Yves here. This post notes that there are problems with lithium, both supply and environmental cost, relative to hoped-for demand for electric vehicles. Of course there are alternate battery types that could replace lithium ones, as well as expectations that car-makers will keep becoming more efficient in their use of materials, including lithium. But it is not clear than any of this will come into play soon enough to prevent a cost crunch and/or damage to aquifers and wildlife.
By Joshua Frank. Originally published at TomDispatch
With his perfect tan and slicked-back hair, California Governor Gavin Newsom stood at a podium at Sacramento’s Cal Expo in late September 2020 and announced an executive order requiring all new passenger vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emissions by 2035. With the global Covid pandemic then at its height, Newsom was struggling to inject a bit of hope into the future, emphasizing that his order would prove a crucial step in the fight against climate change while serving as a major boon to the state’s economy. Later approved by the California Air Resources Board, his order is now being reviewed by the Environmental Protection Agency. For his part, President Biden has moved to tighten regulations on tailpipe exhaust, a not-so-subtle way of pushing car manufacturers to go electric.
As Newsom said shortly before signing his order on the hood of a bright red electric Ford Mustang Mach-E:
“Our cars shouldn’t make wildfires worse and create more days filled with smoky air. Cars shouldn’t melt glaciers or raise sea levels threatening our cherished beaches and coastlines… This is the next big global industry, and California wants to dominate it. And that’s in detoxifying and decarbonizing our transportation fleets… And so today, California is making a big, bold move in that direction.”
One stereotype about Californians is true: we do drive a lot, which also means we buy a lot of new cars. California is, in fact, the top seller of new vehicles in the U.S., with more than 1.78 million cars and trucks rolling off its lots in 2023. In total, significantly more than 14 million vehicles are registered in the state, nearly the same number as in Florida and Texas combined. So Newsom is undoubtedly right that ridding our roads of combustion engines will significantly reduce the state’s climate toll. After all, California’s transportation sector alone is responsible for more than 40% of its greenhouse gas emissions.
On the surface, Newsom’s executive order appears all too necessary, indeed vital, if the use of fossil fuels is to one day be eliminated and climate change mitigated. California is also home to more than 50 electric vehicle manufacturers, and car companies that don’t get on board will soon find themselves “on the wrong side of history,” as Newsom warned. “And they’ll have to recover economically, not just recover in terms of being able to look their kids and grandkids in the eyes.”
Underpinning the governor’s ambitious goal of an all-electric future is another reality. While we may change the kinds of cars we drive, we won’t change our lifestyles to fit a climate-challenged future. Millions upon millions of new zero-emission vehicles will be required and to create them, we’ll need staggering amounts of resources that are still lodged below the earth’s crust. On average, a single battery in a small electric car today contains eight kilograms (17.5 pounds) of lithium, or “white gold.” To put that in perspective, if Californians continue to purchase vehicles at the same pace as in 2023, the amount of lithium required will exceed 113 million kilograms (249 million pounds) annually going forward.
That’s a mountain of lithium and an awful lot of mining will need to be done to make the governor’s plan a reality. And mind you, those figures are lowball estimates — a Tesla Model S battery needs 62.6 kilograms of lithium, for instance — and they don’t address the additional mining electric vehicles will demand to produce considerable amounts of cobalt (14 kilograms), manganese (20 kilograms), and copper (upwards of 80 kilograms) per car. Newsom is correct: ridding California’s sprawling freeways of gas-guzzlers is a necessity and will also be highly profitable, especially for the extraction industry. Nevertheless, it will come with significant cultural and environmental costs that must be accounted for.
A Lithium Bonanza
It’s a scorching hot afternoon in the middle of August and I’m heading west on State Route 293 through Humboldt County in northern Nevada. I’m just a few miles south of where the Thacker Pass lithium mine operation has broken ground. The terrain, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), part of the Department of the Interior, is sparse and vast. The sky is cloudless, the soil bone-dry. I pass a coyote scampering through the sagebrush. In the distance, the Montana Mountains rise above the flats, casting a long shadow. While dramatically serene, this landscape, located in the middle of the McDermitt Caldera, along with its almost boundless lithium deposits, holds a hauntingly shameful history.
On September 12, 1865, American soldiers carried out a massacre of the Numu (Northern Paiute) near Thacker Pass. Natives call the area “Peehee mu’huh,” or “rotten moon,” to honor the victims. As the story goes, Indigenous Numu were being hunted by the 1st Nevada Cavalry and decided to hide out near Thacker Pass. Dozens of them, including women and children, were eventually found and slaughtered.
