UM atUM [S04-ep03]: The Race for Rare Metals

[Podcast] - Published on October 3, 2024 in Science and Society

This week on "UM atUM ": Roberto Interdonato, a researcher at the Tetis, talks to us about mining transactions. The report takes us to the nuclear magnetic resonance platform with Aurélien Lebrun. Then Thomas Pichery, sustainable development communications officer atUM, tells us about the Science Festival. The show airs every Wednesday at 6 p.m. on Divergence FM-93.9.

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And today we’re talking about a form of cognitive dissonance—the dissonance between a vision of our future selves, a clean, green world where our electric cars and bicycles don’t pollute, where our homes are heated by renewable energy that’s good for nature, and where we can continue to consume the products of our industries without guilt because they have a near-zero carbon footprint.

Set against this image is the other one—the old, ugly one—that of our societies saturated with black, dirty, toxic fossil fuels, embodied by the coal mine in *Germinal* or by the gold mine and its rivers of arsenic. An outdated image, an image of the past.

And yet, the reality of the situation compels us—whether we are European, American, Canadian, Australian, Russian, or Chinese—to superimpose these two images in order to grasp the idea that the energy transition comes at a cost, and that we are not the ones paying for it.

Because our batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines have one major flaw: they’re energy-hungry. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, and aluminum are their guilty pleasures. And according to the Net Zero Emissions by2050 (NZE) scenario, demand for what are known as critical minerals is expected to increase by 1.5 to 7 times by 2030.

And when you think of ore, you think of… mines. You can picture it: dirty, ugly, toxic. The image of arable land being seized, of hunger, of irreversible ecological damage, of child labor, of war.

Using open data, Roberto Interdonato of the Tetis Lab and his team have mapped the current transnational mining network linking investor countries and host countries to highlight distributional injustices and the unequal distribution of the social and environmental costs of resource extraction.

He published an article in the *Revue Perspective de Développement Mondial* titled “Mining Resources: The Uncomfortable Truth of the Energy Transition.”