In December, Serbian citizens took to the streets against a planned mine in the farming hills of the country’s west — their
biggest protest since the toppling of the country’s genocidal dictator more than 20 years before. Across the country, protesters held banners reading “
Serbia is not for sale” and chanted against the reigning political party.
But there was a green veneer to this project: The company developing the mine, Rio Tinto,
declared that it could supply enough lithium to Europe to build one million electric vehicles a year. Australia and Chile held tight control of the majority of the market, but if this project got underway, it could spread the benefits of mining for a crucial element in the clean energy revolution to a country
lambasted for its horrendous air pollution. Lithium would end up in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy grid storage. Serbian citizens, this narrative held, were sitting aimlessly on the poster mineral for the energy transition. The citizen protest grew over the course of more than a year, until the prime minister
suspended the project, awaiting the results of a national election.
News media quickly distilled this as a conflict between the benefits of clean batteries and the rights of people who live on top of the materials needed to create them. The paradox is tempting, offering intractability and sensation, cannon fodder for all forms of environmentalists and their opponents. This summer, the conversation matured into three new books that, read together and against the grain, reveal that the more important question is:
How did we get here?
This mining-climate tension has been showing up on ballots all over the world. In
Peru and
Ecuador, which have been called copper’s final
frontier, mining was a central topic in national elections. In Chile, the top producer of copper, citizens voted to transform the country with a socialist government which is overseeing a convention to
rewrite the entire constitution, the first in the context of the climate crisis (voters recently
rejected the first draft). In Greenland, a tale of two mining companies
shaped an election that saw anti-uranium voters triumph. In Bolivia, voters twice re-
elected the incumbent party, which accused foreign powers of meddling with its lithium.
As was the case with those other votes, the Serbian protests were about much more than a mine. They were about the rule of law, and citizens’ ability to decide what happened on their land. Experts
described contaminated water sources across the Balkan region. Farmers had been
pressured into selling off their land. Regulations were
sidestepped behind closed doors. The reigning political party had sealed off access to many
news channels, and citizens were frustrated with hearing monotonous political rhetoric from a powerful minority.
Savo Manojlovic, a lawyer who had become an outspoken organizer in the protests, didn’t know much about environmentalism when he started. The year before, he was leading legal challenges to the destruction of a city park. Citizens wanted the park, he told me, and why shouldn’t they decide what happens next to their own front doors?
But what happens when the world also has something at stake? Should a mine be built upstream from your water source if it means preventing global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees above preindustrial temperatures? And, more importantly, who is allowed to answer that question?
For better or worse, the World Bank Group had already begun answering it in
2017. In order to provide for a clean energy future, lithium companies would need to churn out roughly ten times normal production every year until 2050. In
2020, the estimate was reduced, but it still saw that meeting the most ambitious climate goals would require 3.5 billion tons of metal, or roughly the total
production of all metals for all uses in
2020. That budget includes the materials needed to create renewable energy plants and batteries to store that energy. They don’t include the associated infrastructure, like roads, power lines, or car frames. They don’t include construction materials like cement. They don’t include mine waste, which comprises the majority of a mine’s product, because metals are just a small portion of ore.
Wielding reports like this from financial institutions and business consultancies, mining companies declared their time had come. Mining billionaire Robert Friedland — who once
earned the nickname “Toxic Bob” after a waste spill at one of his mines —
joked to potential investors that the energy transition was the “Revenge of the Miners.” Though Green New Deal activists who paint them as the bad guys might not admit it, mining companies would now be the ones to save the day — and, he added, they would need a lot of money to do it.
James Morton Turner, author of “
Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future,” comes to a similar conclusion: Environmentalists, the very same who have championed a clean, just future for the U.S., haven’t really considered that their beloved world-saving technologies will need to begin as rocks in the ground somewhere, and likely not in an area with the same level of wealth as they have. Mining is necessary, Turner argues, and we need to find ways to support it, whether by subsidizing mining companies or creating regulatory incentives that encourage mining.
Turner, an environmental historian at Wellesley College, builds his argument by assessing the journey that batteries — lead-acid, AA, and lithium-ion — took to arrive in the present. He finds, counterintuitively, that the battery-powered future contains much more “past” than it does “future.”
Image: Valentin Tkach for Noema Magazine[ed. Good intentions gone bad.]
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