An article in the September 30, 1865 edition of The Owyhee Avalanche detailed the carnage. “A charge was ordered and each officer and man went for scalps, and fought the scattering devils over several miles of ground for three hours, in which time all were killed that could be found.” In all, 31 bodies were located, but “more must have been kill[ed] and died from their wounds, as a strict search was not made and the extent of the battlefield so great.”
Today, descendants of the massacre victims are still fighting to designate Thacker Pass and the surrounding area as a memorial site in the National Register of Historic Places. By doing so, they hope the bulldozers will be forced to shut off their engines and lithium mining will cease. In 2021, federal judge Miranda Du rejected their plea, noting that the evidence they presented was “too speculative” to stop the company, Lithium Americas, from prospecting there. In the years since then, the protesters have encountered significant setbacks but have refused to quit.
“All the people here on the reservation were not consulted when this mine was approved,” says Dorece Sam, a descendant of Ox Sam, one of only three survivors of the bloody 1865 massacre at Thacker Pass. Along with six others, he’s currently being sued by Lithium Nevada Corp. (a subsidiary of Lithium Americas) for protesting the mine. “Myself as an Ox Sam descendant, it means a lot to me to know and watch… as the grounds become more and more desecrated. It’s hard to see and hard to watch.”
Lithium Americas pitched its plan to the BLM in 2019 and broke ground at Thacker Pass in March 2023. Native tribes and environmental groups have argued in various court proceedings that the BLM rushed its environmental review without properly consulting the tribes in the approval process. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals shot down their best-chance lawsuit in July.
In a previous 2023 ruling, a lower court stated that the BLM had indeed violated federal law by approving the mine since Lithium Americas hadn’t demonstrated its rights to the 1,300 acres it would, in the future, bury in waste rock from its mining. Despite that acknowledgment, presiding Judge Du failed to revoke the company’s permits.
“Our hearts are heavy hearing the decision that Judge Du did not revoke the permits for the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. Indigenous people’s sacred sites should not be at the expense of the climate crisis the U.S. faces. Destroying Peehee Mu’huh is like cultural genocide,” said the People of Red Mountain, Indigenous Land and Culture protectors, following Du’s decision.
The “Right” to Mine
While the courts ruled in favor of the Bureau of Land Management’s audit, few are disputing that the Thacker project will have a deleterious impact on the region. For one thing, when the mine is up and running, it will need an exorbitant amount of groundwater for its operations. An estimated 1.7 billion gallons sucked from the Quinn River Valley, an already overburdened aquifer, will have to be pumped into the mine annually. Opponents of the project also note that chemicals used in the lithium extraction process could leach into groundwater supplies, polluting nearby creeks, home to the already threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout. The Thacker basin is also a vibrant wildlife corridor for pronghorn antelope, mule deer, and home to the single largest sage-grouse population in Nevada.
In total, the Thacker Pass mine, the largest known lithium deposit in this country, could one day eat up more than 17,000 acres of public lands, more than half the size of San Francisco. It’s set to be the largest lithium mine in the country, churning out as many as 40,000 metric tons annually, enough to power 800,000 electric vehicles. Inevitably, Thacker will make Lithium Americas’ shareholders very rich, bringing them an estimated nearly $4 billion once all the recoverable lithium is extracted. However, that projection, from 2021, was based on the price of lithium when it sold for an average of $12,600 per ton. By 2023, a ton of lithium was selling for around $46,000.
Promising that the mine will power its all-electric-vehicle future, General Motors now holds exclusive rights to the lithium the mine will extract and has invested $650 million in it. President Biden’s Department of Energy is also all in, loaning $2.26 billion to Lithium Americas to jump-start the project.
The Thacker Pass lithium mine is but one of many examples of the way once venerable Native lands have been and continue to be exploited. The 1872 Mining Act and the Dawes Act of 1887 have long permitted the federal government to stake claims to tribal lands without their consent.
“The Mining Law allows United States citizens and firms to explore for minerals and establish rights to federal lands without authorization from any government agency. This provision, known as self-initiation or free access, is the cornerstone of the Mining Law,” reads a report on that law by Lawrence University economics professor David Gerard. “If a site contains a deposit that can be profitably marketed, claimants enjoy the ‘right to mine,’ regardless of any alternative use, potential use, or non-use value of the land.”
The Dawes Act went even further, allowing the federal government to divide tribal lands into smaller parcels that could be sold off to individual buyers, part of a sinister scheme to delegitimize Native sovereignty on lands that had been stolen from them in the first place.
