Guillaume Pitron: The shifting conflicts and costs of ‘green’ energy (ep357)
“The sooner we are able to get rid of these two commodities, oil and coal, the better it will be... But green technologies such as electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines, do not come out of thin air.”
In this episode, we revisit our past conversation with Guillaume Pitron, an award-winning journalist and documentary-maker for some of France’s leading TV channels. From Chinese rare earth metals, oil extraction in Alaska, to Sudanese gum arabic and khat trading in Djibouti, Pitron focuses his work on commodities and on the economic, political, and environmental issues associated with their use. His first book, The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies, explores our new dependence on rare metals.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Guillaume Pitron: I became a journalist 13 years ago. I was twenty-seven. Now, I'm about forty. I was convinced that one of the ways to interest the general public in international affairs happening at the other end of the world was actually to talk about the resources they've got in their fridge, the resources they’ve got in their mobile phone.
Anything around the world happens because we need to get resources, and that triggers political, environmental, and economical challenges.
If you explain to the people that anything at the other end of the world actually ends up in their fridge, in their homes, and that they are responsible for that because they have to get this commodity somewhere for them, then you start to get them much more interested in something that was previously not very interesting. The resource is a way to link something that is very far away to something in your everyday life, and that becomes something very exciting for people to read and listen. Then, when you start to get an interest in oil, gas, mining, agricultural commodities, wherever in the world, well, you start to dig into very interesting questions about the green energy transition, geopolitics, and economics. Whenever there is a resource, there is a challenge.
Kamea Chayne: So, in the face of climate change, where the topics are often centered on carbon emissions, a primary goal people have set for our society is decarbonization by shifting to what they call green energy and no longer relying on burning fossil fuels. But you've really been pushing this dialog by questioning whether green energy is really green and I’m wondering if you think it's a misnomer and a mistake to label green energy green. How might we have been misled or shortsighted about the potential for green energy to save us from ecological degradation?
Guillaume Pitron: That's a very good question. Obviously, green energy is not green and clean technologies are not clean, and what we call sustainable energies are not sustainable. That's very counterintuitive to say such a thing. That may be very provocative, but it is actually very true.
We are rightly moving away from oil and coal because oil and coal are responsible for climate change. Obviously, we are responsible for climate change. The sooner we are able to get rid of these two commodities, oil and coal, the better it will be. So, we have to find another way of producing energy that will not actually produce CO2 emissions. But the thing is, green technologies such as electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines, these technologies don't come out of thin air.
They need to be manufactured and they are made of minerals. These technologies are made of base metals such as copper, zinc, and aluminum, and they are also made of rare metals, which are said to be rare because they can be three to 10 times rarer in the Earth's core and base metals. Then, we talk about 30 or so rare metals such as cobalt, tungsten, gadolinium, gallium, and indium. Where do we get these minerals from? How are we going to extract and refine them?
I am a reporter. I'm going to travel to the field. That's my job. That's what I've been doing for the last year, to look at the ways these metals are being extracted and refined in order to manufacture green technologies. The way these commodities are being extracted is extremely, extremely dirty. So, if you want to make something clean at the end of the manufacturing process, you need to actually pollute at the very beginning of the process where the metal is extracted.
That happens in Bolivia for lithium, for example, and Congo for cobalt. That happens most of the time in China because China is the leader in the production of rare metals in the world. Wherever I've been for the last two years in China, in graphite mines, in rare earths refining zones, and any mining areas, it's just a nightmare. People talk about an ecological nightmare. They talk about cancers and diseases. They talk about air pollution. They talk about water pollution. These people say..
"You have no idea about it because you are very far. Because you don't mine anything in your countries. We mine all the metals for you, at the end of the process, to say ‘We're clean.’"
But you have no idea about how we can suffer here in Baotou, in the province of Inner Mongolia alone to extract these resources.
Kamea Chayne: So basically, we have this perception of clean energy only because the source of that pollution has been removed from us. So instead of our cars burning fossil fuels and seeing the pollution coming out of other cars’ tailpipes, that pollution is really just happening somewhere that we can't see.
