 Good afternoon and welcome to your wonderful cycle called the dark side of the cloud. This is an environmental impact of the day-to-day business as usual. This is one of the three sessions we're going to have this month. First of all I want to thank the Transition Merderic and the Glacasa Encendida on the European Green Foundation that have made possible to hold this interesting cycle. So the first panel we'll be moderating is a panel where we'll talk about feeding the beast. That's the title. And we'll talk about the infrastructures of water and minerals that are necessary to feed the virtual world where we are more and more involved every day. And I have the honour of having with me four experts today. They've been very kind to us, so as to share with us their knowledge. So we have Vlad and Joller, Alicia Valero, Lorene de Monteney. And then I will introduce them as they, before the begin their speeches. So one last thought before beginning this panel is we all always think that this cloud is something a material spongy light thing, but this is far from, very far from the truth, it's just a myth. And we're going to see why I'm telling you this and when we talk about deutalisation. So trendy right now we're not talking about something immaterial. There's a large infrastructure that is holding this virtual world, this digital world and that is fed by mineral resources, water, energy, labour, etc. And well not to talk about the waste and the impact all of this has in the environment. I don't want to take too much time, so I'm going to give the floor to our first expert. His name is Vlad and Joller, he's a professor of new media in the Nobiza in Serbia University and the founder of Shea Lab. He privileged the invisible structure, the transparency of algorithms, labour exploitation are the phenomena that come with technological progress. Also he's written several books and Vlad has his work in permanent work. He's an artist, he has in a MoMA and he has a permanent exhibition of electronics and Adam will be talking about this physical side that holds this cloud. I was talking to you about, so the floor is yours. Hello, good evening. It's really really great pleasure to be here this evening with you. And it's also a pleasure to open this wonderful gathering. So I'm going to start basically with my personal relation with that topic and it basically started somewhere like let's say 10 or 12 years ago. Really not with this idea of like describing planetary scale structures. It basically started with trying to understand some kind of really small micro-events. So I was like really interested, for example, in how the life of one internet packet look like. And then I was trying to follow this internet packet to try to understand where this internet packet is going and what is happening in this let's say few milliseconds or less than one seconds of life of this little packet. And by doing that, I realized that in a way following this life of internet packet I realized that there are like a lot of different layers of untransparency, a lot of different events and infrastructures that are completely hidden from our side. So my research started with one packet and then the next question was okay, how those networks look like and where are they and how they are structured, what is the architecture of those networks. And from there I was going deeper into, next step was like going into data centers and trying to understand how they operate and then going deeper into algorithmic processes that are happening within those data centers. So it was some kind of journey and by doing that I started to do some kind of maps. For like about this kind of internet infrastructures and internet networks and how they look like. And then after several maps I made one that probably it's the most known one, it's called Anatomy of an AI system. And I'm going to use that map today to lead you through some process of investigation and what was basically going on. So okay, so this is the map, it's called Anatomy of an AI system. And basically it explores this process, you know that I was explaining to you. So I started with us as individuals and this is this person on the top of this map in the middle of the map. And basically this main line in the middle explained this process of going further, further, further. And then starting with the device and then on each of those steps. We can see different kinds of issues different problems that are related to each of those, let's say layers of untransparency so even on the level of device itself in this case this map explore the device that it's called Amazon Echo. Even here in the beginning with this device we see a lot of different problems so for example there is like issue about right to repair. Sometimes when you open some devices like you know they are made to be broken when you open them then in lots of cases you're not even allowed to open them and so on so on so there is like a lot of different layers. There are a lot of different issues on each of those layers know so the second layer it's infrastructure. Internet infrastructure and and so for example, there we have another types of problems so here we are speaking about like a lot of different relations between internet service providers government, some powers that each of those internet service providers have, they have a power to block they that means to sensor to filter traffic they have a power to make some packets more important some packets less important. So, on each of those levels we have, let's say a universe of different issues and different problems that we can speak about some of them are political some of them are economical some of them are speaking about some kind of like labor relation and and to each of those structures we can also understand that there are some kind of like that there is always some kind of human labor involved that for us is most of the cases it's invisible completely. If we move move there from the Internet infrastructure then we are coming to a data centers and going further to that we have like this kind of algorithmic processes, and those are specific black boxes that we that it's really hard to open and really hard to investigate. And this is something that I was doing in my previous research that was called Facebook algorithmic factories we tried like for, for, you know, like, several years to try to unpack those processes and to create the map of those like the connection between human beings algorithms and different processes that are happening within those data centers and within those like algorithms and this basically some kind of invisible factories that we are not aware of. But from there we can go even deeper and deeper and deeper and this is like just a question of like how many dimensions we want to have and to cover. If we go deeper for, for example, from from this process of like algorithmic let's say in this case it's like machine learning models that are recognizing the voice. We can go deeper there, even there and then we need to speak about like time and labor that is involved in creation of those models and then we will