Universalism and Sacrifice | News Round-up #53

And some news about the newsletter.

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.

First, a note to check out a Mongabay webinar in which I and SIRGE Coalition member Galina Angarova discuss some tips on investigating the grand world of ‘energy transition minerals’. It’s aimed at journalists, but it includes insights in the field from a variety of perspectives, so Mongabay put it in podcast form, too. And now a note with some news.

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When the climate made its first appearance in my reporting, it was by accident. As a rookie journalist in 2019, I was living on Sulawesi Island in Indonesia. Friends there had persuaded me to stay and write, and they pulled me into environmental journalism. I began reporting for Mongabay about land conflicts, bird trafficking, and threats to marine life. The topic nagging at me was nickel mining. Sulawesi had for decades hosted foreign firms extracting minerals and shipping them around the world. Yet new voices were driving a new wave of mining: The World Bank in 2017 had lent credence to the global “need” for new mines to supply climate technologies like electric vehicles. Indonesia’s power brokers and private sector seized the opportunity to create mines that would save the world.

I had barely grasped this before setting off to report on a mine conflict on a small island (Indonesian laws prohibit mining on small islands, but they earn permits regardless). I found the firm linked to an emerging supply chain for nickel designed for lithium-ion batteries. This mine, which had ignited local and national protest, seemed to be crucial for reducing emissions and stabilizing rising global temperatures. How was I supposed to address this tension as a journalist? Was this story about a mine actually a story about climate action?

I’ve since reported dozens of stories that start like this: private firms and policymakers bestow a mineral or mine with the power to stifle emissions at the expense of a local community. Scores of other journalists and researchers have found their way to similar stories. Their refrains have become common parlance: climate minerals, blood cobalt, child labor, ethical mines. (I only permit myself the “dirty/clean” dichotomous trope with irony in my newsletter slogan.) With every new book and article, mining enters the public imagination as a wrangled mess of moral imperatives. Mining is increasingly visible but in a way that doesn’t challenge the idea that “Civilization would not exist were it not for miners,” to use a recent Wall Street Journal proclamation. This is the normality of mining. (Consider also the recent ICMM newsletter.) As a leading climate writer summarized to me recently, we need all those minerals, and we just have to make sure to local communities benefit in the process.

I encountered this approach when I moved to the US at the start of the pandemic. The fight to electrify the grid and transportation was already decades old and still facing an uphill climb against hostile leaders and paltry funding. The conflicts and violence I witnessed in Sulawesi were supposedly a small part of a global mission to reduce emissions. A mining firm in Indonesia leveraging a history of land capture and recent regulatory privilege was just a soldier in this battle against fossil fuels. Remote villages, bustling reefs, and dense forests were a sacrifice for the greater good. In the words of Bill McKibben, “You do have to mine to produce the minerals for a clean-energy world.”

I use past tense there, but not much has changed. The primary debates between mining and climate have persisted since 2019. Are there enough minerals? Where will we get them? Can we get them fast enough? How can firms minimize damage? It’s an echo that has hammered on for years, bolstered by each new publication that juxtaposes mining harms and climate necessity. Bringing these two environmental and moral problems into the same conversation portrays the violence a community faces in terms of a problem that the community played no role in causing. As if a global problem ought to define a very local issue. Reindeer herders in Sweden, Peruvian families breathing in dust, Chilean farmers on the fringes of salt flats, debt-burdened small island states, Congolese contractors risking safety for meager pay, Indonesian fishers fighting through muck, Indigenous Greenlanders fighting hazardous waste, Native Americans seeking protections for religious rights, and myriad more peoples ought to put their problems in perspective. There’s a bigger problem that needs addressing, right? Shouldn’t the rest of the world have a say in whether a particular tract of land is mined for its climate-saving minerals? (I’m likely guilty of falling into this trap as a journalist, too.)

