Exploring-the-sociological-impacts-of-going-green-in-developing-countriesThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2021 report warned that human activity is changing the physical climate system and could lead to temperatures rising beyond 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels and environmental calamities. During the COP27, the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres noted that the world was “on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
Transitioning to renewable energy sources, particularly hydro, wind, and solar is perceived as a remedy to mitigating climate change and contributing to sustainable development. Attention is focused on renewable energy technologies particularly electric vehicles (EV), solar panels, and windmills. Manufacturing these products requires critical minerals and metals (cobalt, copper, lithium, graphite, and nickel and rare earth elements, whose extraction destroys the environment and biodiversity, displaces and exposes host communities to armed conflicts, and to healthy and economic vulnerabilities, a paradox popularly known as the “resource curse.” Little attention is paid to such communities, the environment on which their livelihoods depend, and the fact that since minerals and metals are not renewable, access to raw materials is not sustainable. Moreover, although climatic catastrophes know no national borders, in the global north we are made to believe that renewable energy will insulate us from the devastations created in the global south.
The demand for minerals and metals is irreversible.
The demand for raw materials is liable to increase concomitantly with the demand for energy technologies envisaged to mitigate climate change and reinforce energy security. The International Energy Agency (IEA) 2021 report on the role of critical minerals in clean energy transition stated: “The rapid growth of clean energy technologies is expected to boost demand for critical minerals.”
For example, Canada wants 60 percent of all new vehicles to be electric by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035. The United Kingdom (UK) plans to ban selling petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030. The US projects that more than half of passenger vehicles will be electric by 2030. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) projects that EV sales will skyrocket from the 4 percent trend of 2020 to 70 percent in 2040, while by 2050 wind and solar will contribute approximately 50 percent of world electricity and the demand for lithium-ion batteries to rise from 269 gigawatt-hours of 2021 to 2.6 terawatt-hours annually by 2030 and 4.5TWh by 2035 Net Zero.
Switching the UK’s “31.5 million petrol and diesel vehicles” to electric batteries alone requires an “estimated 207,900 tonnes of cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate, 7,200 tones of neodymium and dysprosium, and 2,362,500 tonnes of copper (Jonathan 2019). Replacing an estimated 1.4 billion engine vehicles globally requires 40 times the quantities of minerals.
Producing an EV battery “weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing approximately 500,000 pounds of minerals, whose access requires digging and extracting “1,500,000 pounds of earth.”
The technologies expected to mitigate climate change consume more materials than traditional energy sources. Technological advancements are concentrated in the global north countries, which are the highest CO2 emitters, while the majority of the raw materials are sourced from the global south nations which are the least CO2 producer. Communities rich with the minerals and metals required for the green energy transition are being destroyed along with the environment on which their livelihoods depend.