understand that this then there is another layer of invisibility. There. So for example you need great amount of resources to train those models but also behind them you have like a process of creation of those like learning materials for for machine learning so that means like thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of of hours of voice that someone needed to produce in order for this to happen and some, you know, invisible labor in within like this kind of process of training so for example, people, you know, like fine tuning those models and so on so on. But, but all of those like we can we can think about those processes from different angles so we can think for example, from the angle of the energy that is being spent for all of those processes, or we can think about like hidden forms of labor. In a sense of like what are the labor relations existing there but also like what kind of biases people are basically giving to those systems that are completely invisible forms of biases so for example someone needed to create some kind of classification system for classifying or someone needed to choose those training data sets and so on so on. And each of those relations into those interactions are basically influencing the final result so this is some kind of multi dimensional problem. So this is the, the, the, the, we can explore this kind of invisibility from many different dimensions like material or labor or energy and many other, many other dimensions so. Then the main, let's say breakthrough in in my point of view of understanding of those systems so I will like spending years in this like just this kind of vertical line trying to go deeper and deeper and trying to, let's say open this layers of this black box but then my research went into completely different direction. When I start to think about this kind of geology of though of all of those like parts of this infrastructure so geology of this device that I'm having in my hand or geology of those servers of fruiters of, of all of those material objects that are part of this invisible infrastructure. And in that moment this map and this research basically exploded in completely different direction. And it became this what you're seeing in front of you. So basically this map have a three parts the left part it's birth, the middle part it's life and the right part of the map, it's death of one device in this case Amazon echo device. So when I started to investigate this I started from like, you know, like here. Down in. I started with the with the elements I started with the periodic system of elements and I try to understand. Okay, I have this device in my hand and then I try to, you know, destroy this device and to try to like understand and analyze on different how to which kind of elements are involved there and then you come to the situation that that for example one mobile phone and it's the same it is Amazon echo device. It's basically three quarter of periodic system of elements or most of the elements that exist are embedded in one of this in one device. And this is like big difference from the technologies that we're creating before when you know like you have like, usually just few different elements involved here it's much complicated story and then if you start to follow each of those elements, then the story is basically like expanding in so many different ways for example, if you start to follow lithium if you start to follow coltan if you start to follow rare earth elements, some of them. Most of them coming from different parts of the world, and most of them are creating in different forms of slavery relation. So I started to follow this this story of each of those elements and started to draw this. To make this more simple I use this kind of triangles that are basically explaining this relation between resource labor and product and try to draw this map in some kind of continuous flow of those triangles, because this is what you get you're transforming elements into into some kind of like resources and then you're melting them then you're, they're going through many different transformations, but each of those transformations isn't is a unit for itself and so for example it's then you can, you can, you know, some of them, most of them are basically really energy, spending a lot of energy and ecological footprint. It's huge but what what is making them together a process this is like all of those like countless like thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of kilometers that each of those elements are basically going through because like in order to create one device you need like a planetary scale system. And so for example if you if you reverse engineer this process from the factory in China for example Foxconn you realize that you know on the first level you have like 200 something main suppliers than those 200 something suppliers have their own 200 suppliers that have their own 200 suppliers so it's some kind of fractal supply chain. And I was like researching this a lot in a way like like researching this kind of like black boxes that are mostly related to technology and then we are speaking mostly about like you know like black boxes within like artificial intelligence and algorithms and so on, but the production process is a black box itself. And this black box basically operates on on like, let's say different forms of extractivism and this is why after this map I created another work that it's called the new extractivism when I try to understand all of those different forms of extraction that exists because because it's not just extraction of nature. It's also the extraction of data extraction of this kind of different forms of immaterial labor. That exists during the process. No, so for example, and what is like really important to speak about it is this kind of inequality that exists within this process so what I try to do here in this work it's also when when I was able to to find some form of labor. So I'm trying to find what is the average average pay for that labor and so so because of that I created this line on the left side of the map when it's listed all different forms of relation so on the on the bottom of this you have people who are earning. Like three or $5 or $10 per day on the top of this invisible fractals to structure and supply chain you have people like for example in this case, in this case, Jeff Bezos who is earning like millions and sometimes millions per day. So this kind of scale of inequality within this process is, let's say one to 300 million and even more, and this is something that we should should speak about. And so, and then here. So on the left side of this map we have this kind of process of extraction process like planetary the scale system of production so and all of those devices that we are using today it is kind of like high tech devices that are connected to networks. So if they rely on, let's say this planetary scale factory, but also rely on planetary scale system as, as, for example, Internet so there are different kinds of it's a network of different kinds of planetary scale systems. And if