Hi, all.
It’s a well-known fact at this point that we need to electrify our economy to meet emissions goals, and we need to do it fast. The recent passage of the IRA has sparked a nationwide conversation about electrification, and in many ways, it’s been exciting to constantly be hearing about newly electrified things, be they vehicles, heat pumps, or lawn mowers.
The passage of the IRA has also caused another, more political conversation to spring up within the climate movement that centers on national versus local aims. One of the most salient examples of this has been the controversy surrounding the concessions made about the Mountain Valley Pipeline. I have written about this a couple of times in this newsletter and we have a podcast coming out with one of the folks heavily involved in the resistance to the MVP (soon!), but in many ways, this issue (MVP) and others like it boil down to folks working at the national scale having different aims than those working at the local scale within the climate movement: National folks were prioritizing getting the first big climate legislation passed and so made some pretty gnarly concessions to Joe Manchin, while folks on the ground in Appalachia were understandably incensed by those same concessions.
These two conversations–the need for wide-spread electrification and the discrepancies between national and local environmental interests–are colliding in very real ways around the world in the form of precious metal mining conflicts.
The electrification of our transportation and energy systems will require immense amounts of raw materials (the scale of physical infrastructure that needs to be built is mind-boggling), and will especially require large amounts of metals, like copper, nickel, and lithium. This need for metals to propel the decarbonization of our economy is in turn leading to a somewhat frantic search for places to mine those metals, not least because China is currently a big supplier of those metals.
As a result, we arrive to situations like the ones described by these New York Times articles: This Remote Mine Could Foretell the Future of America’s Electric Car Industry and How a Quebec Lithium Mine May Help Make Electric Cars Affordable. Though the titles of these articles emphasize the mines’ connections to the “green economy,” their contents tell a more complicated story: one about questionable pollution promises in water-rich environments, the creation of local jobs, the presence of foreign mining companies, and the infringement of Indigenous rights.
Jobs vs. the environment is an age-old story, one that’s been used to sweep environmental concerns and human rights under the rug for hundreds of years, but it feels as if we’re entering a new era of environmental conflict–one in which both sides can claim they’re acting in “environmentally-friendly” way, whether that’s procuring materials for the green economy or stopping the destruction of some of our last wild places and preserving some semblance of ecological health.
While I will not shed any tears over the passing of the jobs vs. environment narrative that has plagued environmental rhetoric for the last several decades, I enter warily into this new landscape where my footing as an “environmentalist” feels more unsteady. It is doubtless we need to decarbonize our economy to stave off the worst effects of climate change and electrification is a key pathway to that goal, yet it is also doubtless that we need to protect ecological health and human rights. Destroying the Earth to save the Earth is a pointless exercise (if I do say so myself).
I think, however, that there is a way that we should welcome the murkiness of the new territory we’re entering. After all, what retrospectively feels so clear cut about past environmental conflicts is at least in part an illusion created by one-size-fits-all political identities, and this take-no-compromises, partisan approach often hasn’t gotten us too far in solving environmental issues in ways that are reliably sustainable and just.
So, let’s take this as an opportunity to reframe our understanding of environmental conflicts. Until now, we’ve lived in a frame of mind dominated by extraction and economic gain, and in a system that was therefore hardwired for injustice. But now, just as our houses and electrical grids and legendarily boring places like the DMV will undergo an electrification makeover, let’s rewire our approach to taking care of each other and the planet.
I don’t have the authority nor the expertise to provide answers on how exactly we can shift our collective mindset, but I am confident that the material changes happening in our world around us are creating opportunities for societal changes to happen in parallel, and that the need for a more holistic, justice-based approach to solving environmental problems is at least equally as urgent as the need to electrify everything.