But you can sense that climate advocates recognize that this may be their moment. At the opening assembly of heads of state four days ago, the Big Four – U.S., China, EU and India—laid their claim to leadership and ambition and called for success. Canada and Australia, the two carbon exporting industrial democracies, have both replaced climate skeptical Prime Ministers with advocates of action. Russia, whose short-term self interest might lie in a failure of the Paris talks, has pledged not to disrupt. Poland remains as the biggest outlier, calling for less ambition, but seemingly still in the tent.
What are #COP21 negotiations really like? @jpasztor answered this + more Qs in @reddit_AMA https://t.co/imEenUhyUP https://t.co/EvyC4KtNUK— United Nations (@United Nations)1449254215.0
The formal negotiations, predictably, are bogging down and tempers are rising. Unlike heads of state, climate negotiators each strive to take home a head on a platter at each other’s expense, so they see a “zero sum game” however sternly Chinese President Xi may caution against that narrow view.
Most of the inside reporting from these talks will be framed within that narrow negotiating context. An enormous amount of the argument will be “sound and fury,” not substance:
1. Legally binding is a meaningless term. President Obama and the Republican Congress may spar over what this means; the EU may pound the table demanding more “bindingness.” China and India may draw a bright line against being “obligated” themselves while seeking to make the OECD powers “deliver” on their obligations. But no country is going to get so much as a traffic ticket as a result of any deal struck in Paris—or even offered. The UN has no black helicopters to enforce any agreement. No version of the text on the Cop 21 table imposes any penalties on anyone. Kyoto was, in the language of these talks, “binding.” Canada ratified it. The U.S. did not. Canada walked away from its obligations and paid no price. The U.S. met obligations it had not legally assumed. It got no reward from the UNFCCC.
2. The 2 degree pathway is a destination, not a starting point. We already know what the world is planning to do in terms of immediate decarbonization. The final commitments made by the end of the week will simply ratify the national offers already on the table. Roughly speaking, these “INDC’s” [Intended Nationally Determined Contributions] will cut emissions by about half of what climate scientists recommend. That “gap” will not, in any arithmetic sense, be closed in the next two weeks. But this is good, not bad news—we have closed half of the global ambition gap in the past eighteen months, a pace of progress vastly in excess of anything we have seen before.
3. What the negotiations will drive is momentum. The incentives and the level of trust and perceived solidarity—will shape how quickly the world economy prepares itself for the next round of carbon pledges, ones that will be identified between now and 2020, initiated during that period and ratified at COP26. The speed at which decarbonization accelerates is the crucial factor. These elements of the next ten days of negotiation will shape our future.
Will the finance ministers in the industrial nations shake themselves free from the shackles of the post-WWII vision of the role of development finance? They need to provide emerging markets with the necessary liquidity and derisking mechanisms so that banks, pension funds and other investors can provide developing nations with the trillions of long term, lucrative clean energy finance that will be needed. It’s a win-win, but it needs a guarantor—and none has yet been identified.
- Can mechanisms be found to help poor countries already suffering from climate disruption get ready for grimmer weather almost certain to come? How can we ensure that there is advance planning and security to adjust to the losses and damages which are already mounting as weather becomes less predictable and more volatile?
- Can the negotiators, collectively, overcome the instinct to be overly cautious and deferential to the most isolationism segments of their domestic constituencies and forge a genuinely multi-lateral low carbon development regime? Feelings and signals, matter—not just dollars. Here’s where bridging countries like Mexico can be so important—but their work will almost certainly remain hidden behind quiet Paris curtains.
We are indeed poised to ratify more climate diplomacy progress in the next week than we have achieved in the past 20 years. But we can still stumble and the path to success is narrow and slippery. Stay tuned.
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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.