Electric cars have a dirty secret — and it's a big one / Ian Morse

Electric cars have a dirty secret — and it's a big one / Ian Morse

By Ian Morse

Electric vehicles require certain minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Converting the world's one billion cars would require dozens of new mines across the globe.

iStock; Rebecca Zisser/Insider

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Earth is in bad shape. Each new United Nations report declares we are closer than before to global catastrophe and implores leaders to take drastic action immediately. But even when policymakers agree the situation is dire, deciding how to tackle the problem is where things get heated.

Global emissions from greenhouse gasses need to be almost halved by 2030 to prevent a rise of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius in temperatures before 2050 and the resulting cascade of extreme weather, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss, and crop failure. To get there, the energy sector needs to transition away from fossil fuels like oil and coal toward renewable energy from things like solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars.

To make this shift, the world will need to produce the raw goods that make these technologies possible. Materials like lithium and graphite play a central role in producing lithium-ion batteries, which are used in electric vehicles and the storage systems for wind and solar energy. Since 2017, the World Bank has predicted that stifling rising temperatures will push demand for these minerals several times higher than their current supplies.

But massively increasing production of these minerals may cause more problems than it solves. Climate policies have traditionally favored new technologies like electric vehicles to help replace fossil fuels with renewable electricity. But given the amount of mining required to electrify the world's more than 1 billion cars, creativity around consuming less or in different ways could move the world more beneficially toward sustainable development goals than the replacement of the consumption with cleaner versions. For the one-third of greenhouse-gas emissions that come from industry, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found the most significant steps to help the planet would be slashing the amount of material used, produced, and wasted.

"We've seen studies that hypothetically see the potential for drastic reductions — up to 50% — of energy demand in the next 20 or 30 years. That's a significant reduction in materials," Narasimha Rao, an associate professor of energy systems at Yale and a contributing author on the IPCC's chapter that assessed demand-side climate tools, said.

More institutions are following the IPCC's lead. BloombergNEF, an energy-transition analyst group, found in a May report that a "modest 10% reduction" in car travel could take pressure off companies straining to meet EV demand. 

"What was really striking when we were modeling EV uptake was how challenging it would be to produce enough electric cars to have a zero tailpipe emissions fleet by 2050," Andrew Grant, a BloombergNEF intelligent-mobility analyst, said.

Reducing and altering consumption can quickly and efficiently slash harmful emissions. Yet a core goal in many climate policies is not reduction but an inflation of thirst for newly mined materials. Financial institutions, consultancies, and the International Energy Agency (which was formed to support the oil industry) have framed climate action as a trade-off between mining for critical minerals and reducing emissions. In the process, they have given dreamlike forecasts to mining companies and investors who scour the world for minerals.

"This says that our approach to the climate crisis is a consumer-driven one, which is bad news for the planet, the climate, and many communities worldwide," Javiera Barandiarán, an associate professor of global studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. She joins a suite of advocates, researchers, and communities challenging climate policy that requires more mining.

Signs are set up in front of two tents to protest a lithium mine at Thacker Pass in Nevada.

Many local communities, like this Native American tribe in Nevada, are pushing back against new mining projects in their backyards.

Ty O'Neil/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Adopting technology as fast as possible seems like the simple solution — develop products like electric vehicles that make it easy to switch energy from dirty hydrocarbons to clean electrons. But balancing the need for a clean-energy grid and fewer fossil-fuel cars with the harms of mining is tricky. We do need more minerals for a clean-energy transition, but how many, which ones, and how we get those minerals are important questions to answer.

Raquel Dominguez, a circular-minerals-economy policy advocate with the nongovernmental organization Earthworks, told me: "Who is it the most easy for? It's not easier for people who live on the front lines of extraction for the minerals we need for these vehicles. It's further shoving frontline communities under the electric bus."

'Climate minerals' get low environmental scores

Mines typically take a decade or more to get from discovery to operation. And when they are operational, they are capital-intensive, risky, and a major source of greenhouse gasses. Mineral processing predominantly depends on fossil-fuel combustion to shape molten rock, and the process is difficult to decarbonize. The industry's emissions already make up 7% of the global total, but the mines' indirect emissions grow as more cars demand manufacturing, roads, and deforestation.

Plus, mines can cause damage to the communities and ecosystems where they are built. They displace people and forests, and exposed land can pollute waters and cause dramatic flooding. Metals like lithium and nickel exist in very small quantities, and processing them turns the remaining rock into toxic waste that companies struggle to manage — they sometimes even dump it into waterways or store it behind shaky dams.

Across the globe, companies are facing backlash for new climate-branded mining projects. In Serbia last year, the multinational mining company Rio Tinto announced its next major lithium project, stirring the country's largest protests since the downfall of its dictator and causing the government to suspend the project. Around the same time that Tesla began to seek out iron-based batteries for its cars, an iron-ore miner in Australia blew up Aboriginal heritage sites to develop a mine — pushing the country to review its mining governance. A Canadian company is using the climate crisis to justify mining at the bottom of the Pacific, despite warnings of a biodiversity disaster and financial fallout in Pacific island states.

In the US earlier this year, a Chilean company lost a years-long bid to mine copper and nickel and lost several lawsuits from environmentalists — the plan was expected to disrupt Minnesota's 1 million-acre Boundary Waters protected wilderness. In Arizona, what analysts call the most promising source of copper in the energy transition has caught flak from protesters who say it will trample the rights of a local Apache community and dehydrate natural life. And in Idaho, a gold miner says it can join the fight for clean energy, even though the Environmental Protection Agency found the mine would have disproportionately adverse effects on water for the Nez Perce tribe.

