2024-02-13 05:18:13
Published on February 13, 2024 at 06:18. / Modified on February 13, 2024 at 07:26.
“Gold generates 2% of global emissions and is useless. No one sees this elephant in the room.” This sentence comes from Vincent Donnen, an expert in rare metals in Geneva, who gave an interview to Temps Monday. It weighs all its weight in Switzerland, this country where between a quarter and half of the world’s yellow metal is refined. We checked whether his words were correct.
This fact checking exercise begins with the reading of a book on “the mining rush in the 21st century” which was the subject of a review in our columns in January. Its author, Celia Izoard, writes that gold production is “particularly energy-intensive, polluting and mainly intended to produce jewelry and ingots which end up in bank vaults”. She cites a study from a Canadian NGO, Northern Confluence, published in July 2023.
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#extraordinary #pollution #inutility #gold
