China’s booming electric vehicle (EV) industry is fueling a lithium rush in the Tibetan Plateau that risks damaging the troubled region’s fragile ecology and deepening rights violations, research published yesterday said.
China is the world’s biggest EV market, but largely relies on other countries to supply the lithium used in the batteries that power low-carbon vehicles.
That is set to change as Beijing begins to exploit vast deposits on the Tibetan Plateau — about 85 percent of the country’s total lithium reserves.
Photo: EPA-EFE
This “white gold rush” has led to Chinese miners polluting the local environment with “quick, cheap and dirty” extraction and processing techniques, according to the report by Turquoise Roof, a network of Tibetan researchers.
The group used satellite data and public resources to chart the effects of lithium mining in culturally Tibetan areas and its links to automakers, including Elon Musk’s Tesla and its Chinese competitor BYD.
Those firms are “increasingly reliant on Tibet’s lithium exploitation,” it said.
“Bigger, faster electric cars require larger capacity lithium batteries — which cannot be done without a hidden footprint in Tibet,” it said.
Citing Chinese geological research, Turquoise Roof said that about 3.6 million tonnes of China’s lithium lies in hard rock deposits in Tibet and the adjacent provinces of Sichuan and Qinghai.
Miners exploiting those resources risk creating “devastating” pollution in biodiverse regions particularly vulnerable to climate change, the report says.
It pointed to a mine in Sichuan whose activities reportedly killed thousands of fish in a local river and harmed grasslands home to Tibetan herders.
“Tibetans have no voice in this latest rush to riches ... there can be no informed local consideration of whether there should be extraction,” it says.
In one example, the report cites a patch of land in a Tibetan autonomous county in Sichuan Province found to have rich lithium deposits that sparked a bidding war between firms, eventually won by Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co.
However, local Tibetans “were not informed that their hill pastures were being sold, let alone consulted in any way about the land being drilled beneath their feet,” it said.
China says it has brought infrastructure and education since taking over the region in 1951, but many exiled Tibetans accused the Chinese Communist Party of repression, torture and eroding their culture, with rights groups and some Western governments backing their claims.
About 1 million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and put through “forced assimilation” at Chinese residential schools, UN experts have said.
Yesterday’s report comes as China seeks to shore up domestic supplies of critical minerals in the face of fraying ties with Western exporters.
Beijing imposed curbs on the graphite used to make EV batteries after the US restricted outflows of high-tech microchips to China.
The EU has also angered China by launching a probe into Beijing’s subsidies for its homegrown EVs.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver