A clean energy transition will create jobs, promote energy independence, improve public health, and, ultimately, mitigate climate change. But getting to this new future will require more than just phasing out fossil fuels. The production of a wide range of energy-relevant materials must be scaled up substantially. Studies project that producing the materials to enable a clean energy transition will be a massive undertaking. The International Energy Agency forecasts that keeping the world on a path compatible with the goals of the Paris Climate Accord will require expanding production of energy-relevant materials sixfold between 2020 and 2040, to 43 million tons per year. At first glance, that may seem to pale in comparison to the fossil fuel industries, which produced roughly 15 billion tons of coal, oil, and natural gas globally in 2020 alone and added 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when burned.

But the transition will be even tougher than it first appears. For example, nickel, cobalt, and copper and many other energy-relevant materials occur in low-grade ores, which entail far more mining, processing, and waste than fossil fuels. Securing the millions of tons of finished materials needed will require mining hundreds or thousands of times more raw ore. Although this transition will ultimately lower greenhouse gas emissions, especially as more renewable energy powers mining processes, it will require processing metal ores at a scale that rivals the material throughput of today’s fossil fuel industries.

The potential harms of such a transition are considerable. Large scale mining affects ecosystems, threatens water supplies, and is sometimes linked to poor working conditions, corruption, and human rights abuses. But scaling up mining to support a clean energy transition also offers the opportunity to reform materials production in ways that are both socially and environmentally just. Wealthier countries, which have often outsourced mineral extraction abroad, need to help shoulder these burdens and model responsible approaches to development.

To meet the global clean energy challenge, government policies supporting public and private sector investments are needed at every stage of extraction and processing. This means support for exploration, research into new mining and processing technologies, streamlined permitting processes, support for expanding processing capacity, and trade agreements that ensure supplies from international markets. These policies must be paired with initiatives to ensure that materials are sourced sustainably and transparently. Over the past decade, third-party certification programs have proliferated in the mining sector. One of the most promising approaches is a standard championed by the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance. It offers an independent certification system that can be used to assess mining activities relative to best practices for worker health and safety, human rights, community engagement, corruption, pollution control, and land reclamation through mandatory third-party audits and publicly available scorecards.

Which of the following is true of a clean energy transition?