we follow this like so on the left side we have a birth of one device in the middle we have a life. And then on the right side of this map, we have a death of this device. It's kind of it's inverse process in which, you know, like we again have like a lot of different layers of transparency how where those devices are ending up and and how they're again at the end becoming some kind of new form of geological layer that that exists around us. And in a sense of what was like for me, interesting here it's to try to understand how this system functioning and how what is like, and in a way, the one of the main question was like, for example, every time when you throw away your device, you are basically feeding this system of production and giving this system some kind of energy. And then in the further work on new extractivism. I was like, trying more to understand this kind of new labor relation that exists in this system so for example, we are not just being exploited as a workers in this like traditional sense but but our very existence is becoming a work it's becoming a labor because like if we live in this system of total surveillance because like still most of those like big companies and devices like have this kind of business models related to extraction of data. In that sense, we are all the time working and in most of the cases we are not even realizing when we are working when we breathe when we move when we do whatever we are basically being exposed to this system of extraction, in which our body and minds are conscious and then subconscious is creating some kind of data so it's multi dimensional problem of extraction of labor and our bodies in the way. I think I'm well over 15 minutes. Yes, I'm afraid so and we're sorry because we'd like to have so much more time because it's so interesting what you are talking about and I will never again look at my phone the same way after what you said but I think it's interesting to be able to listen to the presentations and then to give the opportunity to the audience to ask questions so thanks to my colleagues that explain how this works because we are so used to the virtual world and having holding this kind of sessions online sessions. It seems that we can all handle zoom. If we have someone that joined us, do you have the chat box and also you have this world sign to select the interpreting channel and you choose a language and also you have the chat box for the questions that will be answered later. Now I'm going to give the floor to our next expert and it's a pleasure to have her again in a session to be able to talk about minerals about the finite capacity of our system. She is a chemical engineer about the University of Zaragoza and she is an investigation group of industrial ecology and she is a teacher in the University of Zaragoza. In her research activity she focused on looking for efficient solutions and the use of resources and applying them dynamics to evaluate the mineral capital of the earth and as she would explain later this is finite. Alicia, the floor is yours. Thank you Carol. I'm going to share my presentation now. Okay, thank you so much for having me here. I love to be here with you today because there's always a great debate here and I like very much the title I loved it. I'm going to dig deep on the map the previous speaker explained Vlad and I'm going to give you some data about that's behind the data centers. So to start I want to tell you that we have an exponential growth in data creation and the estimates the future estimates for the data creation are always obsolete. And they are well above the reality compared to the reality is always above to what was forecasted. And so what does this entail? Well, among other things, the traffic and data volume in five, six years have been multiplied by five, but not the users have been multiplied by five. So each internet user generates way more data. Many of them useless and this is another conversation worth having I think in another conference of the usefulness of some data on the problem associated to all of this. So if we take a look at, for example, the energy in spite of it being five fold the data, the energy has just been increased by 40% why because the data centers are more and more efficient and we have the hyperscale data centers. But in 2021, according to the energy international energy, 3% of global electricity consumption was because of the data centers and 80% of the energy of the data centers was associated to crypto mining and this has been increased by 30 since 2015. So it's five fold, but the energy consumption hasn't and that's because efficiency is better and this is based on the more load that telling us every two years the number of transistors in a microprocessor doubles. And also is one in line with the cumulo, telling us the energy efficiency of computer equipment doubles every one and a half years. So since 2000, these 2000 more slow it doesn't hold true. And what we can see is that the increase in data volume is has an increase in energy consumption associated. In addition to that increase in energy consumption, we have the beside of efficiency, which is the increased use of material. And according to the Falcon study, at least we hear you can see the rock composition made up by 13 servers where we include at least 20 metals, many of which are considered critical. So the trend, not just in servers that are part of the data centers, but in general in all technologies is that we have a larger amount and increased number of products and materials with better performance. As the laws I explained say reduced in size and weight but are impossible, functionally impossible to recycle. And they contain a large amount of elements with small amounts and we're talking about nanometers in many cases and that's impossible to recycle. Because if we mix everything together we have this metallic mixology and this has to do with thermodynamics. And if you mix certain elements in small amounts that entails irreversible loss in the life cycle. We carried out a study a few years ago and we studied some devices including servers and computers and we realized that other technologies then seem more efficient from an energy standpoint are less sustainable from a material standpoint. So we improve on the one hand but we are doing worse on the other hand and this is serious as I will explain. Let me give you an example, we're talking about gold in the PCBs of these servers or the mobile phones or technology, digital technology in general. We have a PCB that contains up to 860 grams per ton in gold so the PCBs have more gold than the mines so the best mines have between 8 and 10 grams per ton. So there's almost 100 times more gold concentration in servers and PCBs than in mines. So it would take about over 5000 PCBs to make a 90 gram ring of pure gold and in fact in Tokyo, I don't know if you remember, but we did the metals from electronic devices waste. So 30 kilograms of gold, 1600 metals were refined from 80 tons of electronic devices and this accounted for 6.21 million mobile phones. So this need to increase the data that