CFACT Collegians Discover the Rocky Reality behind Green Energy

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There’s more than one way to get caught between a rock and a hard place. Six students from Carson-Newman University made an afternoon at Onsight Rock Gym a physical and intellectual workout. For these students, the challenge wasn’t just reaching the top of the bouldering wall, but confronting the less-than-glamourous realities of mineral mining for modern technology.

From the batteries inside our smartphones to electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and more, the technologies we depend on daily rely on extracted earthly minerals that, contrary to what may be popular opinion, don’t magically appear out of thin air. Somebody has to dig them up.

As students climbed up the rocks, CFACT Collegian Noah Penland explained what happens when we dig into them.

Take cobalt, for example. The Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies much of the world’s cobalt, with parts of its mining industry having been linked to dangerous working conditions and child labor. Consumers enjoy the finished products, and celebrate the move towards “clean energy” but ignore the obviously documented human costs of what it takes to make them.

A student scales new heights after discussing the challenges of critical mineral mining.

Noah also tackled America’s reliance on China, which dominates the processing step of many critical minerals and rare earth elements used in batteries and electronics.

But here’s the kicker: America has critical mineral resources of its own.

The students were left with a question to consider: Why should the United States rely so heavily on foreign supply chains for essential materials, especially when the unethical practices involved in sourcing some of these minerals contradict the very environmental goals that “clean energy” is supposed to achieve?

And that’s one problem worth climbing toward a solution for.