The climate war

Michael Mann, an American researcher who became famous and controversial for claiming in 1999 that the Earth's temperature was rising in the shape of a hockey stick , published a book he called “ The New Climate War ”. This would pit the converts against the climate sceptics, with the conviction about the role of greenhouse gases in global warming determining the future. Nothing could be more misleading. The real climate war is the one that is now being waged in all latitudes for control of the raw materials needed for the transition. This will spread across the entire Earth, there will be losers and winners, and the raw materials will not arrive in time for everything or everyone.

The development of renewable energy sources and the progressive elimination of fossil fuels is common to all societies and political systems. Xi Jinping, the leader of the country that is always seen as the worst example when it comes to climate change, said in a speech given on 13 June 2014: “… we must revolutionise energy technology and improve the related industrial structure. We must encourage innovation in technology, industry and business models, and pursue green and low-carbon energy development that is tailored to our national conditions and in line with the positive international trends in the energy technology revolution”. He set 2060 as the target for achieving carbon neutrality, with emissions expected to peak in 2030.

To achieve these goals, China is currently building more wind and solar power capacity than the rest of the world. The production of these types of renewable energy is already more than four times greater than its European equivalent. All deadlines are being brought forward. As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, particularly due to the use of coal available for this transition phase, and despite repeated accusations that this strategy will not achieve the transition, the successive overshoots of targets show exactly the opposite: that an economically sustainable transition is the most realistic in the medium term, and that the path to decarbonisation must be determined by common sense rather than activism.

The European Union is on a symmetrical path. It has set a target of carbon neutrality by 2050, with an intermediate step of cutting emissions by 55% by 2030. It has declared a “climate emergency” and has taken a leading role in the Conferences of the Parties held at the initiative of the United Nations, giving a broad platform to different forms of activism. More recently, it has approved the Climate Law and designed a Carbon Market to promote the energy transition through taxation. Despite the reduction in emissions, the European automotive industry has been slow to adapt and today, far from being among the leading car manufacturers, it is forced to pay carbon credits to Tesla, due to the application of the rules that Europe imposed on itself. It is a growing importer of Chinese electric vehicles. All deadlines are being successively rescheduled.

The US administration is following a third path, different from those two. It maintains a political discourse that denies climate change, and is implementing a strategy of confrontation with the international system, perhaps to gain leeway for more radical actions that it considers necessary and plans to take. However, the President's main advisor bases a significant part of his action and his fortune on promoting electric mobility. Here too, the future is set, despite the role that fossil fuels will play in getting there. The use of nuclear energy for electricity generation will continue, and small nuclear reactors may be extended to data centers that support artificial intelligence systems.

The three strategies are different, but they all involve the need for raw materials that are finite and poorly distributed around the world. Special attention has been given to the so-called rare earths, which correspond in part to the lanthanide group of the periodic table, to which yttrium and scandium are usually added. Some of these chemical elements have electrical, magnetic or electrochemical properties that make them necessary for the manufacture of high-tech products. They are needed for the production of wind turbines, photovoltaic panels or electric vehicles. In addition, aluminium, cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel are essential components of batteries and their consumption is expected to increase more than fourfold by 2050. Three-quarters of these resources are concentrated in China, the United States and Myanmar .

The position of each of these three blocs is very different. China, which does not have sufficient hydrocarbon production to meet its needs, controls eighty percent of the rare earths on its territory, which it used to be a major exporter of, but which it now keeps for its own use. It has integrated mining operations around the world into its global logistics chain through the initiative known as the “New Silk Road”. Given its dominant role in access to rare earths, the situation has become so critical that exploration in almost pristine territories is being considered by other players. This is the case in the Arctic, the Amazon, Greenland and even the Moon .

The United States, which has always maintained a committed attitude towards hydrocarbon exploration on its territory and which possesses a significant but insufficient share of critical raw materials on its territory, is now coveting Ukrainian lithium and mineral resources from Canada and Greenland. Europe, which has developed a huge regulatory activity that radically restricts mining exploration on its territory, does not seem capable of ensuring access to the critical raw materials it needs, relying on access through the global market.

And what about us, in this garden planted by the sea, politically linked to Europe, always looking to the United States across the Atlantic, but with a historical link to China? Let us imagine for a moment that we want to be serious about our relationship with the European Union. Then we must mine further and deeper for raw materials and we must participate in the Union's efforts to ensure strategic independence. If we want to honour the transatlantic relationship, then we must seek to understand the nuances of the American administration's actions and keep alive the economic, cultural and scientific relations that are beneficial to us and that set us apart. If we finally consider China to be a leading actor of the present and the future, we must be able to think about the times in a less Western way and strengthen the ties that still unite us, in all areas that contribute to the modernization of our industrial fabric, as we apparently are doing . We are very small compared to the scale of the problem and the magnitude of the values ​​that are at stake. As in the distant past, we can seek to reduce this disadvantage by multiplying the points of contact and channels of cooperation.

The climate war is being fought here. It has nothing to do with convictions or good or bad principles. It is not based on an assessment of the role of carbon dioxide, or even on the responsibility of the industrial revolution in climate change. That train has already passed, regardless of what anyone thinks. It has to do with the role that each country wants to play in the new world, decarbonized, electrified, shaped by artificial intelligence and perhaps by quantum supercomputing, which is already in sight. Increasingly global, and where the borders that nationalist politics will build in the short term will have the same resistance to the wind of time as the houses of the three little pigs, as the fable tells us from our childhood.