“It served the larger purpose because the larger purpose was twofold: to make us more like white people or destroy us and get large amounts of land out of Native control and into the hands of individual, non-Native citizens,” says Kelli Mosteller, director of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center. “The Dawes Act solidified once again the distrust that has settled in about dealing with the government. Every time the government comes in and asks for something, there is always that ulterior motive.”
The mine at Thacker Pass, which will end up slicing a gash in the earth a mile wide and 2.3 miles long, is just the latest example of an ugly legacy of ravaging former Native lands for profit.
“Are we still in a situation where the rich get rich and the tribes get poorer because they don’t get a dime off of the mining that happens within their original lands? That’s hard to swallow,” says Arlan Melendez, chair of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony.
Going Back to California
A significant underground lithium deposit has also been discovered near the south end of California’s dilapidated and toxic Salton Sea, once a playground for Hollywood’s elite. While it’s not nearly as large as the one at Thacker Pass, estimates put the extractable deposits of lithium at upwards of 18 million metric tons, enough to eventually fill 380 million electric vehicle batteries.
Of course, digging out all that smoldering “white gold” will come at a cost there, too, not just economically but environmentally. What those effects will be, exactly, has yet to be revealed. Even so, Governor Newsom made his way to the Imperial Valley and the Salton Sea, a region he hopes might be transformed into a hub for electric battery production and that he’s smugly branded “Lithium Valley.”
“California is poised to become the world’s largest source of batteries, and it couldn’t come at a more crucial moment in our efforts to move away from fossil fuels,” said Newsom. “The future happens here first — and Lithium Valley is fast-tracking the world’s clean energy future.”
How clean that future will be remains to be seen. Here’s one thing to consider, though: no matter how this all turns out, Newsom’s electrified vision of the future doesn’t mean fewer vehicles on the road or a reduction in America’s energy consumption. The California governor isn’t about to challenge the tenets of global capitalism that, with a significant helping hand from global warming, are already driving us toward the brink of ecological collapse. In all too many ways, at least as now planned, more mining, even of lithium, will mean not a new world but an all-too-grim continuation of the status quo. The key difference is that this time around, it will come with a “green” stamp of approval.
In other words, despite the horrors of climate change, the present approach to fixing it, whether by mining for lithium in the Salton Sea or dredging up the spirits of Thacker Pass, is deeply problematic. As long as every single thing on this planet remains a commodity to be exploited for profit, whether labor or natural resources, humanity will remain in crisis. If we proceed as planned down this violent and bumpy road ahead, we may (or may not) save our imperiled climate, but one thing is certain: our little planet will be left in ruins while the wealthy speed off in their Teslas.
Copyright 2024 Joshua Frank
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With respect to the writers, this sort of analysis is of minimal use if you don’t take the big picture of resource use and decarbonisation, and in particular compare it to the ‘do nothing’ alternatives (and this includes rapid reduction in resource use, as to achieve this we must…. Increase electricity use, because electricity the most efficient option we have for the ‘big’ requirements of a society).
There have been several big studies done on this, not least by the IEA, a notoriously fossil fuel friendly organisation. The results are usefully summarised by the always very accessible Hannah Richie. There is in fact an inverse relationship to mining waste and renewable energy – the more solar panels, wind farms, batteries, EVs we make, the less mining waste we produce – it’s that simple. If you wonder why, try visiting a coal mine or fracking operation or gas field.
We are very fortunate that the most important materials required for the transition – lithium, silicon, sodium, steel, aluminium, rock wool, etc., are among the most common and easily accessible on earth.
Yes, there are huge problems in shifting an economy from one energy use to another. Yes, we’ll need to use a different set of polluting rare earths than the ones we use for facilitating fossils fuels. Yes, it’s probably too late to avert catastrophic climate change. Yes, it’s not nice if you happen to be living in a lovely area on top of a lithium deposit (unless you own it of course). But no, mining waste and resource availability are not key constraints in aiming for a low carbon future. The constraints are all human made.
“The constraints are all human made”
This is quite true even if at some level there are physical constraints on resources. We first have to deal with our mental constraints and barriers as you signal which are so often all too difficult to overcome. We should first break the dam that fossil fuel industries have created starting with climate change denialism.
Agreed. And I would add that nowhere, ever, is there any suggestion that we can alter our demands, lower net demand, and maintain or improv lifestyles and quality of life . It IS possible, there are a lot of folks who are smart and care, big picture.
It seems there is not enough up-front easy money in mindful conservation and action.
