Pushing renewables
Still, this doesn’t at all mean we just sit back without any political or economic notions about what’s really at stake in the push for renewable energy.
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Still, this doesn’t at all mean we just sit back without any political or economic notions about what’s really at stake in the push for renewable energy.
Urgently transitioning to energy renewables is the best remedy for our luckless addiction to fossil fuels and to oil.
Our oil addiction, in fact, is proving fatal to us after the shutting of the Strait of Hormuz that’s disrupting supplies, jacking up prices and accidentally accelerating the global massive shift away from dirty oil.
These reasons should be enough for insisting that the country needs to warp-speed the transition to renewables from local resources.
But that isn’t the case. In fact, government’s recent stated goal of having the country source half of its power generation from renewables only by 2040 doesn’t at all sound like speeding up but more like a lazy cruising.
Nonetheless, government makes a fair case when it says it can’t hurry things up, arguing that it would take a herculean effort for the country to source reliable power from renewable energy to 35 percent by 2030 from its current baseline of about 25 percent.
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Still, this doesn’t at all mean we just sit back without any political or economic notions about what’s really at stake in the push for renewable energy.
Broadly speaking, noted American activist Rebecca Solnit recently argued that “fossil fuels is political as well as literal poison.”
In light of the ongoing Middle East conflict, what Solnit meant is that “a world that runs on renewables is likely to be more peaceful…no wars for oil, no sinister motives for colonial-style exploitation/invasion of global south countries for fossil fuel…no petro-states with a resource curse (the term for how countries rich in resources are often poor in development and democracy, which makes them prone to all kinds of trouble)...”
We undoubtedly want a peaceable and prosperous world. Renewables hopefully will help us get there sooner than later.
But in paying close attention to renewables, we nonetheless need to also tackle certain contentious facts that force us to seriously rethink our other abundant resources that are needed for renewables other than the sun or wind or natural steam.
Specifically, this is about renewables, like batteries, made from minerals that are mined.
Mining, of course, suggests so many bad things to indigenous peoples and their lands, the environment and nature itself.
Before going further into mining, however, note that batteries are the next big thing, more than solar panels and even nuclear power.
Experts say the race for energy is no longer about generating electricity but having the batteries for storing it. Battery technologies are rapidly improving and battery prices, in fact, are falling.
But where are we at in the production of batteries?
Now, if it’s batteries, everybody thinks of lithium-ion. Unlike Australia, the Philippines has no commercial lithium mining operations or major natural lithium deposits.
Instead, our country is a global powerhouse in nickel and copper, two critical raw materials heavily used alongside lithium in electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy storage systems.
Both nickel and copper, by the way, are also durable and recyclable, raising the tantalizing prospect that if we mine enough of these minerals, we’ll be able to resolve grave mining issues by not mining these in the future.
At the moment, however, even if we’re actually quietly fueling the world’s shift to clean energy and modern batteries with our nickel and copper, what our greedy miners are digging up are mostly sold cheaply to China and processed there.
It’s a lopsided arrangement that doesn’t make more money for the country.
