Green Energy Mining and Indigenous Peoples’ Troubles

Negotiating the Shift from the Carbon Economy to Green Energy with FPIC

Rudolph C. Rÿser, PhD, Aline Castañeda Cadena

Abstract

The countries of China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan, and Germany emit 60% of the world’s carbon gases that cause climate change and the breakdown of biodiversity. At the same time, these countries, and the corporations they created seek to make sizable economic profits from “Green Energy” as a replacement for dependence on the carbon-based economy. State government and corporate policies promote the mining of metals such as gold, tantalum, and lithium—key elements necessary for supporting the development for electrical replacements to petroleum-based machines like cars. The problem explored in this article is that while effecting “green energy” is a positive step toward reversing the adverse effects of the carbon-based economy, catastrophic damage is done to the environment and indigenous peoples. The consequent mining and other resource exploitation of the “greening” directly destroy and pollutes the environment while violently forcing the removal of indigenous peoples from their territories or now killing thousands of people. Democratizing mining and other resource exploitation inside indigenous peoples’ ancestral territories is essential and must become the new standard—a standard based on obtaining the consent of the affect indigenous peoples. The author presents a green-energy plan for mediating relations between indigenous nations, corporations, and states. Mining and exploiting “green energy” resources is a dominant yet destructive economic activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—the second largest state in the African Continent.

The DRC illustrates the problem as the largest source of “green-energy” tantalum—a “refractory metal” mined with lithium essential to producing capacitors, computer chips and semiconductors used in electric technology. Tantalum and lithium are mined primarily from the territories of indigenous nations with disastrous consequences.