Invariably if you talk to anyone, even those who believe the science of climate change and want us to move swiftly away from fossil fuels, they will raise the thorny issue of the environmental impact of mining the critical minerals - like lithium, nickel and cobalt - on the planet. Extracting these minerals also has a human impact as “can be seen in forced displacement and child labor exploitation in the cobalt-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as violence toward Indigenous people living on nickel-studded lands in the Philippines" according to this article.
The obvious question is should we just continue with the fossil fuel status quo - are we better off with the devil we know? Often when people look at this issue they forget to take into account that coal, oil and gas extraction also includes “local ecological disruption in the form of fossil fuel extraction, which will continually expand as existing fuel deposits are depleted.”
Part of the answer to the dilemma is in the name ‘fossil fuel’. Oil, gas and coal are needed in such massive quantities because they are fuel - they must be continuously fed into power plants to create energy. “By contrast, solar panels and wind turbines require a fixed quantity of metals only during the construction phase — and once built, they can produce energy for several decades without additional inputs. Because of this, experts agree that the world will actually see a net decrease in energy-related mining if we replace fossil fuels with metals-powered technologies.”
So as we go forward we will likely be able to reduce the amount of mining we do. Though mining for iron and aluminum, which we need to build structures and machines, will continue to be needed and may even increase. There is also the potential to return to mines that extracted other minerals in the past and find critical minerals in their waste piles. For example, “mining and sustainability expert Tim Werner of the University of Melbourne has estimated that waste from a single Canadian zinc mine could supply several years’ worth of global demand for indium, which is used in solar cells, and there are already efforts to recover cobalt from old lead mines in Missouri.” Lastly, but not least, much renewable technology continues to evolve and improve by developing components, like iron-phosphate batteries, that don’t require cobalt or nickel.
So it seems that although mining for critical minerals is not without negative consequences it has the potential to be much less harmful in the long run than continuing with the status quo of extracting and burning fossil fuels.