Guillaume Pitron: That's exactly the point.
We are relocating the pollution.
We used to have mines in the western United States. There are still a couple of mines that were much more mines in the past [than they are] right now. Same in Australia and same in Europe. We used to be mining producers for our own needs. But, you know, we as Westerners want to live in a cleaner environment, our environmental regulations are getting stronger and stronger, and at some point, we just don't want to have these polluting environments around us.
That doesn't mean that we don't want to change our ways of living. This doesn't mean that we don't want technologies anymore. Around the 90s or 80s, we started to close our mines and these mines were reopened somewhere in the world in developing countries which were ready for anything, including devastating the environment, to actually catch up their economics and their industry delays compared to the West.
We are so happy in the West, we say “Let the Chinese just open the mines for us and we're going to get some minerals at a good price.” Everyone's happy because the Chinese get richer, and we get cleaner. So, we relocated pollution in this way, and we will locate the pollution of green technologies ten thousand kilometers away from our homes. Nobody has an idea of how it's going over there because no one gets into Baotou Inner Mongolia, the lakes and fields of water containing heavy metals.
Actually, you're not very welcome in China when you're a journalist. So, it's very hard to get witnesses to get back audio and video from these places. So, this pollution is invisible to date. We don't see it. We don't even have an idea that it does exist. We are believing that the world we live in is clean, but it's just a question of relocating the pollution, as you perfectly see it.
Kamea Chayne: Right. So sometimes I feel like in looking at statistics on environmental pollution in various parts of the world, people might look at the so-called developing countries that have higher levels of pollution and basically blame them without connecting the dots to see that the ways of living in the West are also contributing to all of this outsourced pollution in other countries. So, it's really important to not purely blame them, but to also realize that we're all connected.
Guillaume Pitron: We live in a global world, and we cannot have a fair analysis of anything around us if we don't look at the global picture. If I look at my own French picture or if we look at just a US national picture or an Australian picture, we don't see the global picture. We don't see that we live in a connected world where actually I couldn't believe the way I live in my everyday life. I couldn't even call you if there were not somewhere Indians, Malaysians, Chinese, Africans, and South Americans being part of the process and doing something for my life to be what it is.
So, we really need to have these global views, which we don't. That's a big challenge when we accelerate towards this greener age. There is hypocrisy here. I mean, I don't feel very happy and proud. Sorry to say that, because I'm responsible as a consumer for this situation. But I feel like there is a bit of hypocrisy in not being sufficiently willing to analyze the CEO in that picture.
Kamea Chayne: Well, it's always really helpful to contextualize what's happening in the present day with an understanding of our history. Can you walk us through the key turning points in the past centuries where we made significant energy transitions from one energy system to another and to the next into what we have today?
Guillaume Pitron: We can say that up to the 18th and 19th centuries, there was no real energy revolution and no real energy transition. We were depending on animals and on human force to move, build cathedrals, and wage wars. The first industrial revolution happened when we developed the steam engine. The steam engine allows us to develop a lot of tools, including stream power trains. That is the first industrial revolution starting in England. For making these new technologies work, we needed a commodity named coal.
Then in the 20th century, we realize that coal is not such an interesting commodity to produce energy and that we can actually produce much more energy with much fewer resources if we replace a steam engine with a terminal. A terminal engine was the oil motor. To make these new technologies that we still use today work, we needed to shift from coal to oil. In the 20th century, [there were] different views. History has been very much impacted by the global use of coal.
Then, we understood that these two technologies, two resources, oil, and coal, will actually burn a lot of gases and will be responsible for climate change. I really say it strongly. We have to go in another direction. We have to turn back the oil and coal. That's how the beginning of the 21st century began, accelerated with the Paris Agreement in 2015. We tried to move to new types of technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars, which don't emit CO2. They don't burn anything when they're being used. If you look at any technologies like this, you see them turning, you see them heating, you see them moving, but without emitting any CO2 emissions.
This is where we arrive in this "greener" age because we don't see carbon emissions. The carbon emissions are somewhere else.