Journalism has been a great forum for me to explore the breadth of perspectives within this topic. But I’ve found that there is little funding to support the kind of reporting that challenges this common framing, which hasn’t changed in five years. Even the widely reported statistics on the expected skyrocketing demand for minerals (500% more lithium!) have evaded the basic reporter’s question about conflict of interest: mining firms only survive if they can persuade investors that the market for minerals will be stronger in the future. What of the mining firms that simultaneously expand coal production as they build out energy transition minerals? Or the projects that obliterate sustainable ways of living which themselves embody a kind of “climate solution”? Or the decades it takes to build a single mine and the risks of delaying climate action?

Framing new mining enterprises as climate conversations strips power from local communities facing legitimate devastation. The rhetoric of sacrifice allows for established powers to determine the purposes of sacrifice. It devalues the worldviews that are at risk of disappearing when massive development imposes itself and upends lives. ‘Climate’ itself sits comfortably as a vague term implying a global aim, as the atmosphere exists everywhere. This employs a universalism, as if we’re all in it together, while it enables the immense loss of entire worlds of being, framed as sacrifice.

All this to say: I have been in this mining+climate conversation a long time, as have you all, but we ought to recognize the problems with having this conversation in the first place. My instinct, then, is to include more people in the conversation.

The language I’m using might imply where I’m headed with this: Academia. This fall, I’ll be entering a geography PhD program with the intrepid Julie Klinger, who has crafted an expert team on mining and justice at the University of Delaware. I will of course continue the newsletter, since I keep hearing from people I’ve never met that it has become a helpful resource. I’ll lift my self-imposed requirement to publish only on Thursdays, and I’ll allow the length of each edition to vary more widely. It will change, but I’m not sure what it will become, and how quickly. And I hope that, in sharing more of my perspective, I haven’t discouraged you from sticking with Green Rocks — after all, it’s the same perspective that has always shaped this newsletter.

As always, interested in feedback from all 2700+ of you — and any stories I forgot below, which is surely to be many.

Banggai, Indonesia

News Round-up

• The US and the Philippines are discussing how to prevent Chinese firms from dominating nickel processing within the latter’s borders.

• Hyundai Motors ended its aluminum supply deal with Adaro and its project in Indonesia that is expected to rely on coal power.

• Tesla supplier Piedmont Lithium received its final mining permit this month.

• Environmental activists in Bolivia say they’ve become the targets of discrimination, death threats and bombings after speaking out against harmful mining operations.

• Brazilian officials rejected a plan offered by Vale and BHP to clean up after their 2015 tailings dam collapse, citing inadequacies.

• An iron company in Brazil is facing a lawsuit in the UK over river contamination.

• The UK has imposed sanctions on companies linked to two Sudanese military factions, including two mining companies.

• Seabed mining regulator ISA will host an election that pits its longtime leader against a Brazilian marine scientist.

Research & Reports

• The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre found that the mining industry was behind the greatest number of attacks on human rights defenders in 2023.

• A study from leading hydrogeologists of Andean salt flats write in a new article that their new model of water dynamics would benefit water management as climate change and lithium projects advance, although low regional coordination and sparse data make it difficult.

• Researchers in Australia question the urgency to mine for climate minerals and raise the opportunity to envision alternative types of extraction and solutions.

• Russia and copper topped the list of links to allegations of abuse at projects in Eastern and Central Europe that claim to aid the energy transition.

Reads

≠endorsement

• Mining Fight on the Okefenokee Swamp’s Edge May Have Only Just Begun (Inside Climate News)

• How Gulf states are putting their money into mining (Financial Times)

• Why climate change is leaving mining firms between a rock and a hard place (Reuters)

• Don’t Talk To Me About Solutions (Planet Critical)

• What is mineral sands mining and why are farmers wary of its potential to lead us 'out of climate crisis'? (ABC News)

• Cheap coal, cheap workers, Chinese money: Indonesia’s nickel success comes at a price (The Guardian)

• How Nevada is about to become a leading boron producer (The Nevada Independent)

• How Anglo American turned into prey (Financial Times)