17/04/2019

Electric Cars Can Clean Up The Mining Industry – Here’s How

The Conversation -  | 


Electric vehicles and renewable energy must mine more responsibly. Ioanac/Shutterstock
Growing demand for electric vehicles is important to help cut transport emissions, but it will also lead to new mining. Without a careful approach, we could create new environmental damage while trying to solve an environmental problem.
Like solar panels, wind turbines and battery storage technologies, electric vehicles require a complex mix of metals, many of which have only been previously mined in small amounts.
These include cobalt, nickel and lithium for batteries used for electric vehicles and storage; rare earth metals for permanent magnets in electric vehicles and some wind turbines; and silver for solar panels.
Our new research (commissioned by Earthworks) at the Institute of Sustainable Futures found that under a 100% renewable energy scenario, demand for metals for electric vehicles and renewable energy technologies could exceed reserves for cobalt, lithium and nickel.
To ensure the transition to renewables does not increase the already significant environmental and human impacts of mining, greater rates of recycling and responsible sourcing are essential.

Greater uptake of electric vehicles will translate to more mining of metals such as cobalt. Shutterstock
Recycling can offset demand for new mining
Electric vehicles are only a very small share of the global vehicle market, but their uptake is expected to accelerate rapidly as costs reduce. This global shift is the main driver of demand for lithium, cobalt and rare earths, which all have a big effect on the environment.
Although electric vehicles clearly help us by reducing transport emissions, the electric vehicle and battery industries face the urgent challenge of improving the environmental effects of their supply chains.
Our research shows recycling metals can significantly reduce primary demand for electric vehicle batteries. If 90% of cobalt from electric vehicle and energy storage batteries was recycled, for instance, the cumulative demand for cobalt would reduce by half by 2050.
So what happens to the supply when recycling can’t fully meet the demand? New mining is inevitable, particularly in the short term.
In fact, we are already seeing new mines linked to the increasing demand for renewable technologies.

Clean energy is not so clean
Without responsible management, greater clean energy uptake has the potential to create new environmental and social problems. Heavy metals, for instance, could contaminate water and agricultural soils, leading to health issues for surrounding communities and workers.
Most of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and around 20% of this is from artisanal and small-scale miners who work in dangerous conditions in hand-dug mines.
This includes an estimated 40,000 children under 15.
Rare earths processing requires large amounts of harmful chemicals and produces large volumes of solid waste, gas and wastewater, which have contaminated villages in China.
Copper mining has led to pollution of large areas through tailings dam failures, including in the US and Canada. A tailings dam is typically an earth-filled embankment dam used to store mining byproducts.

A tailings dam. Edvision/Shutterstock

When supply cannot be met by recycling, we argue companies should responsibly source these metals through verified certification schemes, such as the IRMA Standard for Responsible Mining.

What would a sustainable electric vehicle system look like?
A sustainable renewable energy and transport system would focus on improving practices for recycling and responsible sourcing.
Many electric vehicle and battery manufacturers have been proactively establishing recycling initiatives and investigating new options, such as reusing electric vehicle batteries as energy storage once they are no longer efficient enough for vehicles.
But there is still potential to improve recycling rates. Not all types of metals are currently being recovered in the recycling process. For example, often only higher value cobalt and nickel are recovered, whereas lithium and manganese are not.
And while electric vehicle manufacturers are beginning to engage in responsible sourcing, many are concerned about the ability to secure enough supply from responsibly sourced mines.
If the auto industry makes public commitments to responsible sourcing, it will have a flow-on effect. More mines would be encouraged to engage with responsible practices and certification schemes.
These responsible sourcing practices need to ensure they do not lead to unintended negative consequences, such as increasing poverty, by avoiding sourcing from countries with poorer governance.
Focusing on supporting responsible operations in these countries will have a better long-term impact than avoiding those nations altogether.

What does this mean for Australia?
The Australian government has committed to supporting industry in better managing batteries and solar panels at the end of their life.
But stronger policies will be needed to ensure reuse and recycling if the industry does not establish effective schemes on their own, and quickly.
Australia is already the largest supplier of lithium, but most of this is exported unprocessed to China. However, this may change as the battery industry expands.
For example, lithium processing facilities are under development in Western Australia. Mining company Lithium Australia already own a battery component manufacturer in Australia, and recently announced they acquired significant shares in battery recycling company Envirostream.
This could help to close the loop on battery materials and create more employment within the sector.

