Q&A: Why cleantech might not be as clean as it seems

Until the AI boom, the renewable energy transition was perhaps humanity’s most talked about technological breakthrough, positioning clean, electrified tech as the world’s best bet to fend off the existential threat of climate change. But as global powers race to dig up the critical minerals needed to power that energy transition, a renewable revolution might not be as sustainable as many think.

Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist and author whose most recent book, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future, hones in on the impacts of the resource development that’s fuelling the technology behind the green-energy transition. 

Beiser was at Web Summit Vancouver last month, where he participated in a panel with Canadian cleantech company Moment Energy on second-life technology and how retired EV batteries can go from environmental liability to supply-chain asset. BetaKit caught up with him after his panel to talk about what the future of the race for critical minerals looks like, what we can do to make the energy transition more sustainable, and why he doesn’t use the term “clean energy.” 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

In the tech world, we hear a lot about critical minerals and how vital they are to this next technological revolution. What minerals are we talking about, and why are they important to Canada?

We need critical metals for lots of things, but there’s two main purposes that we really need them for: magnets and batteries. The battery in your phone, your laptop, your electric vehicle—those are made out of metal, usually lithium, nickel, and cobalt. 

The other is magnets. Magnets are in practically any kind of machine that moves. 

In your book, you don’t use the term “green energy” or “clean energy.” Why not? 

I don’t use the term clean or green energy because there’s really no such thing. Renewably generated electricity is better—it’s easier on the planet and people than fossil fuels, but it still has costs. 

What are some of those downsides?

Solar panels or electric vehicles don’t have carbon emissions, but we had to tear up rainforests in Indonesia to get the nickel that we needed. Kids are being put to work in cobalt mines in Congo to get metals needed for batteries. It’s really important to understand, because often people think if we just switch over to electricity, then problems will be solved. But no: we’re actually trading one set of problems for another. 

What can we do to minimize that damage?

We can be recycling more. We can be reusing a lot more. A lot of these things are already being done in the developing world, it’s just that here in the rich world we’re so used to just tossing out our old iPhone and getting a new one because it’s got something like a better camera. 

All these problems come from our over-consumption of metals. The best, most effective solution is we just have to consume less. That’s a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. 

Canada has a wealth of critical minerals, but most of our biggest companies are developing in the global south. As this resource arms race picks up, do you think we could see more mining here? 

We’re going to. Prime Minister Mark Carney is really pushing out these nation-building projects, so we’re definitely going to see more. The reason so much of it happens overseas is because we don’t want to live with the impact of it, basically. It’s the same story in the US. The US used to be the world’s number one mining power, but people got really fed up with having their rivers polluted, their skies polluted, and giant pits gouged in the earth. So, basically, other countries around the world—especially China—were like “we’ll do it.”

If you want to open a mine in Canada, it’s a lot harder than it is to open one in the Philippines or Indonesia. We have pretty decent environmental regulations, labour regulations, First Nations consultation—all of which is good—but it also really slows the process down and makes it a lot more expensive.

Are there any tech companies that are developing solutions that might make this kind of resource development less, well, shitty for the planet?

Yeah, there are.  One of the things I’m most hopeful about is the idea of re-mining or mining waste. There are hundreds of thousands of mines all over North America and the world where companies went in, dug up a bunch of ore, took what they could get out, and just dumped the rest. Usually, that means in that leftover ore there’s still a lot of metal. Our technology is much better now, so we can extract a lot more efficiently. There’s a lot of research going into how we can go back to these piles of waste which are hazardous in and of themselves and get the metals we need from them. 

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What about e-cycling? Aren’t there a lot of precious metals in our devices?

In every gadget, there’s copper, nickel, cobalt—everything we need sitting there on your laptop. Most of that stuff just gets thrown away and ends up in landfills. It’s a waste. We throw away something like $62 billion worth of metals. Just throw them in the trash every year. It’s crazy. But there’s also a big industry of e-waste recycling. They’re doing way more of it in China than we are here, and there’s a lot of money going into it, a lot of investment, and a lot of government support. So, it’s good on balance, and better for people and the planet, but it’s still very energy intensive, polluting, and often done on the backs of some of the poorest people in the world.

It sounds like a lot of the investment and development is happening in places like China and Brazil. Here in North America, government seems to be doubling down on those legacy fossil fuel industries. Are we laggards?

We’re definitely making progress. The energy transition is happening, but we’re really behind the curve. These legacy industries are huge industries with lots and lots of money, clout, and constituents. But another part of it that’s really unique to North America is the politicization of it. In the rest of the world, that doesn’t enter into it at all. In most of the world, it just doesn’t have this political layer.


BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.

Feature image courtesy of Web Summit Vancouver.