Regardless how stringent climate policies are, or how rapidly we move from internal combustion to electric vehicles, increasing battery needs around the world presage a huge increase in demand for cobalt. Right now, as Ronald Stein and Todd Royal demonstrate in their book Clean Energy Exploitations, most of the world’s cobalt comes from mines with very low environmental protection standards and huge human rights problems—child and slave labor in highly toxic settings, sometimes at the point … [Read more...]
“Net Zero by 2050”: Roadmap to Conflict and Poverty
The Biden Administration wants America to make emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases amount to “net zero”—that is, for emissions and removal of GHGs to be equal—by 2050. The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA, established in 1974 under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development following the 1973 oil crisis to ensure that oil supplies remained secure) has released a new study purporting to show how to get there. But Dr. David Kreutzer, Senior … [Read more...]
