Miscellaneous News Gleanings: Green Elitism, Lithium Mining, EVs, and the War on Lawns

Items of note from various sources the past couple days.

The first is from Michael Shellenberger:

Green Elitism Behind Farmer Crackdowns
What role is the World Economic Forum playing?
 

Farmers in the Netherlands reduced nitrogen pollution by nearly 70% through a voluntary system. But the government says that is not enough and is demanding that they cut pollution by another 50% by 2030.
By the Dutch government’s own estimates, 11,200 farms out of the roughly 35,000 dedicated to dairy and livestock would have to close under its policies; 17,600 farmers would have to reduce livestock; and total livestock would need to be reduced by one-half to one-third. The Dutch government has demanded that animal farming stop entirely in many places.

EdNote: Is there not a global food shortage in the making already? What's the deal here? Is this the beginning of a more widespread trend? How will this impact the price of steak?

Item Two: Lithium shortages coming

Satellite view of salt flats in Bolivia and Argentina
that are rich in Lithium.

Another article I read was about the Lithium shortages that are coming... EVs are dependent on batteries, but Lithium Inflation is up 750%. More than half the world's Lithium comes from So
uth America, but those countries have two things going against Lithium. (1) Leaders who want more of the profits from mining in their countries. (I can't entirely blame them) and (2) indigenous people who are protesting mining altogether, like they do in the U.S. ... "Protect our water" groups. What we have is competing Green objectives colliding.

Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal:

South American setbacks for lithium, a key battery component, worry the electric-vehicle industry.

Lithium is an essential element in EV batteries. Less than 2% of the world's lithium comes from the U.S., though actually 4% is available but we have designated it as off limits. 

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Item Three: The War on Lawns.

Thursday's NYTimes eNews daily had a story on the war on lawns.

Early in the piece the authors write, "But while the lawn may be a powerful symbol of American postwar prosperity, it’s also an ecological dead zone that’s sucking the nation’s aquifers dry."

OK, so my initial reactions to the story ran like this. First, it seems to me that there's an inherent hatred of suburbia that I've never fully understood. People in Manhattan don't have lawns. So why this assault on yet another aspect of the suburban lifestyle?

It brings to mind the assault on SUVs twenty years ago. Well guess what? SUVs are useful for taking eight kids to a soccer game. They save gas because you don't have to take three vehicles. And when you have a hobby farm, pickups and SUVs are quite useful for conveying hay or feed.

Until I read this NYTimes piece (it looks like an opinion presented as news) I never knew lawns were a "powerful symbol" of anything. Then again, when things get cast in a political light, everything tends to be turned into symbols of one kind or another.

And when you look at a map of the U.S. from above, what percentage of the U.S. is covered with lawns? It has to be less than 5%. Most of the country is mountains, forests, plains and lakes. Can this small slice of American landscape really suck the entire North American aquifers into an ecological dead zone? 

I'm skeptical. 

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Hard Choices. India's Bustard Has a Handicap and the Green Movement a Dilemma

The Bustard: a big bird with poor eyesight

This past week I came across an interesting story about a dilemma involving two competing agendas. According the story, the Bustard is an endangered species of bird. It is protected because it is purportedly in danger of becoming extinct. But there's a problem. 

It is one of the largest flying birds and doesn't maneuver very well. In addition, it has poor eyesight, therefore it doesn't fly up high where eagles soar. As a result, it has a lower flight path and tends to not look where it's going. Instead it flies forward while gazing downward as it crosses India's flatlands. These characteristics lead to Bustards having so many collisions with power lines that the Supreme Court has said the power lines in this region must go underground. The cost: four billion dollars.

Those costs would no doubt be passed along and are a pain, but the story gets worse. because India wants to use these empty wastelands for wind farms and solar panels. It appears that the forces for a Green future for India are running afoul of the animal rights faction.

“The whole renewable industry, especially solar, could come to a standstill,” said Parag Sharma, chief executive officer at O2 Power Pvt., a Temasek Holdings-backed developer that’s building a 780-megawatt solar project in the western Indian town of Jaisalmer. “You won’t find land that easily anywhere else in the country.”
--EnergyWorld.com

* * * 

The story caught my eye not because I've been losing sleep over the fate of the Bustard. Rather, because it was representative of the kinds of issues leaders face involving conflicting agendas. 