in time in turn needs to increase the servers and the raw materials means that we have to extract more raw materials and that entails that in the 20th century. We have 21st century as much copper as in the entire history of mankind and not just copper which is one of the most important elements of the digital transition. We're saying that gold in electronics and jewelry was, well we have extracted 0.5 times as in the history of humanity in silver also, 0.6 zinc, 0.8 times, nickels, 1.2 times cobalt, essentially in batteries, 1.56 times and lithium almost 2 times more than in raw materials. This is unprecedented and if we keep on exponentially increasing the resource extraction, well in a limited planet of course has its consequences the first of which is that the mines are depleted. And here we can see some studies we carried out a few years ago about the production peak or extraction peak of mineral resources. Where we can find that, well considering the most optimistic estimates and we're talking about resources and not reserves which is what we can use today so the resources maybe in the future so the resources could reach their peak before the end of this century. While the reserves also what we can use today will be peaking, no are already peaked. So the consequences is that obviously that the mines are degrading and here we can see how we are reducing the gold concentration and mines all over the world. And obviously we went from high concentrations, more than 40 grams per tonne of gold and now they are below 80 grams per tonne. So well the concentration of gold is decreasing so the gold mines are depleting and that means that we need way more energy to extract. The following tonne and this has to do with thermodynamics. We analyzed thousands of mines all over the world so copper, gold, zinc and we saw how the energy associated is exponentially increased with mining. So we have this exponential and because of the thermodynamics low so the extraction energy in most of its bodies based on fossil fuels because we use large trucks to extract the tons of rocks that are obtained from those big holes we do on the earth. So the energy and digital transition need materials that are extracted with fossil fuels. I'm sorry but the emissions associated with their extraction of minerals will increase so they are not telling the truth about the decarbonization figures because they are not taking into account this aspect. And this has an environmental impact of course and other speakers will tell you more in detail. Talking about the gold we have the Grasberg mine which is the largest mine in the world, the gold mine in the province of Papua Indonesia, 1.6 km of the crater and in 2018 80 tons were extracted. So here you can see well the impact of the mine, the dark purple, you can see the product of the mine waste material. And obviously this entails that the fish or the animals in the river have almost disappeared and you can see the CO2 emissions in the area, the carbon emissions. In addition to the environmental impact we also have economic and social impact. For example, talking about economic impacts, we talk about the scarce lands and we have essential elements in the air generators and any engine that you can find in the digital technologies. So in batteries for example we can see that this element between 2007 and 2021 the price has been multiplied by 7 and by 23. And well the big producer of scarce lands is China and they have a monopoly of this scarce soil or land so we are vulnerable because we depend on them and many other critical elements too for the digital transition. So in analyzing the reserves we have what we can extract today and the expected demand for the digital transition and energy transition we see that we may have not enough raw materials for all these elements from here to 2050. In 2050 we will talk about well, chrome, copper, silver or copper you may think it's a vulnerable, we will be a problem with gallium, lithium, magnesium, platinum, zinc etc. All these elements are essential for the digital transition and the energy transition. And the governments are very worried, very much concerned because of the very few reserves and the refining of those elements are controlled by very few countries so what can we do? Well we can talk about that in the debate but I will give you some data. You may think that we have to recycle right these elements well about recycle. Let me give you the data from Spain because we are analyzing the electronic and electricity equipment of how much we recover and recycle. If we look at the value not so much the quantity but the value of the elements that are inside those electronic and electronic devices it turns out that over 80% of the value of these metals is lost. Because we focus on what's easy to recycle aluminium, copper a little bit, steel but we recover copper blends and aluminium and steel blends the purity of which is below the original. So we have to incorporate new material, virgin material to recycle and the diluted part of the purity. And 99% of those critical elements and which are called palladium, palladium and other elements that are there in the service to generate our data is just lost. So we have mineral limits to the ecological and digital transition and with this well I end up my speech. You have my message to open up for the debate in the end. Thank you so much. Thank you Alicia for sticking to the time you have us so that we can have time also for the Q&A. I mean I knew this was going to be the case but I'm a bit in shock after what the figures you've given us but we'll ask you more questions. Yesterday we had the opportunity to present a report of the first part of our report called Digital Technologies in Europe for the life cycle. And the second part we will be launching in shortly and you have it in transitionberde.es. And we have the pleasure to have with us one of the authors, Lauren Smobne. She is an expert and member of Green IT in France. She run the first Nazis in life cycle of the impact on the utilization also she carried out qualitative analysis on the use of the digital devices and the impact on the cloud. The self-driving vehicles and all not this virtual but also the digital part we're talking about. So Lauren is an advisor for organizations in their transformation process towards sustainable digital transformation if possible. And she's a teacher in the University of Andréa. So thank you for being with us and the floor is yours. Please tell us more. Thank you very much Carol. So good evening. It's a great pleasure to be virtually here with you today to present you the results of the study of digital technologies in Europe and environmental life cycle approach. So I will tell you a few things about this study now. First of all it's that the study is a world first. This is the first life cycle analysis at the scale not of a country but a continent here the European Union and which is based on a plurality of indicators. This is the first time that a study of this magnitude is compliant with the most demanding metal methodological standards available for life cycle