Climate One: Can We Get Clean Energy Without Dirty Mines?

Global sales of electric vehicles more than doubled in 2021. Projections for this year are for another huge gain as more automakers introduce more models with increasing range. This is all good news for transitioning to a clean energy economy. But sourcing the materials needed for clean energy might not be so clean. Mining is the leading industrial polluter in the U.S., but the climate crisis demands a transition to technologies that require raw materials to be extracted. Today’s Climate One asks: how can the world get the minerals it needs to mitigate the climate crisis without creating other ecological disasters in the process?