PERC member Glenn Banks has published a piece in The Spinoff analysing Shane Jones’ “mining boosterism” and the debate around “critical minerals”. He argues:
“The minister’s references to the need for New Zealand to “do our bit” in terms of the production of “critical minerals” is used as an additional justification for the expansion of the sector. The problem is that none of the evidence to date – over a hundred years of sporadic and the more recent systematic surveys – indicates that we have significant, world-scale reserves and resources of any of these critical minerals. There are potentially reserves of antimony on the West Coast, and exploration interest in lithium in a few spots, but nothing like the scale elsewhere. And the argument that we have a moral obligation to produce some of what we consume in terms of the critical minerals we draw on in our everyday lives just doesn’t hold water in the globalised world we live in. The label “critical minerals”, then, is just being used as a discursive shift to try and justify the continuing relevance of the mining sector and open up new opportunities for the expansion of non-critical minerals (such as gold) and fossil fuels (coal).”
Head over to The Spinoff to read the whole piece.