analysis with an independent review. And this study was published last December in English and in French and just yesterday in Spanish. So it is difficult to summary in a few minutes all the findings of the study so I will do my best to focus on the most important findings. But before presenting you the results let me say a few words so you can better understand the methodology that was used which is called the life cycle analysis. So the methods used enable us to dispose of a quantified vision of the environmental impacts of a product or service over the whole product life cycle. This means we not only look at the final energy consumption of the ICT and associated impacts but we look at the impacts of the manufacturing phase and then the distribution phase then the use phase. And finally the impacts associated to the end of life of ICT equipments. We used eight environmental indicators among them metal resource used for soil resource used climate change, ecotoxicity for example and four floor flow indicators including waste production and energy consumption. To have a complete overview of the ICT we considered three tiers. The first tier it's a first category with various devices and user devices such as TV laptops, smartphones, IoT connected objects, etc. Then we have a second category which is the network with fixed and mobile networks and then third category which is data centers in Europe. To do such a study we did what is called an inventory. This means we quantified how much digital devices we did use in Europe in 2019 per category. So all the smartphones, all the TVs, all the laptops, all the desktops, all the connected objects, all the mobile and fixed networks and all the data centers. So this inventory, these are a few learnings of this inventory. Various 4.5 billion devices, digital technologies in Europe are wild sets that include almost 3 billion end user devices and 1.5 billion connected objects, which means 4.5 billion devices just for this part. We have nine smartphones over 10 people, which means about 475 million smartphones in Europe. Then we have one TV and one laptop for two people, which means 226 million TVs in Europe. There is also one laptop over two people in Europe and one desktop over four people. There is an average of three connected objects per European including all types of connected objects from commercial building, building controls, smart meters to home appliance, security or health. So this is huge. The results of our study shows that digital technologies for the need of Europeans wait more than all of humanity. Compared to the average weight of a person, this is 1.11 ton per European, so the weight of 18 human beings for the digital needs of one European. At the scale of all Europe, this means 571 megatons of raw materials needed, so the weight of 9.2 billion human beings. Overall impacts of U28 digital services are of 571 megatons of raw materials, which means that raw materials extracted to produce all the ICT used in Europe in 2019 wait as much as 18 times the weight of every European. Translated for an average European, this means 1,110 kilogram per European. This is a very material perspective. And then from a climate change perspective now, 185 megaton of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases were emitted for all ICT in Europe in 2019. In comparison, it is like if every European traveled 1,870 kilometers more by car in a year, each European. So translated for one average European, this means 361 kilograms of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases emitted by each European. In this study, we compared the environmental impacts of ICT to planetary boundaries. This means, for example, for climate change, as we compared the environmental impacts of one European with an average ICT consumption to see how much of its budget to stay below 1.5 Celsius degrees of global warming ICT do take. So how much of our sustainable budget does ICT take over a year? I'll let you take a few seconds to give your guess in the chat. I don't know if there are some guesses in the chat. I can't see the chat at the same time. Don't worry about the chat, we'll see that in the end. Okay, so I hope you have some guesses about this. We'll see if it's right. Digital technologies alone spend 40% of the sustainable greenhouse gas emissions budget of Europe. This means that without reducing our ICT consumption, this would leave a bit less than 60% of all the other activities, including to eat, to lodge, to eat, to dress, for care, to travel, etc. Isn't that a hint for more digital sobriety? But how to have a sober attitude with digital technologies? First, by understanding from where the most impacts come from. Manufacturing is the most impactful life cycle stage of ICT, representing 54% of the impacts. This is mainly because manufacturing is extremely energy consuming, especially for metals and rare earths, excavation and refining that will constitute the different components of a device. Then come the use phase, with 44% of the impacts. Televisions and computers account for half of the environmental reasons associated with manufacturing. User devices, such as TVs, laptops, smartphones, account for 71% of the environmental impacts of ICT in Europe. This finding goes against a common perception that data centers would be the main area of impact. Data centers account for only 18% of the share of impacts in Europe. I beg the organizers of this conference to excuse me, but this is so. The dark side of the cloud is in fact in first place and from far, our user equipments and far away behind the data centers and the network. Why is that so? Remember the inventory in Europe that 3 billion end user devices, excluding the IoT devices. While on the other hand, data centers enable us to mutualize servers and the associated infrastructure. Mutualization, this is a word to keep in mind. I was telling you how much user devices account in the share of impacts. For one particular category of device, the results are huge. 14% of the environmental impacts of ICT are solely due to TVs. TVs alone have twice as much the impacts of smartphones. TVs have more impacts than the entire network in Europe. So a few things to remember to conclude. Digital devices are a non renewable resource. This means that a device that is manufactured is a device in less in the future. These results show how urgent it is to tackle the environmental impacts of ICT by two things. First, by reducing the number of devices we need and second, make the same devices last much longer. Thank you for your listening. Thank you so much, Lauren, as you were telling us. We're talking about the dark side of the clock, but the dark side starts with something with people such as the smartphone, TVs, laptops, etc. So thank you so much for your presentation. Now we are going to take all these ideas and bring them down to earth with our last speaker. She's Melissa Argento. She is a political science teacher at the University of Rosario. She is a researcher in Latin America and Caribbean for the study center. She studies extractivism, conflicts between the