Almost by surprise, Mainers find ourselves in the same boat as people in the Congo rainforest and Chile’s Atacama desert: Here come the miners!
Specifically, miners hunting for “white gold” – lithium – and other critical materials like cobalt, copper and nickel. Without these materials, our overdue transition to electric vehicles – known as EVs – pretty much becomes a dead letter. No lithium or cobalt, no batteries and no EVs.
To meet EV demand, worldwide lithium production must quadruple by 2030, says Chemical & Engineering News. Other sources put it at 10 times by 2040. But mining in the U.S. actually declined last year. The authoritative journal Nature reports that we now import every pound of 12 critical materials.
Maine is among a half-dozen states with potentially large lithium reserves. One deposit in Newry is estimated at 11 million tons of ore, worth around $1.5 billion. U.S. Geological Survey scientists have found other rare elements in northern Maine that will bring billions. “It was a perfect discovery,” one of them told Science magazine in June. He expects more like it.
Even so, it won’t be easy to catch up. China already manufactures half of the world’s EVs. It also controls a third of the world’s lithium mines and 40 percent of cobalt mining. A near-monopoly on refining raw ore gives China even more leverage. Almost 75% of cobalt, two-thirds of lithium and 63% of nickel are refined in China.
“Can the world make an electric car battery without China?” the New York Times recently asked. Right now, probably not.
Behind this question lies another big issue: Will our transition to a low-carbon future make life worse for people in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
Prosperity in industrialized countries has generally meant importing natural resources from abroad. Prevailing economic theory said that was OK: Poor countries would pay for their own development by selling us oil, copper or other commodities.
In the mid-1990s, a British geographer named Richard Auty spoiled this rosy picture. He found that most mining countries have higher poverty rates, lower wages and generally worse economies than places without minerals. He called this problem the “resource curse.” Other experts call it “the paradox of plenty.”
Pieces of kunzite, a variety of the lithium-bearing crystals found in Newry, for sale at the Rock & Art Shop in Bar Harbor. Kate Cough/Maine Monitor
Here’s how it works. Privileged elites “capture” their governments and skim off the economic cream. For appearances’ sake, the money usually flows through bogus “infrastructure investments”: railroads without passengers, oversized airports, highways to nowhere and other useless projects. Most people get nothing out of these deals.
As long as ore prices remain high, miners will push into ever more remote and fragile environments: mountains, deserts, rainforests, the Arctic. These places are often home to Indigenous people and ethnic minorities whose land rights are easily ignored – another consequence of the resource curse.
The United Nations, International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank) and other major institutions have issued social and environmental standards for extractive industries like mining. In theory, these standards protect vulnerable people and fragile environments.
I helped write two of the IFC’s eight standards: the one on land rights and the one on Indigenous people. The results have been disappointing. Resource-cursed governments simply brush them aside. Enforcement doesn’t exist.
There’s no quick fix for the resource curse: Think of Saudi Arabia or Putin’s Russia. China now dominates materials markets partly because it doesn’t “play politics” in poor countries. In practice, this means allying with any kleptocrats who guarantee access to minerals. So how can we move toward a low-carbon future without making life worse in low-income countries?
One obvious step: We should stop exporting environmental and social problems to other countries. The U.S. has plentiful reserves of lithium and other materials. We also have a (mostly) functioning government and a strong legal system.
Right now, market conditions favor stricter regulation. High prices mean that mining companies have no excuse to resist top-drawer environmental and land-use rules. These rules should reflect the real cost of critical materials, not half-measures that leave us with a mess.
We also need to admit that there are places where mining can be done well and places where it doesn’t belong. Local moratoriums, like the ones adopted in Union, Hope and Warren, buy us time, but they don’t solve the problem. And the jury’s still out on a new state metallic minerals law.
In Maine, we have a golden opportunity to raise the bar for mining. If we don’t, our low-carbon future could be bad news for the world’s less fortunate citizens.
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