AFP UK

Warmth from bitcoin mining servers heats the tulip greenhouse near Amsterdam, saving on energy bills

Tulips and bitcoin have both been associated with financial bubbles in their time, but in a giant greenhouse near Amsterdam the Dutch are trying to make them work together.

Engineer Bert de Groot inspects the six bitcoin miners as they perform complex sums to earn cryptocurrency, filling the air with a noisy whine along with a blast of warmth.

That warmth is now heating the hothouse where rows of tulips grow, cutting the farmers’ reliance on gas whose price has soared since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The servers in turn are powered by solar energy from the roof, reducing the normally huge electricity costs for mining, and cutting the impact on the environment.

Meanwhile both the farmers and de Groot’s company, Bitcoin Brabant, are earning crypto, which is still attracting investors despite a recent crash in the market.

“We think with this way of heating our greenhouse but also earning some bitcoin we have a win-win situation,” flower farmer Danielle Koning, 37, told AFP.

The Netherlands’ love of tulips caused the first stock market crash in the 17th century when speculation bulb prices caused prices to soar, only to later collapse.

Now the Netherlands is the world’s biggest tulip producer and also the second biggest agricultural exporter overall after the United States, with much grown in greenhouses.

– ‘Improving the environment’ –

But the low-lying country is keenly aware of the effect of the agricultural industry on climate change, while farmers are struggling with high energy prices.

Mining for cryptocurrency meanwhile requires huge amounts of electricity to power computers, leading to an environmental impact amid global efforts to tackle climate change. 

De Groot, 35, who only started his business earlier this year and now has 17 clients including restaurants and warehouses, says this makes bitcoin and tulips a perfect fit.

“This operation is actually carbon negative, as are all the operations I basically build,” says the long-haired de Groot, sporting an orange polo shirt with his firm’s logo.

“We’re actually improving the environment.”

He is also selling tulips online for bitcoin via a business called Bitcoinbloem.

The collaboration started when Koning saw a Twitter video de Groot had made about bitcoin mining, and called him up.

Now there are six servers at their hothouse, whose exact location Koning asked to keep secret to avoid thieves targeting the 15,000-euro machines.

Koning’s company owns half of them and keeps the bitcoin they produce, while de Groot is allowed to keep his three servers there in exchange for monthly visits to clean dust and insects out of the servers’ fans.

With a 20 degree Celsius difference between the air entering the machine and leaving them, this provides the heat needed to grow the tulips, and to dry the bulbs that produce them.

– ‘No worries’ –

“The most important thing we get out of it is, we save on natural gas,” says Koning. “Secondly, well, we earn Bitcoin by running them in the greenhouse.”

Huge energy costs have driven some Dutch agricultural firms that often rely on greenhouses to stop growing this year, while others have even gone bankrupt, says Koning.

Meanwhile, the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who developed the idea of the unpredictable but historic “black swan” event, has compared Bitcoin to the “Tulipmania” that engulfed the Netherlands nearly 400 years ago.

This saw prices for a single bulb rise to more than 100 times the average annual income at the time before the bubble burst in 1637, causing banks to fail and people to lose their life savings.

The cryptocurrency sector is currently reeling from the collapse of a major exchange — with Bitcoin currently worth around $16,300 per unit, down from a high of $68,000 in November 2021 — but De Groot isn’t worried.

“I have absolutely no worries about the long-term value proposition of an immutable monetary system,” he says.

“Bitcoin will last for ever.” 

NASA's Orion space capsule, photographed at more than 432,000 km (268,000 miles) from Earth, a record for a habitable vessel, with our planet and the Moon in the background, in November 2022

After making a close pass at the Moon and venturing further into space than any previous habitable spacecraft, NASA’s Orion capsule is due to splash down Sunday in the final test of a high-stakes mission called Artemis.

As it hurtles into Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) per hour, the gumdrop-shaped traveler will have to withstand a temperature of 2,800 degrees Centigrade (5,000 Fahrenheit) — about half that of the surface of the sun.

Splashdown in the Pacific off the Mexican island of Guadalupe is scheduled for 1739 GMT (9:39 am local time).

Achieving success in this mission of just over 25 days is key for NASA, which has invested tens of billions of dollars in the Artemis program due to take people back to the Moon and prepare for an onward trip, someday, to Mars.

So far the first test of this uncrewed spacecraft has gone very well.

But it is only in the final minutes of this voyage that the true challenge comes: seeing if Orion’s heat shield, the biggest ever built, actually holds up.