Conservation is the lowest cost, lowest-hanging fruit. Paradigm shifts can be empowering and energizing in their own right.
Individual car ownership for every person who can own one is the suicidal, destructive and frankly, mad, result of the US/Capitalist cult of ‘individual freedom’. These huge amounts of battery power supposedly required could be decimated by a planned program of nation wide public transport. But of course, ‘planned’ in association with ‘public’ is a forbidden concept in the US.
On the plus side, the extreme efforts needed to fulfil this crazy program will probably aid in the pauperisation of the US economy, which right now for the rest of the world is a very desirable outcome – (up to a point, of course – that point being the bankruptcy of the MIC/US Navy, Army and AirForce). After that it might be possible to re-build a normal, sane non-hegemonic country. Or not, depending on climate change, desertification and the general decrepitation of the ecology, which are the killer ‘apps’ of the future.
Frank’s Counterpunch is ground zero of the Noble Savage school of environmentalism which says the highest best reason for not doing something is that the land in question is sacred to some dwindling group of Native Americans. Unlike most of the readers here I’ve been to Thacker Pass and it’s as remote and underpopulated a corner of the US as you are likely to find. That doesn’t make running our transportation on lithium a good idea, or a bad idea, but better arguments please. Without a doubt environmentalists have a difficult task in taking on wealthy and powerful interests but here’s suggesting they should pick their battles wisely and accept the reality that doing nothing is not an option. Humanity’s fate matters a lot more than the tribes of Thacker.
Of course I don’t have a solution for this giant problem from hell either but ultimately it may come down to all of us doing a lot less driving and flying. And on that front the vast spaces of the American West are, if anything, overpopulated and require roads and driving to sustain the existence of those who cling to such land, however “sacred.” For Americans the blame is in all of us–tribes too–and not just greedy mining companies.
So nice of you to be magnanimous with blame. This is what the tribes have been dealing with since the first arrivals on this continent from the other continent. As a former Nevada Conservation/Natural Resource official, I can tell you first-hand that Thacker Pass is indeed an environmentally sensitive and natural resource habitat of special interest to the Northern Piute tribe. Just as other sovereign lands within Nevada.
A point of the article that needs highlighting is these tribes live on land that by US treaty is NOT subject to federal control. US treaties being what they are, the Dawes Act breached that trust. (Something the US does with treaties to this day.) And in this case, it was the US Supreme Court that re-wrote the rules-base-order.
Now, some may think it’s okay to breach trust with the sovereign land owners of Thatcher Pass. I don’t. If you want to take their land, as a good capitalist, negotiate a price. Not force them off their land, once again.
This website promotes radical conservation as a best solution to climate change. Native American tribes have been living that meme since those ingrate Anglos arrived. Millions of new lithium powered electric cars will not get us there.
Surprised to read this upon rising late this a.m., PK. The huge water demands are a destructive prescription that your (and esp those in the comments immed below) rejection of alternate value hierarchies cannot gainsay. Northern Nevada as it is and as it has been is more important than suburbanites’ post-1985 fake ‘need’ of driving their 11 year olds to and from school in an electric suv.
Playing the Devil’s Advocate here but what if sodium batteries are actually the way to go and all this investment in Lithium is just a huge misallocation of resources?
https://greenly.earth/en-us/blog/ecology-news/sodium-batteries-a-better-alternative-to-lithium
Keep in mind that lithium is nothing new. It has been in use in phones and computers for a decade or more already. And sodium has been in research just as long. It is just that the quantities needed to replace fossil fuel without a major rearrangement of the western “way of life” is massive compared to older uses.
If we ditched cars, replacing them with light rail, the need for batteries of any chemistry would drop drastically.
From a logistical viewpoint a ton+ vehicle to transport one or two people from A to B each day is a massive waste. Replacing the gasoline with batteries or hydrogen alleviate just a small portion of that.
Humanity was likely on a better path before the model T, even if much of it was fueled by coal.
“When I go to work, I bring along a sofa, an easy chair, and a complete sound system.”
Free relevant webinar April 11: Life cycle comparison of EV vs ICE cars, a series at the Biophysical ECOnomics Institute
If we really belive modern day human activities are responsible for climate change trading one pollutant for another less virulent one while maintaining our present lifestyles is only kicking the can fown the road. Replacing big oil with big mining is not the answer .We all know the hard choices we have to make if we are to save this habitat for our progrny.