states, etc. One of the things that I was most surprised by when preparing the cycle is that we were talking about water mining and I was saying what do you mean water mining? And Melissa will explain this because it has a lot to do when we talk about extractivism and how we extract minerals. So Melissa, the floor is yours. Thank you. Well, it's a real pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much for the three organizations involved here. We'll make this possible. I also thought it was very important and I loved the title, the dark side. And what I will share with you is the dark side of lithium. And I'll bring down to earth this to something much more territorial, what happens with the lithium mining in the territories of Atacama. So the first thing to be said, agreeing with the rest of the speakers, is that lithium is essential. In the framework of the future agendas, the present and future agendas, we have our laptops here with lithium or in the smart forms. Also we have lithium batteries, but also the lithium being the third element of the periodic system. It's a storage device, so it's important for all the agendas and energy transition to approach the urgent side for the greenhouse effect gas. And in line with what Alicia was saying with this extractivism, pressure linked to critical minerals of the energy transition and specifically in the case of lithium, this has social environmental impact with the lithium mining and the human rights violations in the territories and populations. That led to resistance to lithium extractivism. And well, as a reminder, to tell that there is an exponential growth around the lithium demand and went from 152,000 tons to 440,000 tons in the short term. The IEA is projecting a 42-fold increase and being conservative in line with the increase in price. This is important for all the agendas for decarbonisation all over the world for the expansion, for the new paradigm post-fossile. As I was saying, the electronic devices we're talking about are also in line with the electro-mobility, the cloud and with an exponential growth once again toward 26 million cars. And so Argentina, Chile and Bolivia have 58% of reserves of lithium brine reserves. So the brine reserves are a more profitable way for the extraction capital to extract them. And this exerts a pressure of what we call the Atacama region. So it's being called the lithium triangle between Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. So the ways in which the extractivism is made, and we've been investigating this for over 10 years, for over 10 years what we reproduce is a continuity of the accumulation by defossilisation that reproduces the green colonisations in extractivist pressure. So this has some characterising and we have to get the regulatory framework of different governments and I don't have time for that, maybe we can talk about that later. But what's happening is the corporate capitals are owners, but also in the extraction we link the demanding capitals, whether it be of the batteries or electro-mobility, so the big car companies. And here we can see a trend towards the location of the battery production in countries such as China, Japan and South Korea. And export and extraction with no added value from the territories we're talking about. So here you have the map of the salt flats, here you have the main salt flats, but this is a huge region. And where we have several projects that are taking place, here you have the Argentina salt flats. Here you can see the salt flats in Chile and Bolivia, and as you can see the largest salt flat is the Ujuni salt flat, but in Chile we have the more exploited one, the salt flats from Atacama. Here to show you the extractivism pressure, we have this discourse associated, saying in Argentina we have the white gold, the lithium is the star mineral, that we have a golden mine below us. The truth is far from that. So in these salt flats have many people living, and these are like critical resources, research with indigenous people and communities that are far from urban areas, and they have been systematically disregarded by the state-to-harm. They have the quality of life, employment and rights, and these populations are the ones that perceive the environment and the social impacts in a straight way, depending on the way the lithium mining state takes place. So throughout the years, and in field works, interviews and analysis, etc., we have seen that the social and environmental effects of lithium come from it being a water mining, as you were saying. This is water mining in the right basins that are made up of some geological and climate conditions that took place throughout millions of years. This is a slow water recharge cycle, meaning that the water comes by waterfall and then evaporation takes place. So we talk about territories that we could think are a desert, but since it's so dry and because of the texture, we have, in average, 4,000 meters above sea level. Obviously, there are some churches that go higher or lower, but this is, in average, with low rainfall, with high solar radiation and thermal amplitude and high soil insoluble. And, well, these salt flats may be seen as underground water that are mixed with these minerals through evaporation, and the technique is by pumping water in the salt flats and putting them in piles through evaporation, aggregating chemical products to be able to separate lithium. And to get the purity demanded for the batteries, so the main disputes here have to do with the large use of water. Now, in this dry areas and in slow water cycles where the figures depend on the composition of the salt flat and the degree of where the mineral is found, the extracting techniques always depend on different elements. So each salt flat is different, so some extraction, even until 2 million water per tonne of lithium. So here we have to think about the exponential growth because of the global demand and the pressure it entails for the territory. So what the communities are saying, the communities that live here, so we have the unsustainability of the lithium mining, unsustainability, yes, it has to do with the risk of the reproduction of the people that live there. And in their demands, they include ecocide in terms of the human and non-human life of the people inhabiting these territories, depending on the risks and the impact, of course, the alterations in the water cycle that may lead to the salination of sweet water that they need for the daily use Well, for pastures, livestock, so, well, the main work, but also for the water basins that are droughted. So the droughts are a problem and these risks are linked to this water recharge of the salt flats and the populations are saying once and again that there are no studies of the environmental impact. We have the ones presented by companies and per project, but we don't know how the indirect basin behaves as a whole, so we don't have hydric or water risks that take into account the cumulative risks of the large amount of projects. Also, many of these places, well, our lakes protected because the territory that is becoming