They are in the mines because you need electricity to make minerals and in Chinese, that is made of coal mostly. So, the carbon emissions are in China. They are not in the cities where you use the electric car. We're going to solve the local problem of pollution in crowded cities in the United States, and that's a very good thing. But we're just going to relocate to carbon production somewhere else where you need to make the metals, where you need to make such products to eventually be able to run an electric car, for example.
Kamea Chayne: A lot to think about. We've talked before on the show about how a lot of wars and conflicts have revolved around power struggles over the control of resources like fossil fuels. A lot of people talk about our need to break up with fossil fuels in order to not have those conflicts or have to be friendly to the governments of countries with a lot of human rights violations that we should condemn and not cozy up with. But how might our new reliance on the infrastructure needed to build green energy just shift our global power dynamics and the conflicts and wars that we have?
Guillaume Pitron: That's once again, a very, very interesting question because, yes, that's wonderful, a world free of oil, because we can expect that all the wars that we have experienced during the past century, especially around the Middle East, for example, for securing the strategic supplies of oil, will not happen anymore. But we are not solving the problem, as I'm trying to explain. We're just moving the problem somewhere else. We're shifting from one problem to another and...
We're shifting from one geopolitical challenge of finding oil, to another geopolitical challenge of finding rare metals.
Where are we going to get rare earth metals? Where are we going to get lithium? Where are we going to get cobalt and even base metals such as iron and copper for making green technologies possible? Some countries lead the production of these metals in the same way that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait used to lead the production of oil.
Suddenly we discover that these countries, such as China, which are leaders in the production of these rare metals, don't want to sell these metals to the rest of the world. They want to keep these metals themselves and go down the value chain, and they don't want to sell us the rare metal, but they want to sell us the finished product with the rare metals inside because they just want to get richer and make much more money. Then suddenly the question of embargoes and shortages appears again because we're not sure we're going to get these minerals. These are exactly the very same questions that are the challenges we used to discuss and deal with last century. But it is just not related to oil. It's relating to a new generation of resources.
There is the geopolitics of renewable energies happening right now. This is a title of a very interesting report that was published by Columbia University three years ago, the geopolitics of renewable energies. At the moment you have to wonder where to secure this because this is new geopolitics happening and we're going to have to get to lithium in Bolivia, cobalt in the Congo, chromium in Kazakhstan, and a wealth of rare metals such as rare earth tungsten gallium in China in order to make our green living possible.
That's not going to happen peacefully because it's just not how history works. We're going to create new tensions, new economical tensions. It's already happening right now to make these supplies possible for ourselves. I hope we're going to be wise enough to not wage armies in order to secure the most strategic resources. I don't want to be pessimistic, but history tells us that when it comes to power and wealth, there is always a war somewhere. So, the green age coming up will be a very fascinating age, which I'm very eager to live in. But that's going to be a very challenging age that's going to be probably a very conflicting age.
Kamea Chayne: While this theme has already come up multiple times in this conversation, at a more human level, social justice and economic justice have been top of mind for a lot of people. I think most environmentalists currently have an optimistic view about how transitioning to green energy can support climate justice because climate change disproportionately affects people who face greater economic poverty around the globe. So they say if we can address climate change, we can lessen these social injustices. But what do you see as the more realistic picture of how shifting to green energy may address or contribute to economic and social and racial inequity?
Guillaume Pitron: That's a very interesting question. I believe our move to a greener age will bring more social injustice if we bring more ecological injustice. Why is that?
It's because we have to organize the world between those who are dirty and those who pretend to be clean. But those who are “dirty” and were actually extracting the minerals are those who are the poorest, in faraway zones in rural areas at the other end of the world where nobody goes. These are the people who are earning a couple of dollars a day for extracting the minerals, and they are the ones dying from cancers in the cancer villages of China, where I've been to extract the minerals.
At the other end of the process, you've got rich countries claiming to be "green" because they can afford to buy expensive green technologies.
