Unearthed: The Mining Issue
Fighting climate change is going to require a lot of minerals. But at what cost?
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Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: The $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed
“The soul of our ancestors, when they leave this world, they go into the deep.”
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Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.
Recycling provides economic, national security, and environmental benefits. But the United States is playing catch-up to Asian countries, particularly China.
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Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping project
A U.S. Geological Survey effort to find underground deposits of clean energy metals has gotten bipartisan support.
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Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?
Grist spoke with five experts to understand what free, prior, and informed consent should look like in this new era of extraction.
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Grist reports on topics like Politics, Energy, Equity, Solutions, and how they intersect with climate. All topics.
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Indigenous Affairs
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Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste
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A $250M investment will help this lithium mine get up and running. That’s bad news for these tribes.
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In Canada, Indigenous advocates argue that mining companies violate the rights of nature
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‘Like a virus’: Corruption has infected the fight against climate change
Staff Picks
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Expecting worse: Giving birth on a planet in crisis
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Inside a California oil town’s divisive plan to survive the energy transition
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An invisible chemical is poisoning thousands of unsuspecting warehouse workers
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The people who feed America are going hungry
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To get off fossil fuels, America is going to need a lot more electricians
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The Senate’s new farm bill would prioritize the climate. Too bad it’s basically doomed.
More climate fiction
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Trade-offs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?
Extracting resources from the Earth always comes with costs. As we race toward a cleaner, greener future, there is a risk of repeating the abuses of mining for coal and other fossil fuels.
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In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline
Instead of continuing to dig tunnels or pits, some scientists are looking to a promising — but challenging — source of minerals: seawater.
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Farmers are reeling from Trump’s attacks on agricultural research
A "rollercoaster" of funding cuts and layoffs have gutted critical agricultural research projects across the nation.
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Can cities ban natural gas in new buildings? A federal judge just said yes.
After a string of discouraging rulings for other cities, a court upheld NYC's efforts to decarbonize its buildings.
Watch This
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An early-life wildfire exposure sickened these monkeys for decades
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The Gulf Coast is home to one of the last healthy coral reefs. It’s surrounded by oil.
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Nature can’t run without parasites. What happens when they start to disappear?
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How efforts to protect an Indigenous oasis almost led to its demise
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These vegan meat brands taste almost as good as the real thing. Taste tests prove it.
New research shows which products are closest to "taste parity" — and which need more work.
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Power companies would rather not clean their toxic messes. Trump’s EPA is granting their wish.
Advocates fear the agency will “justify avoiding any enforcement whatsoever” of millions of tons of coal ash nationwide.
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Environmentalists in Israel and Palestine fight to save cross-border water resources
"The health of Palestinians affects the health of Israelis and vice versa. And the best example is water."
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The Trump administration’s climate policies jeopardize research in disaster-prone Puerto Rico
As one of the regions most affected by the global climate crisis, local scientists are struggling with canceled research grants and funding cuts from federal agencies.
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