By 2030, we as individuals, businesses and nations must be able to show that we have worked actively on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As a former tech optimist, I was convinced that digitalisation was the main road to a greener future. I thought the green shift could not come fast enough. How wrong one can be.
We live in a time when climate and sustainability have once again gained positive attention. Most people understand that we cannot keep consuming the Earth's resources at today's pace. But the tech industry lacks this realisation. When it sees a problem, it solves it by creating a new one.
When technology demands overexploitation
The green shift is the ultimate example. In our eagerness to replace fossil fuels with renewable technology, we have overlooked a brutal reality: the green shift rests on a foundation of crushed mountains, razed rainforest, poisoned rivers and millions of shattered human lives.
Every single year we dig out enormous quantities of minerals and metals. The scale is almost incomprehensible; each year we extract masses equivalent to the weight and volume of Mount Everest. These holes in the Earth's crust are not just aesthetic scars – they are environmental disasters for nature and the people who live there.
«A hole in the Earth's crust never heals. We leave behind a permanently altered landscape where biodiversity is sacrificed on the altar of technological growth.»
When we blast our way into the depths to extract lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper, we trigger a chain reaction of destruction. Mineral extraction requires enormous amounts of water, often in areas already hard hit by drought. Chemicals from the extraction processes leak into the groundwater, entire ecosystems collapse, and mountain ranges are removed to make way for open-pit mines.
Minerals for batteries, data centres and wind turbines require moving more than a hundred tonnes of waste rock per tonne of industrial metal extracted.
The human costs
It is rarely those who benefit from the minerals who have to bear the costs. It is Indigenous peoples and local communities in the Global South – and increasingly in the North – who see their livelihoods disappear.
In Congo, children dig for cobalt for our smartphones. In South America, salt flats are drained of water to produce electric car batteries. We export the environmental burden to vulnerable areas, while patting ourselves on the back for buying «zero-emission» products.
Repparfjorden: A national betrayal
We do not have to look far to find examples of this overexploitation. Repparfjorden in Finnmark stands as a glaring example of Norwegian double standards. Here the authorities have allowed Nussir to dump millions of tonnes of mining waste straight into a national salmon fjord. It will destroy a productive fjord, just as we see in Førdefjorden.
All in the name of the green shift. In Finnmark, Nussir is to produce copper. The pressure for copper extraction is now increasing, driven by four main areas: data centres, AI infrastructure, wind turbines and electric cars.
The way forward: A circular necessity
We cannot dig our way out of an environmental crisis. If we continue at today's pace, we will leave behind a planet that is perforated and exhausted. The green transition must be about more than switching energy source; it must be about reducing total resource extraction.
We must move from a linear «dig-and-dump» economy to a genuine circular economy where we reuse the metals we have already extracted. Otherwise, the story of our generation will be the story of how we killed the planet to save it. One Mount Everest-sized hole at a time.