“If you want self-reliance, you need to mine” – Stephane Sejourne, EU Industry Commissioner
I came across a Mining.com article recently about Kiruna, the northern Swedish town now wrestling with the impacts of a proposed rare earth mining project. It’s the same concerns and grievances we have seen many times before: local communities don’t want to carry the burdens required to meet the world’s demands for more electrification and less carbon.
But there was one quote in the article from an EU Commissioner that was a real mic-drop moment: “If you want self-reliance, you need to mine.”
Two decades ago, Al Gore polemicized about what he called an “Inconvenient Truth.” The ESG folks are now facing their own uncomfortable reality: it is impossible to build a low-carbon, electrified future without a dramatic expansion of mining. That’s their inconvenient truth, whether they like it or not.
ESG proponents can oppose hydrocarbons. They can champion EVs and massive renewable growth. They can call for rapid decarbonization. But the material math doesn’t care about their good intentions. Saying “no” to building new mines, by default, is saying “yes” to the perpetuation and growth of the hydrocarbon-based economy. There is simply no tenable path forward that rejects both hydrocarbons and mining.
None of this dismisses legitimate environmental or indigenous concerns that invariably come with new mines. Those should be addressed and worked through. But the basic choice still remains: either we mine or we continue relying on oil and gas. There is no magic third option hiding offstage.
For those of us within the mining community, the encouraging part is that the same institutions that once lectured the industry from a moral perch are now grudgingly admitting they can’t decarbonize without us. An EU Commissioner saying the quiet part out loud is a strong indication that the anti-mining narrative is undergoing a real reversal.