more and more fragile, the wetlands are essential to protect in the context of the social and ecological crisis or climate change. And we have, well, of course, the endangered species such as the perinas and the flamingos, but also we have the environmental risk, for example, the ones that are expressed by the communities, the mortality of animals that have to do with the waste in those places. Piles of waste that were accumulated in some cases, reaching piles of over the 15 meters and with very high winds there, which is one of the things that happened there. Here you have images of the salt flats of the evaporation basin and the geomembrane dividing the salt flat and the place where the salt is placed to start the purification, lithium purification process. Well, this is just to tell you that if I'm using Argentina as an example because it's my country, to say that the acceleration of lithium extraction mining is a problem because we have three active projects. So we have Hujuy, Exar, Catamarca also in Hujuy and in the provinces of Hujuy, Saltán, Catamarca in Argentina and also in Atacama and in Chile. There's been a problem with the extraction projects. Here you have just a few of the projects so that you can see some examples of one of the characteristics in the extraction process and we have capitals that are with others that come from the battery industry or electromobility industry. So in all Argentina almost all of the salt flats are pediment and only 14 projects and more advanced projects according to a report of the 2021 Insecretariat explaining the passage from the 37,000 tons of lithium carbonated exported at the moment to 305,000 tons in the next few years. So we're trying to encourage exploration of lithium, rock lithium and in these territories what happens has to do with the social side of this social environmental impact that always go together with the non-compliance of rights. But these populations we don't respect the rights to decide on their territories. They are ruled by the indigenous and provincial rule but also by the law of land and regulation in the case of Chile. The populations are, the water is private, the water used in the corporations. We don't implement the previous consultation, a free consultation with the Convention on 169 of the OIT. And also the human right to have water so there's a systematic violation for the information access right because we have black boxes in the corporations and we don't know what they are doing. And there are problems with the community involvement in the projects and we have what always are made with companies representation with the territorial fragmentation, internal conflict and resistance. And many times we have the social license to obtain in an irregular manner. So this with the promise of work and sometimes say that the work for lithium mining is below 2,000 work positions. And we have an organization process for resistance and competition for well emphasizing the need for water for the basing as a space as a territory to be respected. And they have established some articulations in some of these resistance. In Argentina, in Catamarca also we have resistance processes. In Agastí for example in Chile of course in the populations of the Atacama region because the mining, the lithium mine coexist with the copper mining and copper and other essential elements. So there are organizational processes for organizational trans-boundary organizational processes and struggles for progressive articulations between the struggles of the social environmental side and although the social breaches and rights etc. So thank you for taking so much time. Sorry, no don't worry it's so interesting to listen to you. They are telling us in the chat if you can share your presentations later and we will send them if the speakers give them to us. So now we want to spend these last 15 minutes to one of the questions you sent and the questions we received in line with what Melissa was saying. All the pressure that exists on a basic resource as water, not just the land or the soil but something as basic as water leads me to think that water is also an important resource when talking about data centers and in the context of climate change and drought such as the one we are living, not just in Spain but in many other countries. I don't know if we may see a competition between the water as a basic resource for life and water as a resource for mining or to sustain the dataization of the data centers. I just sent you the questions to you but this is an open question to the rest of the speakers and you can turn all of your cameras, the speakers on and you can answer the questions if you want to. Okay, yes, what I try to say is that for these populations this is already a dispute for life because the problem with water for the lives there is the core noise, the own reproduction and you know that there are many populations and even cities where the water isn't reality, isn't something safe that you just open your top and you have water. It happens in many provinces in Argentina but in other countries in Latin America where you have a different appropriation of resources and there are places where for example the mining metallic industry uses large amounts of water and the cities have time frames where they cannot use water and this is already happening for millions of people who in addition to the millions of people who don't have water running water and this has been recognized by NATO and by other organizations. So we say that we have a present and future problem with the water dispute and in the framework of this transition we will require critical minerals for mining and energetic industry that is active so we have to think about other minerals or solutions proposed for climate change such as green hydrogen also entails a large use of water so we believe that the dispute for water is essential for local geopolitics for all the transition processes in the context of climate change and to leave behind the fossil fuels. If anyone else wants to say many, Vladimir wants to add his perspective for the data sensors. If not, Vladimir, the floor is yours. No, for me what is like really interesting is, you know, I think we really need to try to see those systems wider as is possible so to try to understand this kind of extended anatomies of those processes. For example, when I spoke about, I don't know this machine learning models we can also understand that there is some kind of huge consumption of energy during the process of creation of this machine learning models or for example if we try just to think about like single cookie, internet cookie or like one single internet packet that basically every time when we click something. It's not just this kind of like transmission of this but all of those devices that are in between. Basically, us and data centers are also spending some energy but also when the end of this life of this for example internet packet. It's, it's not ending there because this information is being analyzed and it's being part of some kind of wider process for example, like analysis and creation