Guillaume Pitron: Unmasking 'green' energy's social injustice and environmental costs
Guillaume Pitron (Twitter: @GuillaumePitron; LinkedIn: Guillaume Pitron) is an award-winning journalist and documentary-maker for some of France’s leading TV channels. His investigations focus particularly on commodities and on the economic, political, and environmental issues associated with their use.
Guillaume's first book The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies, which was a bestseller in France and has recently been translated into eight other languages, draws on six years of research to reveal our new dependence on rare metals.
In this podcast episode, Guillaume sheds light on why green and clean energy and technologies are not entirely green nor clean; what we can learn from the history of our energy infrastructure transitions; how moving to ‘green’ energy may actually worsen environmental injustice in some ways; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Guillaume and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Politician Man by Adrian Sutherland
“Green energy is not green; clean technologies are not clean. And what we call ‘sustainable energies’ are not sustainable. That’s very counterintuitive and it may be provocative, but it’s true.”
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This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological regeneration, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app, and support Green Dreamer on Patreon so we can keep the show going and accessible to a wider audience!
On the hidden costs of producing ‘green’ energy:
"The sooner we're able to get rid of oil and coal, the better it will be—we have to find another way of producing energy that will not produce CO2 emissions.
But ‘green’ technologies, such as electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines, don't come out of thin air—they need to be manufactured. These technologies are made of base metals such as copper, zinc, and aluminum. They are also made of rare metals—such as cobalt, tungsten, rare earth, gadolinium, gallium, indium, and graphite—which are said to be rare because they can be three-thousand times rarer in the earth's crust than base metals.
Where do we get these minerals from? How are we going to extract them and refine them?
As a reporter, I travel to the field. That's what I've been doing for years—to look at the ways these metals are extracted and refined in order to manufacture green technologies. The ways these commodities are extracted are extremely, extremely dirty.
If you want to make something clean at the end of the manufacturing process, you actually need to pollute at the very beginning of the process where the metal is extracted—such as in Bolivia with lithium, in Congo for cobalt, and most of the time in China as China is the world leader in the production of rare metals.
Wherever I went in the past years in China—in graphite mines, in refining zones, or any kind of mining area—it's been a nightmare. People talk about an ecological nightmare. They talk about cancers, various kinds of diseases, air pollution, and water pollution. And they say, 'You have no idea because you're very far. You don't mine anything in your countries. We mine all of the metals for you guys at the end of the process to say, ‘we're clean.’ But you have no idea how we suffer here in Baotou in Mongolia or here in the province of Jiangxi to extract these resources.’"
Final words of wisdom:
"Everyone's angry around me; everyone's angry on social networks. I would say, don't let anger drive your actions! Work with passion and honesty. Try to stick to what you love, and try to stick to what you feel is right. You do good where you feel good."