Human rights must not be sidelined
The renewable energy transition will only be sustainable if human rights are made a top priority in the communities where mining takes place and along the supply chain.
The makers of electric cars have the opportunity to lead these industries, driving change up the supply chain, and influence their suppliers to adopt responsible practices.
Governments and industry must also urgently invest in recycling and reuse schemes to ensure the valuable metals used in these technologies are recovered, so only what is necessary is mined.

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How Climate Change Is Pushing Central American Migrants To The US

The Guardian - 

The northern triangle of Central America, the largest source of asylum seekers crossing the US border, is deeply affected by environmental degradation
‘Comparing human beings to natural disasters is both lazy and dehumanizing.’ Photograph: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images 
Media outlets and politicians routinely refer to the “flood” of Central American migrants, the “wave” of asylum seekers, the “deluge” of children, despite the fact that unauthorized migration across the US borders is at record lows in recent years.
Comparing human beings to natural disasters is both lazy and dehumanizing, but perhaps this tendency to lean on environmental language when describing migration is an unconscious acknowledgement of a deeper truth: much migration from Central America and, for that matter, around the world, is fueled by climate change.
Yes, today’s Central American migrants – most of them asylum seekers fearing for their lives – are fleeing gangs, deep economic instability (if not abject poverty), and either neglect or outright persecution at the hands of their government.
But these things are all complicated and further compounded by the fact that the northern triangle of Central America – a region comprising Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and the largest sources of asylum seekers crossing our border in recent years – is deeply affected by environmental degradation and the impacts of a changing global climate.
‘Violence and environmental degradation are inextricably linked, and both lead to mass migration.’ Photograph: Pablo Cozzaglio/AFP/Getty Images 
The average temperature in Central America has increased by 0.5C since 1950; it is projected to rise another 1-2 degrees before 2050. This has a dramatic impact on weather patterns, on rainfall, on soil quality, on crops’ susceptibility to disease, and thus on farmers and local economies. Meanwhile, incidences of storms, floods and droughts on are the rise in the region. In coming years, according to the US Agency for International Development, countries in the northern triangle will see decreased rainfall and prolonged drought, writ large. In Honduras, rainfall will be sparse in areas where it is needed, yet in other areas, floods will increase by 60%. In Guatemala, the arid regions will creep further and further into current agricultural areas, leaving farmers out to dry. And El Salvador is projected to lose 10-28% of its coastline before the end of the century. How will all those people survive, and where will they go?
El Salvador is projected to lose 10-28% of its coastline before the end of the century. How will all those people survive, and where will they go?
This September, I travelled to El Salvador to report on the impacts of the US government’s family separation policy. I’d been to El Salvador many times before, but never to the Jiquilisco Bay, a stunning, shimmering and once abundant peninsula populated by mangroves and fishing communities and uncountable species of marine life. It is also one that, like many places in El Salvador, and like many places in the world, is also imperiled by climate change. Rising sea levels are destroying the mangrove forests, the marine life that relies on them, and thus the fishermen who rely on that marine life to feed themselves and eke out a meager economy.
I met a man there named Arnovis Guidos Portillo, a 26-year-old single dad. Many people in his family were fishermen, but they were able to catch fewer and fewer fish. The country’s drought and devastating rainfall meant that the area’s farming economy, too, was suffering. The land was stressed, the ocean was stressed, and so were the people. Arnovis got into a scuffle one day at a soccer game, which placed him on a hitlist with a local gang. He had been working as a day laborer here and there, but the drought meant there was less work, and it was hard to find work that didn’t require crossing into rival gang territory. If he did, he would be killed. So he took his daughter north to the United States, where border patrol agents separated them for two months, locking them up in different states and with zero contact.
‘People really don’t want to leave their homes for the vast uncertainty of another land.’ Photograph: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images 
