Environmental activist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben was arrested on Thursday after staging a protest at a gas station in Burlington, Vermont to bring attention to Exxon Mobil's decades-long efforts to undermine climate action for the corporation's own gain—a strategy he called "unparalleled evil" in an op-ed for the Guardian on Wednesday.
McKibben blocked a gas pump at Simon's Quick Stop and Deli Mobile station, armed with a sign that read, "This pump temporarily closed because Exxon Mobil lied about climate (#ExxonKnew)" with a link to a Tumblr page explaining his actions.
In recent weeks, two separate investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Exxon hid evidence of the role of fossil fuels in climate change from the public and stymied political action on global warming. "They predicted that some Arctic oil fields would become cheaper and more accessible," McKibben told the Burlington Free Press on Thursday.
To explain why he felt compelled to stage his solo protest, McKibben wrote on his Tumblr:
This is not just one more set of sad stories about our climate. In the 28 years I’ve been following the story of global warming, this is the single most outrageous set of new revelations that journalists have uncovered. Given its unique credibility—again, it was the biggest corporation on earth—ExxonMobil could have changed history for the better. Had it sounded the alarm—had it merely said "our internal research shows the world’s scientists are right"—it would have saved a quarter century of wheel-spinning. We might actually have done something as a world before the Arctic melted, before the coral reefs were bleached, before the cycles of drought and flood set fully in.
"I don't want this story to disappear in all this media clutter," McKibben said before his arrest. "We need to let people know what we now know about Exxon Mobil. In a noisy world, this may be what we have to do."
The demonstration drew immediate support from McKibben's fellow activist and writer Naomi Klein, who tweeted, "Exxon has earned hundreds of billions of profits off of decades of lies and deceit. So proud of my friend Bill today:"
Exxon has earned hundreds of billions of profits off of decades of lies and deceit. So proud of my friend Bill today https://t.co/zqtSKDPevz— Naomi Klein (@Naomi Klein)1444941083.0
"Recent reporting has shown Exxon to be the willing and cold-blooded perpetrators of one of the worst corporate crimes in U.S history," 350.org spokesman Karthik Ganapathy told The Huffington Post. "We should be paying more attention to it, collectively."
McKibben's protest came on the heels of a congressional push for a federal inquiry into Exxon to determine if the corporation broke the law by "failing to disclose truthful information" about climate change.
Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Los Angeles) and Mark DeSaulnier (D-Walnut Creek) on Wednesday wrote a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Exxon violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, as well as a slew of other laws, including those protecting public health, truth in advertising, and consumer safety.
"If these allegations against Exxon are true, then Exxon's actions were immoral," Lieu and DeSaulnier wrote. "We request the DOJ investigate whether ExxonMobil's actions were also illegal."
"When I read the Times investigation it occurred to me that it is very similar to what the tobacco companies were doing decades ago," Lieu told the Los Angeles Times. "Evidence showed that what they were saying was incorrect and they kept spreading this disinformation campaign."
.[email protected]: 'No Corporation Has Ever Done Anything This Big & This Bad' http://t.co/NUpqWQOZ8J @democracynow http://t.co/vLqV1TkkmI— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1444838235.0
Federal prosecutors used the RICO Act to charge tobacco companies after they were found to be withholding information about the health impacts and addictiveness of smoking. "Exxon's situation is even worse," said Lieu. "It was taking advantage of the science ... while denying the facts to the public."
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Obama Cancels Arctic Drilling Leases
Don’t Let Wall Street Leave You Behind: It’s Time to Divest From Fossil Fuels
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.