed. It seems that virtually all the Northern proponents of Green New Deals are either ignorant of the extractivism they're promoting or they don't care "because the climate matters so much". This should be the hottest of topics yet, when someone highlights it in a documentary such as Planet of the Humans, they're accused of being in bed with the fossil fuel industry.