{"id":63827,"date":"2022-10-16T08:27:20","date_gmt":"2022-10-16T13:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63827"},"modified":"2022-10-16T08:27:20","modified_gmt":"2022-10-16T13:27:20","slug":"are-green-resource-wars-looming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63827","title":{"rendered":"Are Green Resource Wars Looming?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"main-article__title article-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/tomdispatch.com\/are-green-resource-wars-looming\/\">Are Green Resource Wars Looming?<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"main-article__subtitle article-subtitle\"><strong>The Burden of Massive EV Batteries Will Be Borne by People and Ecosystems<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Much of the excitement over the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law this summer, focused on the boost it should give to the sales of electric vehicles. Sadly, though, manufacturing and driving tens of millions of individual electric passenger cars won\u2019t get us far enough down the road to ending greenhouse-gas emissions and stanching the overheating of this planet. Worse yet, the coming global race to electrify the personal vehicle is likely to exacerbate ecological degradation, geopolitical tensions, and military conflict.<\/p>\n<p>The batteries that power electric vehicles are likely to be the source of much international competition and the heart of the problem lies in two of the metallic elements used to make their electrodes: cobalt and lithium. Most deposits of those metals lie outside the borders of the United States and will leave manufacturers here (and elsewhere) relying heavily on foreign supplies to electrify road travel on the scale now being envisioned.<\/p>\n<p id=\"more\"><strong>Adventurers and Opportunists<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the battery business, the Democratic Republic of Congo is referred to as \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/auto.hindustantimes.com\/auto\/news\/the-saudi-arabia-of-cobalt-congo-eyes-ev-battery-metal-price-power-41617508158069.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow external noopener noreferrer\" data-wpel-link=\"external\">the Saudi Arabia of cobalt<\/a>.\u201d For two decades, its cobalt \u2014 80% of the world\u2019s known reserves \u2014 has been highly prized for its role in mobile-phone manufacturing. Such cobalt mining has already taken a terrible human and ecological toll.<\/p>\n<p>Now, the pressure to increase Congo\u2019s cobalt output is intensifying on a staggering scale. Whereas a phone contains just thousandths of a gram of cobalt, an electric vehicle battery has pounds of the metal, and a quarter-billion such batteries will have to be manufactured to fully electrify the American passenger car fleet as it now exists.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Are Green Resource Wars Looming? The Burden of Massive EV Batteries Will Be Borne by People and Ecosystems Much of the excitement over the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law this summer, focused on the boost it should give to the sales of electric vehicles. Sadly, though, manufacturing and driving tens of millions of individual [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,5],"tags":[10765,4579,29565,15442,8831,15995,862],"class_list":["post-63827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-geopolitics","tag-batteries","tag-minerals","tag-priti-gulati-cox","tag-renewables","tag-resource-wars","tag-stan-cox","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63828,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63827\/revisions\/63828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}