Violence and environmental degradation are inextricably linked, and both lead to mass migration. An unstable planet and ecosystem lends itself to an unstable society, to divisions, to economic insecurity, to human brutality. When someone’s home becomes less and less livable, they move elsewhere. Wouldn’t each and every one of us do the same?
This week, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer published a series of pieces about the impacts of climate change in the Guatemalan highlands, where farmers are struggling to grow crops that they have been farming there for centuries. “In most of the western highlands,” Blitzer wrote, “the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when.”
A few years ago, I reported from Guatemala’s dry corridor, several hours away from where Blitzer was reporting, where persistent drought had decimated the region’s agriculture, and particularly the coffee crop, on which roughly 90% of local farmers relied. It was a wildly different landscape from the one Blitzer described, but it faced the same problem: if you live in an agricultural zone, come from a long line of farmers and can’t reliably harvest your crops any more, what else is there to do but leave?
If you live in an agricultural zone, come from a long line of farmers and can’t reliably harvest your crops any more, what else is there to do but leave?
It’s abundantly clear that climate change is a driver of migration to the US – we have the data, we have the facts, we have the human stories. Still, the Trump administration has done nothing to intervene in this root cause. In fact, the US government has systematically denied the existence of climate change, rolled back domestic regulations that would mitigate US carbon emissions and thumbed its nose at international attempts – such as the Paris accords – to curb global warming.
Now, in his latest futile, small-minded and cruel attempt to cut migration off at the neck (something we know is not possible – an unhealthy societal dynamic must be addressed at the root, just like with a struggling tree or crop), Donald Trump announced last week that he would cut all foreign aid to the northern triangle. It’s a punitive move, and one that – just like building a wall, separating families, locking people up indefinitely, and refusing asylum seekers entry across the border – is a petty intimidation tactic that will do nothing to actually curb forced migration.
In fact, cutting aid to Central America will do quite the opposite, for as much waste and imperfections as there are in international aid, aid in Central America has been vital for creating community safety programs, job skills development and government accountability standards. It has also helped with drought mitigation and supporting climate-resilient agricultural practices. In other words, foreign aid to Central America – a place unduly hit by climate change – is supporting the kind of climate change resiliency that will keep people from having to leave in the first place.
Because people really don’t want to leave their homes for the vast uncertainty of another land, particularly when that land proves itself again and again to be hostile to migrants’ very existence. People don’t want to be raped along the route north, or die in the desert, or have their child ripped away from them by the border patrol, or be locked up indefinitely without legal counsel, without adequate medical care, with no idea what will happen to them and when. Who would risk this if things were OK back home? People like Arnovis leave because they feel like they have to.
Eventually Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials convinced Arnovis to sign deportation papers with the promise that, if he did, he would be reunited with his daughter and returned to El Salvador. But he was shooed on to a plane back home without her. It took a tremendous amount of advocacy, but, after months locked up in the US, she, too was returned home. They are now back together, which is a good thing, but the fundamental problem hasn’t changed: he can’t find work. His society is ill. So is the planet, and the land and sea all around him.
Today, there are 64 million forced migrants around the world, more than ever before. They are fleeing war, persecution, disaster and, yes, climate change. The UN estimates that by 2050, there will be 200 million people forcibly displaced from their homes due to climate change alone.
Migration is a natural human phenomenon and, many argue, should be a fundamental right, but forced migration – being run out of home against one’s will and with threat to one’s life – is not natural at all. Today, whether we choose to see it or not, climate change is one of the largest drivers of migration, and will continue to be for years to come – unless we do something about it. If we want people to be able to stay in their homes, we have to tackle the issue of our changing global climate, and we have to do it fast.