You see here actually something which is nothing but a new type of injustice taking shape in front of our eyes between the poor [and the powerful], who maybe tomorrow will be even more powerful and will make our greener world possible somewhere else in the West where the rich can afford to live in a more environmental and sustainable way. So, I don't really believe in what we call ecological solidarity, or anything like this.
Kamea Chayne: Now, given that what we understand as green energy really is a solution to a problem that creates a new set of problems, what is your view on why we have a tendency to repeat this cycle again and again, as evident from our history? Do you think this comes from our lack of understanding of the impacts of the new solutions constantly proposed or our need to constantly justify that we're on the right path forward or something else?
Guillaume Pitron: That's a tricky question. History is repeating itself, history is all about love, power, hatred, and justice. Whichever age we live in, we are, as humans, just reproducing these very characteristics of our minds all the time. Sometimes I wonder if history has a sense of direction because we just change technologies, but we don't change the very way we are.
We don't change the fact that we are looking for more, that we are looking for more power, that we are excited by everything that makes us humans as individuals more powerful and richer each day, and all the characteristics of our minds, which are underlying such our activities in our ways of thinking and acting, do not change at all with time. We are just the same age. We are pretending to be modern because we are obviously dealing with modern technologies, more complex technologies, which actually are very exciting technologies, by the way. But that doesn't change the way we are ourselves.
That's the thing to make technological progress. But I don't think there is human progress here accompanying the technological progress we're climbing to achieve today. We're taking a leap forward in terms of technologies, but we don't take a leap forward in terms of human consciousness.
I also believe that whatever we do, we look at the short term. More than ever today in our societies, surrounded by social media networks and everyday news programs and shows, we don't take the time to look at what consequences will result from our actions 10 or 20 years ahead. We don't have this time anymore. Politicians don't have the time anymore in order to make sure they're going to be reelected, neither in the United States nor in Europe. So, we have to make fast decisions for fast results, and we don't look at the consequences one generation or two generations ahead. I'm not sure we are able to make the right decisions for our grandchildren if we live in such a short-term age.
Kamea Chayne: I think we have value systems embedded within our dominant culture that I would consider misguided because these value systems of really obsessing over material wealth and financial wealth and constantly improving these numbers on a piece of paper that hasn't actually led to improved life qualities for a lot of people, improved health and happiness. I think it's interesting through the lens of energy because our society tends to look down on work that requires human labor.
But as we've digitized and electrified our economy and more and more corporate jobs have people sitting in offices using digital technology, for most of the day we end up with a population of so many more people who don't get enough physical activity. Because that's not good for health, people then have to find more time to intentionally exercise, often at gyms with machines like treadmills that are electrified in order to work off some of their physical energy to stay fit.
So I guess this irony just gets me to ask whether we need to challenge our basic ideas of progress and advancement because as more and more things become automated and mechanized, we're becoming more vulnerable as we're more reliant on external and unsustainable sources of energy to power our society. People are increasingly working jobs that don't feel meaningful to them and chip away at our mental health. People are increasingly dehumanized by a system that treats so many like replaceable parts and pieces of a machine.
Guillaume Pitron: That was a brilliant way of seeing how we live today. To add to what you just said, I would introduce an interesting phenomenon that scientists are very aware of, which is a rebound effect.
Any technology is claimed to be a better technology than the past generation of technologies because it's going to be more functional, more powerful, it's going to use fewer resources and less power for actually achieving the same task. But these new technologies will actually make us even more willing to use these technologies and to actually buy more of these technologies. This is how we are today, surrounded by thousands of connected objects in our everyday life, where having one single phone 20 years ago was sufficient for having an exciting life.
So this is what we call the rebound effect, which is that on the one hand, the technology makes savings. On the other hand, such technology, because it claims to make savings, pushes us to actually buy more of these technologies and to make even more even wider use of them all the time, and the rebound effect in the way we consume will actually conceal the benefits, the environmental benefits or the energy benefits of the technology itself. We come up to living in a better way. We come up to living with more technologies around this.
