McKinsey & Company, the high pockets consulting company, has expressed concern regarding the Climate Funding Industry’s net zero by 2050 goal and the minerals available to achieve it. This particular concern is buried well down in the report.
Raw materials. Demand for critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths, is expected to surge, but current supply is only about 10 to 35 percent of what would be needed by 2050. This is a Level 2 challenge, where supply would need to be scaled, alongside managing demand for such minerals.
McKinsey defines a Level 2 challenge as one that
require[s] the deployment of known technologies to accelerate, and for associated infrastructure and inputs to be scaled.
One of the problem here, though, is that mining minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths is an immensely toxic operation, both in producing and handling these raw minerals and in the collateral production and handling of the hugely toxic mining tailings that are inextricably associated with the mining process. Those tailings, too, while not precisely forever chemicals, do last a very long time and are subject to leaching out of whatever supposedly sealed off storage area they might be in, whether from long-term deterioration of the isolation materials or from human error (vis., EPA’s failure with the Gold King Mine near Silverton, CO).
Then there’s the end-of-life disposal of the materials and devices containing these minerals when those materials and devices have worn out or failed. The minerals are still in those devices, they’re still toxic, and we still don’t have the technologies needed adequately to handle that waste.
Then there are the intermediate steps of…assembling…those minerals into the finished net zero-supporting products. They’re toxic to handle there, too, for all that they’re much more easily handled safely than while digging them out of the ground and processing them into usable form.
And that bit about managing demand—that sounds akin to managing third world demand for fossil fuels, too—they shouldn’t have any; they should be consigned to poverty, or the rest of us consigned to poverty forking over the trillions of dollars it would take to prop them up.
Much of that mining, too, is done with child and other slave labor, but that’s really a side issue in this context. It would be straightforward enough to force an end to that, if only by mining elsewhere with legitimate labor forces and technologies. The switch needs only political will and actual sincerity, vice virtue signaling, on the part of the Climate Funding Industry members.
It seems we can’t get there from here (never minding that we really don’t need to).
Oops.