Mining waste destroyed a village in Brazil in 2015.

A dam burst at a mining waste site in Brazil in 2015 unleashing a deluge of thick, red toxic mud that smothered an entire village.

Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images

Despite the local pushback, politicians in Washington, DC, have carried mining into the climate conversation in a bipartisan agreement to boost the industry. The Trump administration smoothed the path both for mining companies to acquire permits and avoid cleaning up pollution from their mines. The Biden administration has also emphasized the need for expanded mining to address its climate policies. In both parties, senators say Chinese companies dominate in almost all industries for battery materials, which threatens US businesses and national security. Therefore, the US needs to step up its production, they say.

But these debates are largely dominated by people with a vested interest in driving as much demand as possible, rather than managing both the demand and the supply sides of the equation. Electric-car companies loom large in scientific studies and media debates on climate, and some mining companies have branded themselves as climate saviors, encouraged by financial institutions like Morgan Stanley and consultancies like Wood Mackenzie. 

"These companies are not acting out of altruism. They're acting out of their own interest, and their own interest is billions of dollars of profits per year," Dominguez said of mining companies. 

Which minerals does climate action require?

Mineral-demand forecasts are built on a string of assumptions and ever-changing data about EV use and battery prices.

"We know that the green transition is more intensive in terms of minerals," Perrine Toledano, who leads the mining and energy team at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, told me. "But it's very difficult to identify which minerals and in which quantity. The only thing you can do is make forecasts based on current technologies, but 10 to 15 years down the road, we don't know."

The World Bank's projections from 2020 are still widely cited today. If the global economy is to shrink its emissions to keep temperatures below a 2-degree Celsius rise by 2100, demand for lithium and graphite in climate technologies like batteries will need to increase five times the total production of 2018.

But those projections keep changing — sometimes shrinking. In 2017, the World Bank predicted the need for lithium would be at least 10 million tons; but in its most recent report, it predicted the need would be less than 5 million tons. Its 2017 forecast on cobalt demand was also several times higher than its more recent predictions. The International Energy Agency in 2021 concluded that climate action demanded lithium production leap by 42 times by 2040, with needed graphite, cobalt, and nickel growth roughly half as steep. Many materials are left out of these projections, such as steel, which can make up to 10% of global emissions and is used in battery packs, car frames, road construction, and charging infrastructure.

These predictions are setting the tone for global leaders to increase mining capacity, but Toledano advised caution at the World Bank's projections. Commodity prices could rise, or a company could be worried about taking materials from politically unstable places or countries where consumers worry about human rights concerns. Batteries could get more efficient or long-lasting. If charging ports become ubiquitous, there would be less reason to design a battery that lasts 300 miles. A small change in battery chemistry, deployed at a large scale, could mean dozens of mines are opened or closed. Plus, new innovations emerge constantly that could require fewer or different minerals. 

"The mineral compositions of technologies are changing, have been changing, will change again," Toledano, who works with public and private institutions to craft sustainable-extraction policy, said. 

Minerals will be needed for all sorts of climate technologies, but planning economies around specific ones may leave entire industries treading water. That uncertainty should raise questions about a climate plan focused exclusively on extraction. 

A better approach

Electric vehicles are crucial to the energy transition and far better than gas-guzzlers, but they are just one piece of a much larger climate puzzle. Moving the spotlight from electric vehicles and mining doesn't leave a dearth of action. Vehicle-sharing schemes, plant-based diets, and taxes on large cars not only reduce emissions quickly but also can lead to less demand for raw materials. A strict carbon price could push companies to shrink fossil-fuel-based supply chains and strengthen local supply that uses less transportation.

One of the primary reasons the World Bank's projections were scaled down in 2020 was the inclusion of reusing and recycling materials. Even so, the projections maintain a "flat assumption on recycling that is staying at current levels," Toledano told me.

Not everyone agrees that recycling can play a role in climate policy. Industry players, mostly those tied to carmakers, are beginning to build out factories that would recover pieces of lithium-ion batteries. These plants face major hurdles, and some industry players predict that recycled minerals may make a dent in the need for newly mined minerals in a decade.

Dominguez of Earthworks said the switch to recycled materials could be even more significant if started quickly. A report last year found that getting recycling programs started soon could offset half the demand for copper and at least one-quarter of the demand for lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The European Commission, which is rewriting its battery regulation, will likely implement a requirement that manufacturers reuse or recycle their own products. A recent California review recommended similar steps. In a report with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Barandiarán of UC Santa Barbara and her coauthors suggested expanding public transportation to reduce the pressures on communities in South America's "Lithium Triangle." 

These kinds of policies, in tandem with a targeted approach to the clean-energy transition, could save humans from disastrous warming more quickly than exclusively relying on mineral production. The prominence of climate minerals in clean-energy policy stems from a long history in the US and elsewhere of encouraging mining to support the consumption of luxury goods, like cars, Barandiarán told me.

"We need to address climate change urgently," she said, "but with a human- and planet-centered approach that is committed to real solutions, not false solutions like the privately owned individual electric car."

Ian Morse is a science and environment journalist with a focus in Indonesia. He investigates land and extractive businesses, reports on the natural sciences, and writes the Green Rocks newsletter.