Last month, I took a few days off work to attend to some family issues. It also offered me an opportunity to pause, reflect and take stock of all I had done in the past eight months.
So, what did I really do? Nothing spectacular! Just a lot more reading and a lot more reflection.
One thing caught my eye while poring over news websites: The Green Revolution we have all come to embrace as the next planet-saving initiative we cannot do without, and the promotion of the electric car as its next big step.
Perhaps because I had the opportunity to use an electric car during my break, I had a lot more to ponder about it.
In fact, the word of the century is green, and I love it too. In every part of the world today, society is calling for green energy, green transport, green jobs, and of course, green growth.
Green growth because our actions today must not only improve our standard of living but also provide cover for generations yet unborn.
I am sure you now know where this is drifting to, right? It’s about sustainability, for sure! That is where businesses, for instance, will not only be profit-minded but will also consider their operational impact on people and the planet.
It has, to be fair, caught the attention of many, and if sustained, this revolution will leave a lasting impression on planet Earth.
Green is Green, it seems! Today, from the billboards of Accra to the conference halls of Dubai, Europe and America, green has become shorthand for good. Events are organised to explain why going green is important for addressing, for instance, climate risk.
Nowhere is this promise more visible than in the Electric Vehicle (EV). At the fuel station, the EV is noticed by its absence, as it glides past in silence, with no exhaust and no smoke.
We are told EVs represent the future, and with perfect marketing, most of us have come to believe that the car itself is redemption, and the future will be clean.
Sounds good, but hang on for a few minutes! In the course of the week, I engaged a friend who had attended a lecture on The Age of Contradictions: Reflections on Power, Narratives and Green Transitions on Thursday, September 3, 2026. He was very excited about the contradictions in green transitions that the lecturer had spoken about.
“It blew my mind”, he said. It was a good opportunity for me to do further research, and I realised there was a second school of thought that interrupts the applause. It asks a simple, uncomfortable question: How green is green?
The example I found was this: “A typical EV battery needs about eight kilogrammes of lithium, 35 kilogrammes of nickel, 20 kilogrammes of manganese and 14 kilogrammes of cobalt. That lithium does not come from a green factory. It comes from a hole in the ground.”
“In the Atacama Desert in Chile, which holds more than half of the world's known reserves, mining a single ton of lithium requires pumping nearly 500,000 gallons of brine water and letting it evaporate for up to 18 months.”
The desert is one of the driest places on Earth. Local communities and flamingo populations compete with mining companies for water.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 70 per cent of the world's cobalt comes from, the debate is not just environmental but human — artisanal mines, child labour, and toxic run-off into rivers.”
Let me be clear here: I have not independently verified that research report, but I do not doubt that even when we leave the mine, the footprint of the destruction remains.
“Lithium is shipped to China for processing, then to Europe or America for battery assembly, then back around the world as a finished car.”
The International Energy Agency estimates that producing an EV creates about 70 per cent more emissions than producing an equivalent petrol car, largely because of the battery.”
The important part is that an EV, according to experts, pays back its carbon debt after 20,000 to 30,000 kilometres of driving, depending on how clean the electricity that charges it is.
As you can see, the EV story is incomplete accounting! A petrol car pollutes where you see it, but an electric car pollutes where you don't, moving the degradation from the city centre to the periphery, from the consumer to the miner. There is no such thing as zero impact.
But it doesn’t mean we should stay with internal combustion engines. Rather, we should appreciate that every energy transition has an extraction cost.
The industrial revolution ran on coal pits, and, of course, as already explained, the green revolution runs on lithium pits.
The real question is not whether EVs are green enough, but whether we are building a truly green system around them.
As I explained in the Saturday, February 25, 2023 edition of this column, to prevent the worst ravages of climate breakdown, there is a need for an immediate, now-or-never move to a low-carbon economy that can guarantee and secure a sustainable environment.
Progress made by companies to measure themselves against the ESG criteria, which stands for Environmental, Social and Governance, shows some commitment on the part of corporations. That needs to be sustained.
As Josiah Charles Stamp (1880-1941), an English Economist and President of the Bank of England, puts it: "It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities".
If we dodge our responsibility to protect the environment, we will one day have to account for our actions in a bitter way. The signs are already clear for all to see.
"The time is always right to do what is right", says Martin Luther King (1929-1968), an American leader of the civil rights movement and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Whether green or a shade of it, the world needs our actions to be directed in a responsible way.
