Dems’ Climate Plan Would Fuel Massive Increase In Rare-Earth Mining

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal has been decried as an economy-killer, but a study released Thursday found that the sweeping climate-change resolution would come as an enormous boon to the mining industry.

A report by the free-market Heartland Institute said that replacing fossil fuels and nuclear power with renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and electric vehicles would come at an environmental cost by driving a “massive worldwide increase” in mining.

“The solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries needed to replace fossil fuels and nuclear energy over a 10-year period to produce the 8.2 billion megawatt-hours of power for America’s annual electricity-equivalent needs under the GND would require an unprecedented increase in mining for raw materials,” said the policy brief, “How the Green New Deal’s Renewable Energy Mining Would Harm Humans and the Environment.”

Those minerals include lithium, cobalt, copper, iron, and aluminum. More than 70% of rare-earth minerals are now mined by Chinese-controlled companies or in China, which has a dismal record on environmental protection and working conditions.

“The mining operations required to build wind and solar facilities would involve removing and crushing hundreds of billions of tons of rock and ore, causing major habitat losses and widespread pollution,” said the report.

“It would also create serious human health impacts, especially in countries that do not have modern equipment and health and safety protections.”

The Green New Deal non-binding resolution introduced in February calls for achieving 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030 and zero carbon emissions by 2050, an aggressive goal that supporters like Sen. Bernie Sanders have described as necessary to “avert climate catastrophe.”

The Heartland study by senior policy advisor Paul Driessen argued that the cure would be worse than the disease, given the scale of the solar and wind farms that would be necessary to replace coal, oil and natural gas in power generation.

A 2018 Harvard University study found that wind turbines would need to cover one-third of the lower 48 states to meet current electricity demand, while a 2019 Heartland report concluded that the same could be achieved with 19 billion solar panels, which would cover an area the size of New York and Vermont.

Environmentalists have long sought to block U.S. mining operations while decrying the damage done overseas. In Inner Mongolia, for example, rare earth mining and iron ore processing have contaminated the soil and driven away farmers.

“There’s not one step of the rare earth mining process that is not disastrous for the environment,” Greenpeace China’s Jamie Choi said in a 2011 report. “Ores are being extracted by pumping acid into the ground, and then they are processed using more acids and chemicals.”

The cobalt used for batteries in laptops, smartphones, and electric cars is mined primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an estimated 40,000 children “work alongside their parents and suffer under inhumane working conditions while digging for this cobalt,” the Heartland report said.

While there are U.S. reserves of strategic minerals, anti-mining activists have fought to block mining exploration in Alaska and Western states, forcing U.S. dependence on China and other countries with weaker environmental protections, the study said.

Read rest at Washington Times