Earth Science Week runs October 11 through 17, and the American Geosciences Institute has chosen a theme that sits right at the center of the climate conversation: "Critical Minerals for a Thriving Society." The idea is to follow minerals from the ground to everyday life, and to show how geoscience shapes how they are found, mined, refined, moved and used.
It is a good theme for us, because the clean-energy transition is, physically, a materials project.
What makes a mineral "critical"
In the United States, the U.S. Geological Survey keeps an official list of critical minerals: materials that are essential to the economy and national security and whose supply could be disrupted. The current list, finalized last November, has 60 minerals, up from 50. The ten additions include copper, silver, uranium, potash, silicon and metallurgical coal.
Many of the minerals on that list are the ones clean energy depends on:
- Lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite go into the batteries in electric vehicles, e-bikes and home storage.
- Rare earth elements go into the powerful magnets in EV motors and many wind turbines.
- Copper carries electricity everywhere: wiring, motors, transformers and the transmission lines a cleaner grid needs. Its addition to the list reflects how central it has become.
- Silicon is the base of most solar panels.
The honest part
Mining is not clean. Getting these minerals out of the ground uses water and land, produces waste, and has a long history of harming the communities nearest to it. A transition that ignores that just moves the damage somewhere less visible.
That is why the climate case for critical minerals has to come with three other things:
- Using less of them. Smaller batteries, shared vehicles and efficient buildings all reduce the amount that has to be dug up in the first place.
- Recovering what we already have. As we wrote during Fire Prevention Week, a lithium-ion battery in a landfill is a fire risk and a lost resource. Recycling gets lithium, cobalt and nickel back.
- Mining better where we mine. Real environmental standards, and a real say for the communities affected.
Students tend to see this tension quickly. It makes for some of the best conversations our youth fellows have.
Exploring it with young people this week
You don't need a lab to take part. A few ideas for families, classrooms and youth groups:
- Take a materials inventory. Pick one object, like a phone or a bike light, and look up what minerals are inside it. The list is usually longer than anyone expects.
- Start a rock collection. Pick up stones on a walk, sort them by color, weight and texture, and try to identify a few. It is how plenty of geologists started.
- Visit a natural history museum or a university geology collection. Many have mineral specimens on display.
- Enter the contests. Earth Science Week runs photography, video, visual arts and essay contests each year. The rules and deadlines are on AGI's Earth Science Week site.
- Follow a battery. Find your nearest battery drop-off and talk about where the materials go next.
Where this fits
Our youth education program is built around exactly this kind of connection: from the record heat we have been tracking all year, like the warmest September on record, to the physical things it takes to respond to it. Climate change can feel abstract to a twelve-year-old. A piece of copper wire and a question about where it came from is not.
