Clean Energy Has a Dirty Little Secret

Clean Energy Has a Dirty Little Secret

"Clean energy has a dirty little secret, just revealed by MIT science writing student Shel Evergreen: 

Its “unsustainable” appetite for minerals and the dirty ways they’re obtained.
From Evergreen’s report for Ars Technica:

• In South America’s Atacama Desert, salt flats are dotted with shallow, turquoise-colored lithium brine pools. 
• In the Democratic Republic of Congo, children chip at the ground for cobalt. 
• In China, toxic chemicals leach neodymium from the earth.

All that extraction “presents humanitarian, environmental, and logistical challenges,” she writes..."