Modern Mining January 2023

COLUMNIST

Is ESG the latest acronym or could it change mining substantively? By Ross Harvey, director of research and programmes at Good Governance Africa (GGA)

T he dust has barely settled on the Climate Conference of the Parties (CoP27) held in Egypt in November last year, and the Cape Town Mining Indaba will shortly be opening its doors. What is the connection? Keeping the earth’s temperatures to below 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels will require the extraction of large volumes of critical minerals and metals to sustain the global energy and transport revolutions. Of course, detrac tors are not convinced that the world ever can become green, and indeed there are some difficult questions to answer pertaining to the environmen tal and human-harm footprint of minerals like lithium and cobalt. Also, the volume of energy required to produce aluminium for electric vehicles is intense. The number crunching has to be done meticulously to justify a particular development pathway. Detractions aside, however, economic research is increasingly clear that a transition to clean tech nology is desirable, and that innovation switches away from dirty (fossil fuels) to clean technolo gies in response to changes in prices and policies. Indeed, we have seen this play out significantly over

the past seven years since MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors wrote that an optimal welfare response to the climate problem is a deft combination of research subsidies (towards clean technology) and carbon taxes. Indeed, we have seen the efficacy of the former in rapid price reductions of renewable energy technologies and its adoption at scale. Carbon taxes are also increasingly difficult to avoid. Moreover, it remains clear that humanity is approaching various ecological tipping points beyond which abrupt and irreversible environmental change at large geographic scales is likely to hap pen. So wrote scholars Tilman Altenburg and Dani Rodrik, also seven years ago. On the back of this work, Anja Berretta and myself wrote a book chap ter for the Routledge Handbook of the Extractive Industries and Sustainable Development. In it we noted the irony that ‘any move towards a low-car bon future will still require vast volumes of minerals and metals to be mined which, if not governed well, may portend further ecological disaster. While progress towards clean, renewable energy and

Ross Harvey, director of research and programmes at GGA.

Any move towards a low-carbon future will still require vast volumes of minerals and metals to be mined.

58  MODERN MINING  January 2023