These kinds of dilemmas exist in countless variations. Here are a few examples.

1. Lithium is a lightweight metal that is needed for batteries in our EV future. One of the largest lithium deposits is located in Utah. Unfortunately, there is a rare flower that is growing only there. Do we proceed with our EV future or protect the flowers?

2. There are purportedly copper deposits here in Northern Minnesota. Copper is an essential metal for recharging stations for EVs. Mining would also provide jobs to a region that has suffered decades of setbacks. At odds with this are the fears that mining will destroy the freshwater in our region, that drainage could also pollute the largest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Superior.

3. Job creation and development is needed in many communities. After Duluth's manufacturing jobs disappeared several decades ago, the tourism industry was nurtured to become a major employer. Service jobs, however, pay significantly less than manufacturing. Efforts to grow our job base run against the desire to restrict growth, to not build new homes or businesses.

4. No one wants the power grid to go down, yet the means for delivering power currently requires oil or coal. Wind and solar can only deliver 10% of what we need, yet every effort to make sure we have energy until that future day when it can be fully renewable is fraught with conflict. The current infrastructure is aging. Railroad trains occasionally jump the track. New high tech pipelines are the safest way to deliver the fuel we depend on. The opposition is fierce, however, and this is another area with contradictions.

* * * 

These are just a few of a multitude of problematic issues that communities, states and nations are wrestling with. Too often things get so political that it becomes near impossible to be objective. Is it possible to please everybody? Not really. 

I am still a believer in dialogue. I am opposed to bullying. Finding wise solutions isn't something just for the birds. What's needed, I believe, is courageous, transparent leadership. 

What do you think?

* * * 

Read India's Bustard dilemma here. 

Dylan Town: Minnesota Brown Talks About Life on the Iron Range and Its History, Past & Present (Part 2)

Minnesota's Aaron Brown

This is part two of a fascinating interview about the Iron Range with Minnesota Brown blogger/journalist Aaron Brown. Yesterday he shared some of the backstory about the expansion of the Oliver Mining Company that resulted in moving a third of the city (home and buildings) to a new location. He also shared how the culture shifted during the 20th century.

In this blog entry we'll look at the political landscape, including one of the biggest political issues facing the region, the battle between environmentalists and the mining interests as regards copper and other metals. Aaron Browns articulate insights will shed light on why these issues are not black and white.

A link to yesterday's post will be at the end of this one.

EN: The Northland once had a strong CPUSA component. During our Great Depression more than 10,000 people, especially Finns, were persuaded to join the future and go to Stalin’s Russia, primarily deceived by propaganda. How much did that happen here on the Range?

Aaron Brown: Yes, early 20th Century Iron Range mining communities had lots of socialist and some communist activity. And I've heard, more second hand than first, of some who left for Russia after the revolution. These were mostly Finns and they headed for Karelia, the region that borders Finland. There was already a large Finnish population there. Keep in mind, these were mostly people from Finland, who still spoke Finnish as their first language. I can't cite you dates or specifics, but I have heard that it proved to be a very bad decision for those who went. After about a year of living in a socialist utopia, with some American elements like baseball thrown in, Stalin grew wary of the Karelian Finns and threw most of them in the gulags. Some survived but most didn’t. It was a cautionary tale about revolutionary communism. These people who went were true believers in the cause. They didn't anticipate how quickly men like Stalin would consolidate power at the expense of the original ideals of the movement.

Humphrey campaigning for presidency, 1968.

EN: Hubert Humphrey made a name for himself by extricating the Communist Party USA from the DFL. CPUSA was a labor movement with strong roots in the Northland. Can you give a brief summary of that history for those who are not from this region?

AB: Of course, this is book. I’ll give you a paragraph.

When immigrants came from Europe to America, and then to northern Minnesota to find work, they brought with them many European languages and cultures. Some of them also brought political ideologies like socialism, anarchism, and communism and dozens of strains of all these movements. They were lured to America with promises of political and economic opportunity. When they realized that things here were surprisingly similar to conditions in Europe (and because they were too broke to go back) they set about to enact a democratic version of the same ideals they had been reading about back in Europe. Many who came to the Iron Range were already socialists. But, in time, they joined their own societies and clubs here as well.