But these technologies push for more consumption. We're not solving the problems here because we live in more automated environments with all the psychological questions that have actually already been brought to our lives. As you said, think about that. We're spending hours in our cars every day in urban cities and urban environments. But tomorrow, what if we have connected cars and autonomous cars? What will we do five hours a day in our cars doing nothing? Well, we will watch YouTube, will watch Netflix, we will go to more social networks, and we're going to have to be busy. Because we are busy doing something that we don't have to do anymore because we're not going to have to look at the car ahead of us or behind us.
Because that's going to spark huge psychological questions. Are we going to use our time and make our life filled with exciting things if we don't spend this time using what we used to do? And secondly, what will be the place for new social networks, new technological applications, and new entertainment in order to make this life as fulfilling as possible? I think we're going towards an entertainment age in which Silicon Valley will have huge power in making our lives easy. I guess it's a good question to answer.
Kamea Chayne: So, mining is different compared to farming in that we can farm in ways that regenerate the ecosystem and do not compromise the land's inherent capacity to recreate abundance. But when we mine metals, there's no way to establish reciprocity, no way to mine regenerative, and therefore no way to really mine sustainably. So, this discussion really takes apart our understanding of, quote-unquote, green energy that really requires a new type of infrastructure and dependence in order to sustain.
It leads me to wonder whether the greenest form of energy is what actually exists within our living biosphere has the capacity for regeneration and therefore sustainability as long as there is balance, complexity, and reciprocity and not overconsumption.
Guillaume Pitron: If we think about various technologies which just make our basic needs easier and cheaper and more accessible to everyone, including the poorest, no one wants to go back to this. Maybe we can discuss whether it's necessary to take ten trips on a plane every year or if we have to go to social networks ten times a day. But that's for the upper crust of the very rich people who are consuming more and more of what they already have in such already huge volumes. But for the poorest and for the middle classes and for Africans and many Asians who are not living in the same ways as we do in the West, this is out of fashion. To think about this, I just want you to catch up and to live the way we live or at least to get a decent living and the decent the access to medication and to their basic needs and technology will afford that.
So I'm afraid we're not actually in the process of really putting in place or really thinking about reducing anything, we are just accelerating, and this is driven by the development of developing countries. There is a question asked by scientists, which is how do we put more vegetable value and organic things in our everyday life? That leads us to the questions of the trees that you were wondering about before. People wanted to make materials not made out of mining commodities, but out of trees or out of agriculture, or out of animal products. They can find the properties in the laboratory of something that is a vegetable or animal and turn this property into something which is electronic or mechanical or which can be used in industrial processes.
There are attempts to actually use the properties of commodities, including commodities that come from the ground and that come from the animal living world, and to replace them with what's not sustainable, such as a mining commodity in, for example, solar panels tomorrow will be like paper sheets, transparent paper sheets made of biological products made of plants or trees. We are able to turn these properties that come from the living world into products that can actually catch the light and in the future, solar panels will be made of this. So, we can expect maybe to not be too much dependent on mining and more dependent on these types of products, which are much better for the environment.
But that's going to take decades, maybe centuries because we are eight billion.
Kamea Chayne: Still, we can't continue the same levels of consumption and we have to look within as well. I'm not sure if you saw the controversial documentary Planet of the Humans.
Guillaume Pitron: I did, I thought he was courageous.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I thought so. That's what I assumed you would feel about this. But it's basically been taken down by YouTube. Some notable environmentalists called for it to be taken down while other people disagreed with certain things in the film but called the act of removing the film censorship. Basically, the various statistics and information shared within the documentary quoted were either outdated or just not true. That's what that's why a lot of critics took issue with.
But I personally saw it, and I think the larger message that it was trying to get across is that green energy is not going to save us because of the new sets of issues tied to it, meaning we can't simply substitute fossil fuels with these greener technologies and think that alone will save the planet and ourselves from ecological collapse without fundamentally questioning our consumption and how our modern civilization exists on this planet. I definitely feel like that bigger message, while it might be really upsetting or uncomfortable for many people to reckon with, is valid. That's also why I believe some environmentalists saw the film as dangerous because, in this time of urgency, people really want to encourage action in support of decarbonization and not disengagement or total hopelessness that this path that we're going down still isn't the answer. But I'm curious to get your take on that as well.
