Fossil Free Careers

Our friends at People & Planet are calling on UK University Careers Departments to end recruitment pipelines into the oil, gas, and mining industries through their Fossil Free Careers campaign. Over the past year, we’ve worked with them to develop a list of the 250 biggest players in extractivism. When we say the universities should end their relationships with the oil, gas, and mining industries, these are the specific companies we are talking about.

As the pressure ramps up on the fossil fuel industry, mining giants are increasingly looking to dodge accountability and keep this unjust system of extractivism in place by shifting their operations, moving from mining coal to mining the raw materials required for renewable energy instead – known as ‘transition minerals’.

To tackle the system at its root, the campaign targets recruitment into the fossil fuel industry and the transition mineral mining industry, addressing the injustice of our energy system as a whole.

Transition Minerals

‘Transition minerals’, are the minerals that are vital to the technology of low-carbon energy systems, particularly extracting, storing and transmitting renewable energy. They include: Cobalt, Lithium, Nickel, Copper, Bauxite, Gold, Graphite, Iron, Silver, Tin, Tantalum, Tungsten, Zinc, and the 17 rare earth elements. Lithium, to take one example, is an essential component of electric vehicle batteries: if we were to simply replace the massive number of petrol-powered cars with electric ones, that would drive a huge spike in the demand for lithium.

The fossil fuel divestment movement has extensively used a list of top 200 fossil fuel reserves owners compiled by Fossil Free Indexes, known as the Carbon Underground 200. To this list of the top 200 fossil fuel companies, we have added the top 50 transition mineral mining companies. Together, this list of 250 companies covers the key players in the extractive industries.

To build this list of the top 50 transition mineral mining companies, available below, we identified the 50 largest, publicly-traded transition mineral mining companies which are implicated in an active case on Environmental Justice Atlas and not already listed in the Carbon Underground 200. Environmental Justice Atlas is a global project which documents and catalogues social conflict around environmental issues. You can read more about our methodology and download a copy of the lis below.