Preface. Everyone talks about oil spills, but what about the dirty mining that will have a huge polluting footprint on the earth of mercury, arsenic, and other toxic heavy metals. The Pebble mine is canceled for now, but if the authoritarians get back in power, it could be permitted again, and destroy the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery. Gold mining is destroying fish and river ecology in 173 rivers in 49 countries (see Voosen 2023 below).
Renewables aren’t cleaner and greener than fossils, and require a hell of a lot of fossils to mine the ore, deliver it to a crusher, blast furnace, and fabrication. More like creating Hell on Earth.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Voosen P (2023) llegal mining has muddied tropical rivers worldwide. Silt overload and mercury pollution endanger river ecosystems—and the people who depend on them. Science
https://www.science.org/content/article/illegal-mining-has-muddied-tropical-rivers-worldwide
Year after year, its waters erode and sluice rock away from mountains, liberating precious metals and whisking them to lowlands, where they are deposited among sediments in riverbeds and floodplains. No need to move mountains; the mountain moves to you.
But the process also draws human miners, especially in the tropics, where homespun operations to extract gold and other riches from river sediments are poisoning waters and drowning aquatic life in sediment. The destruction wrought in places such as Peru, Ghana, and Sumatra has captured headlines.
Gold mining is now the world’s top source of mercury pollution, emitting more than coal-fired power stations.
But the true global extent of the crisis has been obscured by verdant forest canopies, venal companies, and indifferent governments. Miners who once used shovels and pans are now wielding backhoes and dredgers supplied by shady mining concerns, from China and elsewhere.
Now, a comprehensive satellite survey spanning 4 decades shows river mining has surged over the past 20 years and today affects 173 large rivers in 49 countries. Almost 7% of all large tropical river stretches are now cloudy with mining debris.
miners use small-scale techniques not unlike those in 19th century gold rushes. They dredge sediments from the beds and banks of the Amazon tributaries, then add mercury, a cheap and toxic liquid metal, to the watery slurry. It selectively binds to several precious metals, including gold, creating heavier nuggets that fall out of the slurry. After the nuggets are collected, the sediment “tailings” are dumped back into the river.
Researchers have typically focused on the dangers of the mercury, which is burned off as a vapor. It settles in the surrounding ecosystem and can poison the miners themselves. But Dethier was shocked to see how muddy the mining had made the rivers. Some was due to oil palm plantations, but mining was by far the dominant cause.
Sediment clouds the water, interfering with fish spawning since they can’t see or breathe well. It also pollutes drinking water as far as 1000 kilometers downstream.
Bruggers J (2022) ‘Out of control’: Sinking coal industry swamps Kentucky with ‘zombie’ mine violations. Inside Climate News.
As the coal industry collapses in Kentucky, companies have racked up a rising number of violations at surface mines with little enforcement since 2013, no doubt also lax in West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania due to pressures on the industry and regulators. Zombie mines are those idled for years without any reclamation work. In Kentucky there are over 810 noncompliant surface mining operations. And with so many companies bankrupt, remediation won’t happen until another mine operator takes over. Nor is the state of Kentucky doing enough to negotiate with companies holding bonds meant to cover the cost of reclamation in mining companies that have gone bankrupt. Though even if insurance companies forked over the money it wouldn’t be enough. The bonds are worth about $888 million while costs to clean the sites up will cost up to $2.4 billion.
Sadasivam, N. 2019. Report: Going 100% renewable power means a lot of dirty mining. Grist.org
For more than a decade, indigenous communities in Alaska have been fighting to prevent the mining of copper and gold at Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a crucial source of sustenance. The proposed mine, blocked under the Obama administration but inching forward under the Trump administration, has been billed by proponents as necessary to meet the growing demand for copper, which is used in wind turbines, batteries, and solar panels. Similar stories are playing out in Norway, where the Sámi community is fighting a copper mine, and in Papua New Guinea, where a company has been mining the seabed for gold and copper.
Weighing those trade-offs — between supporting mining in environmentally sensitive areas and sourcing metals needed to power renewables — is likely to become more common if countries continue generating more renewable energy. That’s according to a report out Wednesday from researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. The report, commissioned by the environmental organization Earthworks, finds that demand for metals such as copper, lithium and cobalt would skyrocket if countries around the world try to get their electric grids and transportation systems fully powered by renewable energy by 2050. Consequently, a rush to meet that demand could lead to more mining in countries with lax environmental and safety regulations and weak protections for workers.
The list of metals used in the production of renewable energy is long. It includes the well-known — copper, silver and aluminum — as well as rare earths such as neodymium and dysprosium, used to make magnets for wind turbines. Mining for these metals is currently concentrated in just a handful of countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Chile, and India, among them.
Take cobalt. Each electric vehicle needs between five to ten kilograms of the bluish-white metal for its lithium-ion batteries. The authors consider cobalt a “metal of most concern for supply risks,” because nearly 60 percent of its production takes place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with a dismal record of child labor and human rights abuses. Should the world’s transportation and electricity sectors ever switch to running entirely on renewables, demand for the metal would soar to more than four times the amount available in reserves, according to the researchers.