“It is a safety-critical piece of equipment. It is designed to protect the spacecraft and the passengers, the astronauts on board. So the heat shield needs to work,” said Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin. 

A first test of the capsule was carried out in 2014 but that time the capsule stayed in Earth’s orbit, so it came back into the atmosphere at a slower speed of around 20,000 miles per hour.

– Choppers, divers and boats – 

A US Navy ship, the USS Portland, has been positioned in the Pacific to recover the Orion capsule in an exercise that NASA has been rehearsing for years. Helicopters and inflatable boats will also be deployed for this task.  

The falling spacecraft will be slowed first by the Earth’s atmosphere and then a web of 11 parachutes until it eases to a speed of 20 miles (30 kilometers) per hour when it finally hits the blue waters of the Pacific.

Once it is there, NASA will let Orion float for two hours — a lot longer than if astronauts were inside — so as to collect data.

“We’ll see how the heat soaks back into the crew module and how that affects the temperature inside,” said Jim Geffre, NASA’s Orion vehicle integration manager.

Divers will then attach cables to Orion to hoist it onto the USS Portland, which is an amphibious transport dock vessel, the rear of which will be partly submerged. This water will be pumped out slowly so the spacecraft can rest on a platform designed to hold it.

This should all take about four to six hours from the time the vessel first splashes down.

The Navy ship will then head for San Diego, California where the spacecraft will be unloaded a few days later.

When it returns to Earth, the spacecraft will have traveled 1.4 million miles since it took off November 16 with the help of a monstrous rocket called SLS.

At its nearest point to the Moon it flew less than 80 miles (130 kilometers) from the surface. And it broke the distance record for a habitable capsule, venturing 268,000 miles (432,000 kilometers) from our planet.

– Artemis 2 and 3 –

Recovering the spacecraft will allow NASA to gather data that is crucial for future missions.

This includes information on the condition of the vessel after its flight, data from monitors that measure acceleration and vibration, and the performance of a special vest put on a mannequin in the capsule to test how to protect people from radiation while flying through space.

Some components of the capsule should be good for reuse in the Artemis 2 mission, which is already in advanced stages of planning.

This next mission planned for 2024 will take a crew toward the Moon but still without landing on it. NASA is expected to name the astronauts selected for this trip soon.

Artemis 3, scheduled for 2025, will see a spacecraft land for the first time on the south pole of the Moon, which features water in the form of ice.

Only 12 people — all of them white men — have set foot on the Moon. They did this during the Apollo missions, the last of which was in 1972.

Artemis is scheduled to send a woman and a person of color to the Moon for the first time.

NASA’s goal is to establish a lasting human presence on the Moon, through a base on its surface and a space station circling around it. Having people learn to live on the Moon should help engineers develop technologies for a years-long trip to Mars, maybe in the late 2030s.

Members of the indigenous community demonstrate against the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) during the March for Biodiversity for Human Rights in Montreal

The world’s next global pact for nature is doomed without clear mechanisms for implementing targets, conservation groups said Saturday on the sidelines of UN talks, as hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Montreal demanding greater action.

Similar factors were widely blamed for the failure of the last 10-year biodiversity deal, adopted in 2010 in Aichi, Japan, which was unable to achieve nearly any of its objectives. 

“Strong text that commits countries to review progress against global targets and ratchet up action over time is essential to hold governments accountable,” said Guido Broekhoven of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), adding he was “very worried” about the current state of negotiations on this point.

Implementation mechanisms are at the heart of the Paris agreement on the fight against global warming, in the form of “nationally determined contributions.”

However, the current text on biodiversity only “urges” countries to take into account the conclusions of a global review in four years’ time — without committing them to enhance action if the review finds targets aren’t on track.

“So what we have on the table is barely an encouragement to maybe do better,” Aleksandar Rankovic, of the US nonprofit Avaaz, told AFP. 

“And there is no compliance mechanism being discussed that could help organize this necessary conversation between governments, on how they could cooperate better.”

The UN meeting, called COP15, running from December 7 – 19, bringing together nearly 5,000 delegates from 193 countries to try to finalize “a pact of peace with nature,” with key goals to preserve Earth’s forests, oceans and species.

On a freezing Saturday, people young and old, including a large contingent of Indigenous Canadians, braved the biting cold to make their voices heard in Canada’s second city.

Some wore costumes, dressed as birds, trees, and even caribou — an emblem of Canada’s boreal forests that are now threatened.

“The people are trying to speak, trying to say you can’t just talk, you have got to act,” said Sheila Laursen, part of the group Raging Grannies. 

“Let’s not forget that… to protect biodiversity we need to protect Indigenous people first, Indigenous people are protecting biodiversity,” Helena Gualinga, who belongs to a tribe in the Ecuadoran Amazon. 

– ‘Missing critical elements’ –

Saturday was supposed to be the last day for delegates to work on the implementation text, before their environment ministers arrive on December 15 for the home stretch of the negotiations. Under pressure, an additional meeting day next week was approved.

“If biodiversity targets are the compass, implementation is the actual vessel to take us there,” Li Shuo of Greenpeace told AFP.

“The implementation negotiations are missing critical elements that will ensure countries to ramp up their action over time: this is like a bicycle without gears.”

“There has been some progress,” Juliette Landry, a researcher at French think tank IDDRI added, pointing out that the countries have for the first time adopted common planning and reporting templates, making cross-comparison possible.

Chile's Lascar volcano erupted in 1993 and had lesser volcanic activity in 2006 and 2015

A volcano in the Andes in Chile’s north rumbled to life early Saturday, triggering minor earth tremors and sending a plume of smoke and ash 6,000 meters (nearly 20,000 feet) into a clear sky.

Chile’s National Geology and Mining Service reported that at 12:36 am (15:36 GMT) the Lascar volcano stirred.

The volcano sent “an eruptive column” comprising volcanic ash and hot gases 6,000 meters above its crater, the service said.

Authorities raised an alert level to “yellow,” indicating elevated volcanic activity, and established a no-entry perimeter five kilometers (three miles) around the crater.

They also alerted aircraft to the drifting plume.

Authorities stayed in close contact with officials in Talabre, a town 30 kilometers from the volcano, in case evacuations were required. But no property damage was reported.

Lascar, with an elevation of 5,592 meters above sea level, is 70 kilometers from San Pedro de Atacama, a popular tourist center that draws visitors for trekking, amateur astronomy and visits to the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth.

Lascar erupted in 1993 but also had lesser volcanic activity in 2006 and 2015.

Farther to the south, yellow alerts remain in effect for regions around the Nevados de Chillan volcanic complex and the Villarrica volcano.

Vista del volcán Lascar, en la región chilena de Antofagasta, durante un pulso eruptivo, el 10 de diciembre de 2022

A volcano in the Andes in Chile’s north rumbled to life early Saturday, triggering minor earth tremors and sending a plume of smoke and ash 6,000 meters (nearly 20,000 feet) into a clear sky.

Chile’s National Geology and Mining Service reported that at 12:36 am (15:36 GMT) the Lascar Volcano stirred.

The volcano sent “an eruptive column” comprising volcanic ash and hot gases 6,000 meters above its crater, the service said. 

Authorities alerted the nearest town, Talabre, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the volcano, in case evacuations were required. But no property damage was reported, and the service maintained a green level, the lowest level of alert.

Lascar, with an elevation of 5,592 meters (18,346 feet) above sea level, is 70 kilometers (44 miles) from San Pedro de Atacama, a popular tourist center that draws visitors for trekking, amateur astronomy and visits to the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth.

Lascar erupted in 1993 but also had lesser volcanic activity in 2006 and 2015.

Farther to the south, yellow alerts remain in effect for regions around the Nevados de Chillan volcanic complex, 385 kilometers (240 miles) south of the capital of Santiago, and the Villarica Volcano 800 kilometers (500 miles) to the south.

US climate envoy John Kerry speaking at the COP27 summit in Egypt last month

The United States is open to amending lucrative green subsidies that have drawn transatlantic anger for allegedly encouraging job losses in Europe, US climate envoy John Kerry said.

In a BBC interview from London, broadcast on Saturday, Kerry also signalled unease over the UK government’s decision to permit the opening of a coal mine despite ambitions to slash carbon emissions.

Several EU leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, during a state visit to Washington, have said the US subsidies are enticing European companies to relocate to the United States.

Washington’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act contains around $370 billion in subsidies for green energy, as well as tax cuts for US-made electric cars and batteries.

“I don’t think you’re going to see it watered down,” Kerry said, insisting the measures were needed to kick-start the climate transition.

“But will you see, where it might be appropriate, if there were some tweak or adjustment that is fair, and not going to prejudice our own efforts? 

“I’m confident President (Joe) Biden would consider that,” he said.

Biden defended the act to Macron, but said it was never intended to disadvantage US allies, and has committed to understanding EU concerns.

Kerry also spoke out after Britain this week granted planning permission for a controversial new coal mine in northern England, the first in decades.

The go-ahead for the project in Cumbria was slammed by Greenpeace as “climate hypocrisy”, and Kerry said it risked antagonising other countries.

Richer countries had to abide by their own climate rhetoric or be portrayed as “do as we say, not as we do”, the US envoy said.

Kerry said he needed more information about the rationale for the mine, which is intended to supply coal for steel plants, including how its emissions might be offset.

“But obviously, we will hear people raise criticisms about it because in general, the idea of mining coal in any form whatsoever is the opposite direction from that which most people are advocating and most people are moving in,” he said.

Kerry conceded that the recent COP27 climate summit in Egypt lacked “collective ambition” to avert the worst-case models for rising temperatures.

But he defended the UN process overall.

“If you didn’t have that kind of a process, you’d have to invent it. Because you need to get every nation on the planet engaged in this dialogue and in this effort.”

The H2Med project comes as Europe is scrambling to reduce its dependence on Russian energy following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine

An ambitious underwater pipeline to bring hydrogen from the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe will be completed by 2030 and cost some 2.5 billion euros, the leaders of France, Spain and Portugal said Friday.

The H2Med project comes as Europe is scrambling to reduce its dependence on Russian energy following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

It is also seen as helping Europe transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy.

The pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille — also known as the “BarMar” project — will carry two million tonnes of hydrogen per year, or 10 percent of expected European consumption, once it goes online, said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

“It is going to be the first major hydrogen corridor in the European Union,” Sanchez said.

The project will cost around 2.5 billion euros ($2.6 billion), he said at a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron and Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa.

The three leaders formally signed off on the plans in the presence of EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen on the sidelines of a regional EU summit.

Following the talks, they released a roadmap and timeline for completing H2Med which they hope will be partially covered by European funds. 

If approved by Brussels, European funding could cover about half the cost, 1.2 billion euros, French sources said. The remainder could be borne by future consumers in a process that is still to be set out.

The pipeline under the Mediterranean Sea will carry green hydrogen, which is made from water via electrolysis in a process using renewable energy.

But French officials said they had not ruled out that it could also carry hydrogen produced from nuclear power.

The roadmap detailed three options for the route of the pipeline, with the preferred one stretching 455 kilometres (282 miles) at a maximum depth of almost 2,600 metres. 

Construction would begin in 2025 and last four years and eight months, it said.

– Cleaner energy –

H2Med aims to boost the decarbonisation of European industry, giving it large-scale access to clean energy from Spain and Portugal, which are hoping to become world leaders in green hydrogen thanks to their numerous wind and solar power farms.

“The focus of H2 demand is on sectors that are difficult to decarbonise, such as industry and transport,” the roadmap said. 

“The cost of H2 transmission by pipeline over long distances is 2 to 4 times lower than transmitting electricity over high-voltage lines,” it said. 

Announced at an EU summit in October, the pipeline offers an alternative to the defunct 2003 MidCat pipeline project which was to have carried gas across the Pyrenees from Spain to France. 

It was abandoned in 2019 over profitability issues and objections from Paris and environmentalists.

Initially, the idea was for the pipeline to carry gas from the Iberian Peninsula to central Europe, given Spain and Portugal’s huge capacity for turning liquefied natural gas (LNG) that arrives in tankers back into gas form. 

But Portugal’s Costa stressed that the planned pipeline would only carry green hydrogen.

The meeting took place just before a EuroMed 9 summit which groups Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain.

Spain’s Sanchez had planned to hold bilateral talks with Italy’s new far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, but she pulled out due to illness early on Friday, Rome said. 

Sanchez and Macron announced on Twitter that the next summit between their two countries would take place on January 19 in Spain.

Conservationists fear that edited genes might be passed on to non-target species like pollinators

Dozens of scientists, experts and campaigners called for a ban on the release of genetically-edited organisms into the wild, in a statement Friday warning of potentially severe risks to the world’s pollinators.

The appeal was launched at crunch biodiversity talks in Montreal, where delegates from almost all the world’s countries were meeting to negotiate a strategy to halt human environmental destruction, which threatens the natural life support systems of the planet.