Guillaume Pitron: I saw the movie and I thought it was a very courageous movie because it needs to take some courage actually to go against the flow to develop an analysis which is a way different from the conventional wisdom in green circles. I agree with you that some figures can be debated. There might be some mistakes somehow with one figure or here. But the general idea is very right. This is just what we've been talking about.
I believe that there is real honesty in the approach of the filmmaker by doing this movie, by bringing to the table into the debate this general idea that green technologies will not save us from any ecological issues or challenges. It's a despairing thesis. It can bring actually nonaction or it can just bring people to think, well, what should I do if there's no solution? That also is a dangerous flip side of such ideas, that because there is no solution, well, we can just stop acting and we don't have to fight anymore to turn our back to oil and coal. So, I agree with you that there is a risk here.
My thesis is we have to face the reality. I'm just trying to speak about reality. What I've been explaining to you for the last half an hour or so is a reality that I've seen on the ground. I think I wouldn't be a journalist; I wouldn't be able to look at myself in a mirror if I were watching this reality without actually talking about it and saying to myself, I'm just going to keep this for myself and I'm not going to share it with anyone because nobody needs to know. I need to tell you this reality. But also...This is my responsibility: to tell you what do we do now? Where do we go? What solutions do we find?
How do we develop new substitution techniques, and recycling techniques to be able to make these technologies less polluting than what they are today? How do we question the way we consume in order to actually correct the mistakes that we have already done in this green age? How do we calculate the amount of pollution that these new products bring in our everyday life? Because no one is able to actually see any figure about it? How do we make these figures on pollution available to the public so that the public is better informed? These are questions that we need to ask now.
But my very conviction may very well I'm very certain of like actually the filmmaker of this movie, plenty of the humans, is that...
This green transition or whatever transition it is needs to be more radical.
It doesn't need to be just a technological transition. If we just believe that we're going to save the planet by putting solar panels on our roofs and changing from our old cars to electric cars, we're not going to save anything. We need to be much more radical and take a much more radical stance, maybe to make a U-turn in the way we think and act in order to make this green transition possible. That can bring hope, but we probably need to ask questions and look much deeper than what we've done until now.
Kamea Chayne: As we're wrapping up, what are the key takeaways that you would like our listeners to walk away with so they can translate this somewhat heavy discussion into maybe some actionable things that they can do?
Guillaume Pitron: As I mentioned, I think there is in this transition a lot of space for hope. We are living in an age that is wonderful in many ways. We live in an age where one technology changes the other and is disruptive. Innovations can really bring possible solutions to many problems that we have.
I really believe that when I speak to students in college, for instance, I say to them, commit yourself to becoming scientists or engineers and researchers because we need you to actually turn our ideas and our utopias into feasible techniques that actually can help solve problems. There is a huge pass and huge way ahead of us, and a huge space for generations of scientists and researchers to actually, for example, use natural products in order to make new electricity and energy technologies. There is space for, money, and power in a willingness for more discoveries.
We also live in a wonderful world. It's a beautiful planet and it's a planet which is—and I'm going to be provocative here—very peaceful. We live in a peaceful age. We believe we are surrounded by violence, which is not very true, actually. Look at the figures of collective violence. There have been such few people dying of wars or crimes to date then for the last two or three thousand years. It's amazing how few people die today of such collective violence. Contrary to what the media say, I offer you and I suggest that you go back to this wonderful book by Stefan Pinker published in the United States in 2011 is The Better Angels of Our Nature, which explains the story of violence and tells us that we are living in a peaceful world. That makes me hopeful that this world today is also a very exciting age to live in. That's probably the best way to be if you are 20 years old.
Kamea Chayne: What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Guillaume Pitron: I would say a couple of things, but I'm very worried about people's angriness. Everyone's angry around me. Everyone is angry on social networks. I would say don't let angriness drive your actions. I would also say with passion and honesty to try to stick to what you love; try to stick to what you feel is right. As my fellow says, you do good where you feel good and try to do good where you feel good.
