July 6, 2023
Editorials

Green or greenwashing? It doesn’t matter as long as growth is sacrosanct

The Woolwich Observer, 6 Jul 2023 | STEVE KANNON, Editor's Point of View

Having decided that moving away from fossil fuels is the right thing to do, we’re moving in that direction. Probably not quickly enough to make a difference, but such is the course we’ve set.

Certainly, there’s an expectation that the likes of electric vehicles will eliminate emissions at the tail pipe – EVs don’t have tailpipes. And we may even reduce overall emissions of greenhouse gases, but at a massive cost to the environment as we step up mining and processing to provide the batteries that replace said tailpipes.

Moving away from fossil fuels is the right thing to do, for reasons that go beyond combatting climate change – breathing cleaner air, for instance. Whether we’ve chosen wisely with the alternatives remains to be seen.

The shift to electric vehicles, for instance, is fraught with perils that go beyond the recent $14-billion roll of the dice on a VW battery plant in St. Thomas. The sheer volume of mining needed to provide the materials will imperil the environment, along with those living in resource-heavy areas.

“The unfathomable quantities of ores that will be mined to manufacture batteries required by electric vehicles and vast new power grids, and the damage and suffering that will result, have been the subject of many recent headlines. But if countries keep pushing for new energy systems big enough to fully support 100 percent of the economic activity now made possible by oil, gas, and coal, they will not only fail to stop greenhouse gas emissions but will fail to prevent the violation of other critical planetary boundaries, including biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and soil degradation,” writes Stan Cox, a research fellow at The Land Institute in Kansas, in a recent opinion piece.

The electric batteries necessary for electric cars, for example, usually require large quantities of refined metals, the mining of which carries a significant environmental risk. The process of mining for lithium can result in soil contamination, air and water pollution, emission of hazardous gases, land degradation, and water scarcity. While advances are being made in clean technology to reduce the environmental toll of lithium mining, these impacts must still be taken into consideration.

EVs rely heavily on electricity, the production of which carries its own set of environmental risks. Fossil fuels, such as coal, natural gas, and oil, are still the major sources of electricity production in many countries, resulting in significant amounts of air pollution. If the electricity for electric vehicles comes from an energy source that produces high levels of emissions, such as coal, it can potentially negate any environmental benefit of driving a battery-powered car.

Moreover, if electricity production from renewable sources is encouraged, this could lead to additional environmental risks, such as habitat fragmentation and degradation associated with constructing wind and solar energy facilities. Research by Professor Dan Kammen of the University of California Berkeley, a renewable energy expert, finds that “siting of large scale solar, wind and other renewable electricity facilities has to be done with consideration for appropriate environmental protection.”

The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2040, global demand for metals that go into batteries will balloon 20-fold for nickel and cobalt and 40-fold for lithium; demand for manganese, critical for wind turbines, will increase ninefold in just the next decade. Demand for aluminum, which is already produced in vastly larger quantities than any of those metals, will increase by yet another 40 percent, largely to produce lighter-weight electric cars and support solar arrays.

A Forbes study notes some 400 new mines will come into operation over the next decade or so to keep battery factories such as the one planned for St. Thomas supplied with the needed metals. That will come with a significant environmental cost.

A report for the Geological Survey of Finland found that the quantity of batteries required to electrify the world’s vehicles and also provide the world’s power grids with enough batteries for backup storage would exhaust all known lithium, cobalt, and nickel reserves several times over.

Replacing today’s fleets entirely with electric alternatives would require some 1.39 billion EVs, requiring some 282.6 million tonnes of lithium-ion batteries.

“Preliminary calculations show that global reserves, let alone global production, may not be enough to resource the quantity of batteries required. In theory, there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they were exclusively used just to produce li-ion batteries for vehicles,” reads the 2021 report from Finland.

Producing batteries to that scale would prove massively challenging. Replacing those batteries at regular intervals would magnify the problems exponentially.

“Each of the 1.39 billion lithium ion batteries could only have a useful working life of 8 to 10 years. So, 8-10 years after manufacture, new replacement batteries will be required, from either a mined mineral source, or a recycled metal source. This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive.”

In short, electrification is no panacea. Add in the fact that geopolitical concerns would simply shift from oil-producing regions to other resource producers, and we’re in many ways no better off.

That’s not to say we continue business as usual – the impacts are too negative. But we’re not going to improve significantly, or at all, if we think we can continue on with the current growth-fixated economy simply by “greening” it.