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The Next Reckoning: Capitalism And Climate Change

New York Times - Nathaniel Rich*

Fixing the planet is going to be expensive. Can we stomach the bill for human survival?
In Bangladesh, the effects of climate change are happening now: It may lose more than 10 percent of its land to sea-level rise within a few decades. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
The world’s most difficult problem has a solution so simple that it can be expressed in four words: Stop burning greenhouse gases. How exactly to pull this off is somewhat more complicated — just not as complicated as most Americans have been led to believe. As James Hansen, the don of modern climate science, told me last year, “From a technology and economics standpoint, it is still readily possible to stay under two degrees Celsius.” Readily possible.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report from last October, which provoked widespread terror, echoed this conclusion. Keeping warming to 1.5 degrees above historical averages was possible, it found, provided we immediately began to eliminate carbon-dioxide emissions. This was terrifying only because we have not begun to do any such thing.
Most zero-emissions plans — “road maps,” in bureaucratese, or “pathways,” per the I.P.C.C. — propose some combination of the following elements: carbon taxes, effectual international treaties, increased subsidization of renewable energy, decreased subsidization of fossil fuels, nuclear energy, reforestation, land-use reform and investments in energy efficiency, energy storage and carbon-capture technology. But when it comes to drafting actual laws to achieve these policies, to quote the Heritage Foundation fellow Nick Loris, “the devil’s in the details.”
The Heritage Foundation ought to know; for decades, it has demonstrated mastery of the dark arts of climate-change denialism. This strain of influence peddling would be harmful enough had it managed merely to deepen the public ignorance about global warming. But denialism has had devastating downstream effects (to borrow an industry term). It has managed to defer meaningful consideration of nearly every urgent policy question that now awaits us, if we are serious about trying to stop this.
The most fundamental question is whether a capitalistic society is capable of sharply reducing carbon emissions. Will a radical realignment of our economy require a radical realignment of our political system — within the next few years? Even if the answer is no, we have some decisions to make. How, for instance, should the proceeds of a carbon tax be directed? Should they be used to finance clean-energy projects, be paid out directly to taxpayers or accrue to the national budget? In a healthy democracy, you could expect a rigorous public debate on this question. But such a debate has rarely surfaced in the United States because, as of this writing, only a handful of Republican members of the House of Representatives, out of a caucus of 197, have endorsed the basic concept of a carbon tax — an idea that has its roots in conservative economic thought.
And what should be done, if anything, about the people who lose their jobs once coal plants, whether because of market pressures or federal mandate, are forced to close? Should unemployed coal miners be retrained as wind farmers, receive unemployment checks or be abandoned to their plight? You could imagine a robust political debate about this issue as well — perhaps with the right in favor of letting miners fend for themselves and the left supporting a federal welfare program — were such questions allowed to be debated.
What should be done for the far greater number of people in poor and neglected communities, both in the United States and abroad, that stand to suffer most grievously from a hotter climate in the years ahead? What penalties should Exxon and the other major oil and gas companies suffer for their sins? What branch of government should impose those penalties, and should criminal liability be extended to individual lobbyists and chief executives? Should old, declining nuclear plants be preserved, and should new, smaller plants be commissioned, and who ought to make such decisions? How much federal funding should be invested in researching speculative geoengineering or carbon-capture technologies? Should insurance rates in coastal regions be increased abruptly to reflect the actual threat of sea-level rise, or phased in gradually? What sanctions should be imposed on foreign nations that fail to comply with the terms of global climate treaties? On these and many other such questions, reasonable minds might disagree. But beyond the reaches of the scholarly and activist literature, reasonable minds have not been given the opportunity.
It has become commonplace to observe that corporations behave like psychopaths. They are self-interested to the point of violence, possess a vibrant disregard for laws and social mores, have an indifference to the rights of others and fail to feel remorse. A psychopath gains a person’s trust, mimics emotions but feels nothing and passes in public for human (with a charming Twitter feed, say). The psychopath is calm, calculated, scrupulous — never more so than while plotting murder. There can be no reasoning with a psychopath; neither rational argument nor blandishment has a remote chance of success. If this indeed is the pathology that we are dealing with when it comes to the climate impasse, then we should be honest about the appropriate course of treatment. Coercion must be the remedy — exerted economically, politically and morally, preferably all at once. The psychopath respects only force.

*Nathaniel Rich is the author of the new book “Losing Earth: A Recent History,” based on an article that appeared in this magazine.

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Protests And Purchasing Power Could Be Positive Tipping Points In Climate Change