A host of new genome-editing tools that modify the genetic material of living beings have emerged in recent years, and are being researched and developed largely to target insects and plants in agriculture.  

Supporters argue that they could help human health, agriculture and even species conservation.

But their use in the wild carries “understudied risks which could accelerate the decline of pollinator populations and put entire food webs at risk,” according to the letter drafted by the French non-governmental organisation Pollinis. 

The signatories — including researchers specialising in insects, pollinators and agroecology — called for countries party to the UN biodiversity talks to oppose the deployment of genetic biotechnologies in nature. 

They said current scientific research was unable to provide “reliable and robust” risk assessments for potential harms to other species including pollinators and the plants, animals and whole ecosystems that rely on them.    

“Pollinating insects are already facing an alarming decline due to external stressors, adding hazardous and unassessed genetic biotechnologies to this fatal mix will aggravate the stress on pollinators and may precipitate their extinction,” the statement said.

The UN talks in Montreal are tasked with laying out an ambitious plan for how people can live “in harmony with nature” in the coming decades, as scientists warn a million species are threatened with extinction. 

One of the targets up for negotiation looks specifically at the potential risks of genetic biotechnology and the decision on this point could lead either to greater regulation or help facilitate their use.

– Engineered eradication –

Unlike genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which introduce an external gene into a plant or animal, new gene editing techniques directly modify the genome of a living being, without adding external elements.

One example is so-called gene drive technology, which uses tools such as CRISPR-Cas9 — DNA snipping “scissors” that can insert, delete or otherwise edit genes.    

This can push an engineered trait so it is passed down to a higher proportion of offspring than would have occurred naturally, across many generations.

A flagship project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has developed the technology to try to eradicate malaria. 

In 2018 researchers were able to wipe out an entire population of malaria-carrying mosquitos in the lab using a gene editing tool to programme their extinction.

The Pollinis letter said companies have filed patent applications describing the use of gene drive technology to target “hundreds” of agricultural pests.     

Another type of biotechnology uses “genetic silencing” to inhibit certain genetic expressions in animals or plants. 

This would make it possible to combat crop pests such as the Colorado potato beetle, which decimates potato crops, or fruit flies.

Some of these biotechnologies have already been approved for use in different parts of the world, the Pollinis statement said, calling for the issue to be “urgently addressed at the international level”.

– Into the wild? –

Advocates of these biotechnologies want permission to take these experiments out of the laboratory and conduct field trials. 

In Europe, Monsanto’s insect-resistant MON810 corn is the only GMO authorised for cultivation. 

But biotech products benefit from a much more flexible framework in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Japan and India, among others.

Christophe Robaglia, professor of biology at the University of Aix-Marseille and a GMO expert with the European Food Safety Authority said the EU’s regulations on these biotechnologies were largely “obsolete”. 

When it comes to use on plants, he said the use of some of these so-called new breeding techniques could “improve” them, making them resistant to viruses or herbicides or make them more drought tolerant.  

In September 2021, a meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) passed a motion which noted the particular importance of the “precautionary principle” with synthetic biology. 

The Pollinis statement is most concerned about the use of these techniques on insects that are not limited to a single area. 

It raised particular concern about “gene transfer” between species. 

This is the risk that modifications made to pests could potentially contaminate the genome of non-target species, potentially destabilising a cascade of other species. 

This picture taken on May 23, 2019 shows Mariam the dugong as she swims in the waters around Libong island, Trang province in southern Thailand

Dugongs — large herbivorous marine mammals commonly known as “sea cows” — are now threatened with extinction, according to an official list updated Friday.

These gentle cousins of the manatee graze on seagrass in shallow coastal waters, and are an important source of ecotourism in their tropical habitats. 

Despite their moniker, they are more closely related to elephants than to cows. 

Dugong populations in East Africa and New Caledonia have now entered the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List as “critically endangered” and “endangered,” respectively.

Globally, the species remains classified as “vulnerable.”

Their primary threats are unintentional capture in fishing gear in East Africa and poaching in New Caledonia, as well as boat injuries in both locations.

In East Africa, fossil fuel exploration and production, pollution and unauthorized development are also degrading their seagrass food source. In New Caledonia seagrass is being damaged by agricultural run-off and pollution from nickel mining, among other sources.

Habitat degradation is compounded by climate change throughout the dugongs’ range in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans.

The updated list comes as delegates from across the world meet in Montreal for a UN biodiversity conference to finalize a new framework for “a peace pact with nature,” with key goals to preserve Earth’s forests, oceans and species.