The CP-USA was never all that big or important in local politics on the Range, but many immigrants were sympathetic to it. But the peak of socialist thought probably occurred before WWI and the first Red Scare, which caused Range miners to avoid talk of socialism for fear of economic reprisals.

Copper miners in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, 1905

EN: It’s my understanding that the Iron Range also has abundant copper reserves, but that there’s been an almost impossible barrier erected to prevent copper mining from occurring. It’s also my understanding that the environmentalists who oppose mining are opposed to gasoline powered cars and want more EVs. EVs are battery powered and copper is a primary resource required to make battery-powered cars. Is there no way to find a middle ground and have the mining and Green advocates find a solution that is safe and economically beneficial here?

AB: The chief barrier to copper mining in northern Minnesota is and always has been the cost of production. The general understanding that copper and other elements could be found in the region has been broadly understood for at least 80 years. The problem is that the ore is diffused within a vast amount of overburden and waste rock, requiring significant processing to extract. This has never been commercially viable. Nonferrous mining was seriously explored back in the 1970s with a large amount of political support. But that effort was abandoned because the companies doing the promising could never put the money together.

Some twenty years ago (!) talk of mining nonferrous minerals rose again, this time under the umbrella of PolyMet. In the aftermath of LTV’s closure in Hoyt Lakes there was a sucking void of political hopes and dreams, and this fit the bill. The argument was that by using new technology the company could crack the cost/benefit code to mine this site profitably. Not only that, they purported they could do it cleaner than any other copper mine in the world. Twin Metals joined in some years later promising the same near Ely.

Since then, most of what we hear about is related to the environmental risk of this form of mining. And that’s important, but not for the reasons most people think.

It might appear, for instance, that these mines would be running right now were it not for the obstinance of environmentalists. And it’s true that environmental opposition to these projects has been consistent, coordinated and, at times, effective. You might blame regulatory agencies like the MPCA or EPA for their cumbersome red tape and the piles of legal documents they collect and produce. But most of the longest delays have been related to asking the companies for cost-specific information that was withheld for strategic reasons.

PolyMet and Twin Metals are shell corporations, or what the business calls “junior miners.” There won’t be a PolyMet mine or a Twin Metals mine. Rather, there would be a mine run by a real mining company, probably Glencore and/or Antofagasta, respectively. Companies like these are cutthroat international wheeler-dealers. They won’t come in here with their billion dollars a pop unless they are getting a very good deal. So these junior miners, whose targets are really these big corporations, want to make these mines look as good as possible. That means vague permit language and non-binding promises about labor, production, and environmental impact. They don’t have to lie, they need only create enough gaps in the language for a company like Glencore to tear into vast chasms with their team of lawyers at some point in the future.

That’s why you see them talking about using union labor for construction (because all the local construction companies are union anyway) but not signing a non-compete clause with the United Steelworkers of America to seek to represent the workers in the eventual mines. The prior is an assumed cost, but the latter is something that would cost money down the line.

Chalcopyrite from Peru. 

Copper prices are low now and always volatile. It’s copper prices and cost of production that will really determine whether these mines open. The rest is rhetorical noise. Yes, demand for copper might increase going forward, but that assumes no other developments that might make copper wiring obsolete, or that recycling or other sources won't be able to provide what industry needs.

To your question, is there a way to mine Minnesota copper in an environmentally responsible way? The answer is yes, but that it’s very expensive and that efforts to make it less expensive in order to attract investors will lead to it being less environmentally responsible in the long run. The fear isn’t necessarily a large scale disaster while the mine is running — though that’s technically possible — but that the costs of mitigating the mine site after the mine is closed will be placed entirely on the state. Eventually, this would likely negate or even reverse the economic benefits of opening the mine in the first place.

EN: How long have you been writing Minnesota Brown?

AB: I’ve been writing this site since 2006. Prior to that I had used the site as a place to post my weekly newspaper column for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. (I left the Tribune in 2003, but continued to write a column on contract for them. In fact, I still do). But in the fall of 2006 I added the blog component.

EN: Thank you for taking time to share some of the insights you've gained during your life and career on the Range. 

Related Links
Karelia: A Finnish-American Couple In Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941
Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range
Minnesota Brown: Modern Life in Northern Minnesota
Dylan Town: Minnesota Brown Talks About Life on the Iron Range and Its History, Past & Present (Part 2)