Cosmos - Richard A. Lovett

Scientists see consumer action as a potential driver for planet-saving strategies. Richard A Lovett reports.
Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg (R) and German climate activist Luisa Neubauer (L) at a student-led climate change rally in Berlin in March 2019. Carsten Koall/Getty Images
Often, the news relating to climate change is unrelentingly bleak. The world appears to be hurtling toward a climate-warmed future riddled with hurricanes, floods, droughts, famines, heat waves, forest fires, rising sea levels, and vanishing ice caps.
But just as natural systems appear to have “tipping points” in which positive feedbacks can accelerate the rush toward such disasters, it may be that human socio-economic systems may also have tipping points that can help ward them off.
In the natural world, these points include factors such as the loss of sunlight-reflecting snow and ice, or the release of planet-warming methane gas from melting permafrost, both of which can accelerate the rate of global warming.
In the socio-economic world, “good” tipping points would be ones that might induce corporations and individuals to rapidly increase activities that help prevent climate change, even if political institutions are still dragging their feet.
“It’s one of the few positive stories [in the field],” says Matthew Ives, a systems modeller at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford, UK, and coauthor of a paper in the journal Science.
He compares it to the famous butterfly effect in chaos theory, in which a small change to a sensitive part of a complex system “can have outsized results, thanks to feedback dynamics”.
It works, he says, by shifting the focus from traditional, ineffective, approaches such as the Paris Agreement, to “sensitive intervention points,” in which seemingly simple tweaks in socio-economic, technological, and political systems can self-amplify into radical change.
One way in which this can be done, he explains, is by requiring corporations, especially those with fossil fuel assets, to fully disclose to investors the financial risks they face from global warming and the implications of a possible shift away from fossil fuels.
“That is a critical system that is on a tipping point that, if not tomorrow, [is] not far into the future,” Ives says, “because there is a huge risk in the way they do their accounting.”
These companies’ stock prices, he says, are highly dependent on the future price of oil. If consumers shift to alternative forms of energy, and fossil-fuel prices fall, it would drive down their stocks, shifting investment dollars elsewhere, including to alternative-energy producers.
In 2017, he says, one oil company looked at this risk and concluded that a mere 10% cut in its anticipated future oil prices, from $80 to $72 per barrel, would cut profits in half.
“What happens if we get [prices] from $20 to $40?” Ives asks. “It’s going to wipe all the income off the balance sheet.”
Meanwhile, he says, prices of renewable energy have been steadily declining. So who cares if US President Donald Trump hates wind farms? Alternative energy costs have still been steadily decreasing.
Photovoltaics, for example, have been decreasing in price by about 10% per year since 1990. Now, Ives says, “we are around where they are on parity with fossil fuels”.
Once alternative energy sources get past the tipping point where they are actually cheaper than fossil fuels, Ives argues, this will lead to a massive devaluation in the latter and a rapid shift to the former.
The stock market, he adds, may also amplify this effect.
“As soon as one stock starts getting re-evaluated,” he says, “then all of them start getting re-evaluated. Once a buyer sees a major investor pulling out [of fossil-fuel-dependent stocks], and others start doing the same, that has a cascading effect.”
A similar bandwagon effect may also apply at the consumer level. If one person buys a solar panel and puts it on their roof, others see it, and may decide to buy their own.
From a socio-economic perspective, adds Ives, it may mean that creating incentives for consumers to buy solar panels may be more effective than encouraging them to invest in other energy-saving technologies, such as better insulation. “People don’t see insulation,” he says.
Political campaigns can also have outsized results.
In the US, a group of students in Oregon have sued the federal government, arguing that they have a constitutionally protected “life, liberty, and property” right to a sustainable climate. So far, their lawsuit has survived two challenges, all the way to the Supreme Court.
In Europe, a 16-year-old student named Greta Thunberg has become an international celebrity, speaking to the United Nations and leading anti-climate-change rallies far from her native Sweden, partly because of another positive feedback mechanism: the amplifying effect of the internet and social media.
“Suddenly, you’ve got people around the world protesting, based on the inspiration of this one, 16-year-old girl,” Ives says. “That’s a perfect example of these feedback dynamics.”
Marc Hafstead, an economist at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC, and director of its Carbon Pricing Initiative, who was not part of the study team, agrees with the “tipping point” concept.
“Even with the Paris Agreement,” he says, “we are falling short. I think it’s good to ask how we can tip the system to try to get more change and get on track to where we need to be.”
That said, he cautions against focusing too strongly on trying to tip the scales on individual alternative-energy technologies.
“The technologies we pick today might not be the technologies for 10 years from now,” he warns.
However, he likes the idea of political motivation as a tipping point.
“We need public support for the types of policies that are going to be necessary,” he says.
“Whether it’s [through] more young people voting, or more awareness through storms and droughts — the cost of climate hitting us in the face — we need some type of change to our political system to get the policies in place.”
In the US, he adds, one such political tipping point might come via Republican members of Congress.
From what he has been told, many of them are not, behind closed doors, nearly as opposed to climate control policies as they appear to be in public.
“They need a tipping-point moment to come out in a group and feel like they have political cover,” he suggests.
Richard Alley, a Nobel-laureate climate-change researcher at Pennsylvania State University, also finds the new study fascinating and probably important.
Previous work, he says, has looked at societal tipping points going in “bad” ways.
The idea that there might be ones that could help protect the climate, he says, therefore seems likely “to be [both] useful and valuable.”

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