In the background of the EU’s potential mood shift toward China, President of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association Ola Kallenius made a suggestion last month. Speaking to the Financial Times, he said the tariffs the EU imposed on China’s electric vehicles, or EVs, last October could be replaced by encouraging Chinese carmakers to open more plants inside the EU.
For anyone concerned about climate change, that might seem like good news, given the EU’s current stance nakedly prioritizes economic competitiveness over the fast rollout of vehicles that can reduce catastrophic carbon emissions.
But even if the idea came to fruition, there’s a catch. Around 85% of China’s total lithium reserves, which power both the batteries and the entertainment systems in the EVs, are thought to sit in Tibet. And even Chinese factories located in Europe would source their lithium from there — as BYD (比亞迪) and non-Chinese Tesla currently do.
This is a problem because the mining processes for that lithium are wreaking havoc on the Tibetan environment — in a number of directions.
Mining Lithium, Major Effects
Mining lithium involves salt-rich brine being pumped to the Earth’s surface and allowed to evaporate. This process consumes large amounts of water, can make water undrinkable and can destroy traditional farmlands and nature reserves. In 2016, the Liqi River was contaminated, destroying the local water supply and killing livestock and fish. The process can also pollute sacred grasslands.
“Tibetans actually don’t benefit from the mining. They experience negative effects of mining including environmental degradation, loss of land and displacement,” renowned Tibet researcher Gabriel Lafitte told a recent Institute for Security and Development Policy online event.
“Mining is often very bad for local water resources,” Martin Mills, chair in anthropology and director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research at the University of Aberdeen explained. “Mines involve the release of and use of a wide variety of very nasty chemicals that … often render areas infertile and create high cancer rates, poisoning rates. Animals can’t live there so that’s a local problem [too.]”
Carbon Consequences
The effects are not only localized, though. The Tibetan Plateau (sometimes known as the Earth’s “Third Pole”) is home to permafrost which stores vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Alongside existing climate change and increased solar radiation, which are the dominant factors, mining of the mountains around the permafrost, and damming of the Tibetan rivers, exacerbate the thawing of permafrost.
What this means is simple. EVs are no climatological panacea. But in the eyes of Lafitte and Mills it is not naivety that has driven reliance on Tibetan resources, despite the environmental costs. Rather, it is a kind of deliberate ignorance.
Fantastical Tech Solutions
“The world seems to have opted for the rather simplistic assumption that anything and everything that reduces our carbon emissions is the magical solution,” Gabriel Lafitte said.
“[A] lot of environmentalists actually argue that China is the key and maybe now that we have a President Trump they may even more strongly embrace China as the world’s great hope for a simplistic tech solution to the climate crisis … and so [they believe] if Tibet is to be sacrificed well you know that’s very unfortunate but it may be necessary.”
On the part of governments, a similar calculation might be in play. Large states are “protecting their political continuity … and that largely involves protecting the interests and the consumption patterns of the middle class that has grown up in China and America and Europe over the last 50 or 60 years and doubling down on their needs,” Mills said.
That approach means investing in EVs or solar panels, offering a fantasy green swap, rather than thinking about ways to reduce consumption and profits. And that means treating places like Tibet as places to grab resources and ignore the consequences.
“We’re moving into a political domain in which people understand you need to grab resources — food resources, mineral resources — and you need to create a hinterland and you need to control those hinterlands and Tibet is part of that,” Mills explained.
Thus, what is really being discussed when the EU considers allowing more Chinese EVs into its market is whether it wishes to join the Chinese government in a toxic extractive regime.
And both Tibet and Tibetans are the victims here in a double sense: the extractive processes behind the world’s green tech are destructive in their own right, but Tibet is also more vulnerable to climate change than almost anywhere else on Earth because of its altitude. It’s warming 1.3 to 1.45 times faster than the global average.
“The truth of the matter is the shift to green technologies is going to damage the environment just as much as fossil fuels will do because the question is not what technology we’re using, it’s how much energy and resource we are consuming across the board,” Mills summarized.
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