It seems clear that the “hard choices” will not be made voluntarily, but will emerge from the way the situation develops, not necessarily to our advantage. “This habitat” is on the way out – but business as usual will continue, until it can’t. Oreskes and Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future came out ten years ago. Their idea that global – not necessarily western – civilization would revive under changed circumstances after an interregnum of a couple of hundred years now seems optimistic. But one never knows when something surprising might happen.
https://gailepranckunaite.com › Naomi Oreskes-The-Collapse-of- Western-Civilization-2014.pdf
So it would take the equivalent of at least two of these mines on public/Native American land to replace just the annual number of cars sold in California. And it only scales up from there for the rest of the United States. Going to need a lot of lithium…
there are a lot of moving parts at work. but there is no method of energy production and storage that isn’t harmful to some degree. i honestly feel more of a focus must be put on using the energy we are producing more efficiently. conservation and efficient allocation of resources (even as far as rationing!) is just as important as coming up with new energy storage methods.
this is just a lengthy method of me saying cars themselves are the problem. this article mentions general motors owning a lithium mine- i worry the lithium battery discourse distracts from other methods of cutting down energy use, like switching to trains and marine transport. there are certainly more sectors that could afford to use energy more efficiently. agribusiness comes to mind, with the energy expensive haber-bosch process being used to produce nitrogen for fertilizer, and then that fertilizer being overused, causing hypoxia in the water. among other things.
minerals and mining are a very captivating topic. but they are still built in the capitalistic growth mindset. and i worry these discussions of ‘more minerals’ detract from building cyclic processes and using resources creatively.
The geo-genocide continues just so we can run around individually in our own private cars. Lithium is just another skirmish in the destruction of the human habitat. We go after each resource just as the US Army went after each of those natives.
A comprehensive public transportation system run on electricity would make sense. The Chinese have done/are doing it. Our narcissistic obsessions go noplace and will end in catastrophe. Conservation first!
Here is a good study/review on lifetime assement of EV and hybrids. Hybrids seem to be the best. Toyota has stated for years hybrids are best.
https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
As if minerals themselves were not a finite resource as oil… There’s not a chance in heaven we can dig our way out of the hole our super advanced civilization has created.
.
The only solution is really drastic population reduction. Less people, less consumption, resources last more and there’s a way of better planning around them. If all this talk of WW3 is real, maybe we stand a chance.
I live in Marshall, Michigan — site of the big Enbridge Line 6B pipeline dilbit spill in July 2010. After the huge clean-up cost for that, would you expect that Marshall “leaders” would see a lithium battery plant on a megasite — a few thousand acres of prime farmland, right next to the same stretch of the same river so negligently polluted a decade ago — as the town and township’s future? So much so that they’ve distorted the City charter and skirted state laws to try to ram through a zoning change required for the project — and to deny petitioning citizens a chance for a referendum on the rezoning ordinance?
Well, the NC commentariat might — bearing Rule 1 in mind.
A few resources:
“Court of Appeals agrees to expedite appeal challenging rezoning tied to Ford EV plant”
Court of Appeals record on the case
grassroots referendum committee’s Facebook page
“Lithium: A review on concentrations and impacts in marine and coastal systems”
Mining the Salton Sea seems rather insane to me. Much of the seismic activity is within that area. Check out Mecca. So I think Newsom is playing with, ehhh, fire? Hard to discuss this without addressing the issue of new auto affordability. I don’t know how people now afford and will afford new autos in California. Major insurers have pulled out of the state and insurance premiums are going no where but up. Iirc, the insurance cos were ordered to stop stonewalling changes of coverage for preexisting insureds, but those remaining insureds are hostages. (I will withhold my judgment about the present insurance commissioner….)
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/californias-salton-sea-may-be-staving-earthquakes-it-disappears
https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2024-03-29/california-offers-catastrophe-plan-to-draw-insurers-back-to-the-state-but-at-what-cost-essential-california
In Chapter 3 of his 2023 book Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse Jem Bendell discusses the energy crisis, and comes to similar conclusions to those discussed above. Our industrial world runs on fossil fuels. Electric cars can only make a dent in the problem, and that comes with a high cost in materials and related environmental damage. We can only cut carbon dioxide emissions by cutting industrial output significantly, which he believes the world lacks the political willpower to do. Hence, he expects societal collapse to shut it down for us. He also argues that has already started. We definitely need to vastly improve mass transit from local buses to Amtrak. Our cities need much better bicycle and walking paths.
We need to start by facing the truth. Toward that end, the link I posted to his book is to a review of the book, with a link at the end to a free download of Bendell’s book. He goes beyond being a “doomer” to declare himself a “Doomster!” You, too, can escape “Imperial Modernity” and its “money-power.”