IUCN deputy director Stewart Maginnis told AFP: “The ability to slow and limit extinction rate, to buy us more time has been focused very much on a large terrestrial species.”

“But the fact is that we are 30 years behind on effective marine conservation — now hopefully we can catch that up.”

Climate change is driving ocean acidification as well as deoxygenation, while flows of agricultural and industrial pollution from the land are causing significant impacts on ocean species, effects that cascade throughout food webs.

Maginnis stressed that the Red List is not a hopeless catalog of doom — it serves as a scientifically rigorous tool that helps focus conservation action.

It includes more than 150,000 species, with over 42,000 threatened with extinction. Over 1,550 marine animals and plants assessed are at risk of extinction, with climate change impacting at least 41 percent of those threatened.

– Poaching, pollution, climate change –

In other updates to the IUCN list, 44 percent of all abalone shellfish are now threatened with extinction, while pillar coral has moved to “critically endangered.”

Abalone species are considered gastronomic delicacies, leading to unsustainable extraction and poaching by international organized crime networks, for example in South Africa.

They are also deeply susceptible to climate change, with a marine heatwave killing 99 percent of Roe’s abalones off Western Australia in 2011.

Agricultural and pollution run-off also cause harmful algal blooms, which have eliminated the Omani abalone, a commercial species found in the Arabian Peninsula, across half of its former range.

Twenty of the world’s 54 abalone species are now threatened with extinction.

“Abalones reflect humanity’s disastrous guardianship of our oceans in microcosm: overfishing, pollution, disease, habitat loss, algal blooms, warming and acidification, to name but a few threats,” said Howard Peters of the University of York who led the assessment.

“They really are the canary in the coal mine.”

Pillar coral, which are found throughout the Caribbean, moved from “vulnerable” to “critically endangered” after its population shrunk by over 80 percent across most of its range since 1990. 

Bleaching caused by sea surface temperature rise — as well as antibiotics, fertilizers and sewage running into the oceans — have left them deeply susceptible to Stony coral tissue loss disease, which has ravaged their numbers over the past four years.

Overfishing around coral reefs has piled on more pressure by depleting the number of grazing fish, allowing algae to dominate.

“The pillar coral is just one of the 26 corals now listed as Critically Endangered in the Atlantic Ocean, where almost half of all corals are now at elevated risk of extinction due to climate change and other impacts,” said Beth Polidoro of Arizona State University.

Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, Jonathan Wilkinson, has pledged to fastrack permitting for mines that extract minerals critical to the country's switch to green energy and technology

Canada will look to quickly ramp up production of critical minerals that are vital to its transition away from climate-harming fossil fuels, according to a new strategy unveiled Friday.

The 58-page document notes that Canada is home to vast untapped deposits of lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements.

But under a current framework, it adds, it can take from five to 25 years to get new mines approved and operational.

With global demand set to soar and China controlling much of existing supplies, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said it is paramount for Canada and its allies “to establish and maintain resilient critical minerals value chains.”

The new strategy, he added, “sets out a course for Canada to become a global supplier of choice for critical minerals and the clean digital technologies they enable.”

Critical minerals are used, for example, in electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and semiconductors.

They are “the building blocks for the green and digital economy. There is no energy transition without critical minerals,” says the strategy document.

New mine proposals typically undergo a patchwork of rigorous environmental review and permitting process. Wilkinson vowed to streamline that process, including eliminating duplicate reviews at both the federal and provincial levels.

“We recognize that, although responsible regulations are vital, complex regulatory and permitting processes can hinder the economic competitiveness of the sector and increase investment risk for proponents,” says the document.

The new strategy is not backed by any new funding, but in its 2022 budget, the federal government earmarked Can$3.8 billion (US$2.8 billion) over eight years for the sector — including a 30 percent tax credit to spur exploration.

Ottawa also acknowledges in the document the need for new infrastructure such as roads and ports in order to access and exploit the deposits.

To counter China’s supremacy in critical minerals, Canada, the United States and its allies have committed to boosting extraction, processing and recycling of critical minerals.

In late October, Canada also tightened its investment rules to make it more difficult for foreign state-owned companies to buy into its critical minerals sector, following a backlash over Chinese investments in Canada.

Such deals, the government said at the time, would only be approved on “an exceptional basis.”

It has also recently ordered three Chinese resources companies to divest their stakes in Canadian critical minerals firms.