Wednesday, November 3, 2021

COP26: U.N. Secretary-General Calls For An End To Mining—“we face a stark choice – either we stop it or it stops us”

 Ummmm....

From Mining.com, November 2:

UN at COP26: “Enough of mining…we are digging our own graves”

It did not take long for COP26 to turn into a farce this week with UN Secretary General António Guterres pleading with the gathered highnesses and excellencies to declare enough is enough.

Socialist party ex-PM of Portugal, Guterres delivered a rousing 10-minute speech at the opening ceremony saying (around the 0:45 mark) “we face a stark choice – either we stop it or it stops us”:

“It is time to say enough!

“Enough of treating nature like a toilet, enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”

Who’s going to tell him?

COP26 will be a colossal mining cop-out

“The International Energy Agency’s annual World Energy Outlook […] is probably the closest thing to a bible in the energy world,” says a Bloomberg article following the publication of the 2021 edition.

Released earlier than usual in time for the Conference of Parties (COP26) starting in Glasgow, this edition – the 44th – “has been designed, exceptionally, as a guidebook to COP26”. 

At 386 pages IEA WEO 2021 is quite the tome (download here). Under Section 6.3.1, you’ll find the energy bible’s take on “critical minerals”.  It is six pages in total. 

Those six pages may be headlined critical minerals, but it’s hard to detect a sense of urgency in Section 6.3.1:

“The rapid deployment of low-carbon technologies as part of clean energy transitions implies a significant increase in demand for critical minerals.”

We have questions....  

....MUCH MORE