Dr. Lezak is a researcher at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford who studies the politics of climate change.
Seventy years ago, the United States was the world’s leading producer of fluorite, a brilliantly multicolored mineral essential to industries such as steel. But the last American fluorite mine closed nearly 30 years ago, unable to compete with cheaper operations in places like Mongolia.
Although America has abundant deposits of many of the critical minerals that go into our vehicles, electronics and buildings, these materials are mostly mined abroad in poorer nations where labor is cheap (or worse, workers are enslaved) and environmental laws are more permissive, rarely enforced or easily sidestepped with bribes.
The decline of domestic mining means that Americans are outsourcing the environmental and social costs of our inexpensive consumer goods to lower-income nations. More than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, sometimes called the blood diamond of electric vehicle batteries, comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labor and sexual violence are rampant in mines.
About half of the world’s nickel, another key ingredient in electric vehicle batteries, comes from mines in Indonesia, some of which have destroyed almost 200,000 acres of rainforest amid allegations of operating illegally on Indigenous land.
For the rest of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/opinion/lithium-copper-minerals-mining.html