of ads and following it so for example, for me, it was always interesting question to try to understand what is the weight of this surveillance capitalism what is the weight CO2 consumption of this surveillance that is happening all the time, because it's not just one process but some kind of fractal fireworks of different processes that are happening all the time. And it's the same like with this materiality of those devices, you know, like we can deeper we go we understand there is more there is more there is more there is more and it's really hard to understand totality of this process. And in that sense, on other side, like the companies that are mostly profiting from from debt, and here I'm not speaking about mining companies okay, okay, them as well but also like for example, Google it's not paying that price Facebook it's not paying that price this price of of of destruction and extraction and and and all of those like fractal events that are being embedded in this it's not paid by by almost anyone. And and and until we don't try to understand like what is the real price of like each device that we use but also the information that is like flowing all around what is the real price of watching one Netflix Netflix video. I'm afraid the price is higher than we may all think when we are taking it while just watching a film in Netflix. And Lauren was asking what was saying me if the data you presented are the European or European Union level for Lauren, and if you have some comparative estimate with China or the US. As I was saying, at the beginning of my presentation, this, this kind of study is the first. It's very rare to have such a study at the scale of a country and it was the first time for a continent. We did this study for France, but and for but but without all the methodological complexity, it was not the same level of how to say this, the same level of credibility of the methodology for France and for the world. But it's, it's a bit difficult to say to you a comparative figures for the United States or China, because this would mean this will mean to have all the inventory to do back from the beginning for these countries. I'm not completely sure that it will be easy to do an inventory for China, because it was already a bit difficult for Europe, so I'm not sure it would be easy to say it or I don't, I can't say comparative figures now for this. In fact, you include a note about the difficulty in accessing some certain data in Europe. So yes, we are aware. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Alicia, there was a question about the recycling process you were talking about. So the thing was if the recycling wasn't made because you couldn't or because it's not profitable. Well, first of all, we have several problems. The first one is it's not done because of technologies nowadays. There are no plans that are able to recover the critical materials. There are very few in Europe. Until now we, until not long ago, we only had one able to recover other elements of gold, stanium, stanium. So we just go for the easy part and what can be recovered from an economic perspective. So all these processes require chemical techniques because we were using physical techniques and hydro metallurgy or pyro metallurgy and this is very costly, but we need a large volume of devices and electric and electronic devices so that the technologies may be profitable. But also, since the devices are not designed to be recovered or recycled, like, as an example I use a lot. If you mix sugar and salt, it's easy, but try to separate that. It's complicated. That's what we are doing, not just mixing sugar and salt, but sugar, salt, flour, all kinds of species and nanoscales making it way more difficult. So we have technological problems, economic problems, but the largest problem making it impossible to recover is the design. They are not prepared. We think about the functionality but we don't think about the end of life. Yes, it's a matter of design, almost always. I wanted to ask to the four of you talking about the elephant in the room in terms of public policies and transition, et cetera, but to talk about growth seems taboo. What do you think? Is the technological decrease the future and anyone can take the floor? OK, Melissa, the floor is yours. OK, excuse me, but the third world countries have to grow, especially the social majorities have problems in accessing energy and they have energy poverty and basic needs that are unsatisfying. So the problem with decrease is that it's a theory that applies for some realities, but not for all of them. And what, well, what we try to do in trying to understand that there are different responsibilities really regarding the climate change and this environmental debt linked to the different conditions and starting points we're all in and that the ecological crisis or environmental crisis or what you name it won't affect us the same. We have different responsibilities and different consequences and effects. So in the idea of growth, we have a dimension that is essential. Yes, we need to reduce the social metabolism and energy in terms of energy or fossil fuels using things that become quickly obsolete that are not recycled. But we also have to redistribute the use of resources, energy, and most of the populations that don't have access to a life quality, they have to consume more. And so it's complicated, it's different. I like this perspective because many times we tend to forget this. So it's a good thing that you remind us. So, Lauren, what do you think about this bet on decrease, at least on a side of the world, on a part of the world? I will speak of what I know is the ICT part. I showed in the results that to stay below 1.5 degrees of climate change, ICT already takes a big part of the budget because it's 40%, which is huge. What I would like to say is that there is a do not theory also and you can have, when you are outside the circle of the do not, you are outside of, you are doing how to say this. You take a budget out and bigger than what you have, what you can have to stay in the planetary boundaries. So the outside of the do not is more than the budget and the inside of the do not is less than the budget and with development possible in this limit. So I think this is a theory that it's interesting to look at, especially as that now we can measure quite clearly the impacts of many activities we do have, as we did for the ICT impacts. So I think it would be interesting to use more than the measurements to bring light to a development that would be taking into account the limits, the planetary boundaries and then consider a planification potentially inside the limits. Plan, what do you think? Is it a possible solution? What can we do to keep inside those planetary boundaries? I don't know, I'm always like, but I'm kind of afraid of this idea of like blaming the end user. It's also like, let's not shower longer or whatever and then at the end you understand it's not about you at the end so much but the whole system that is rotten deep under. So in my sense I think that we should try to understand like, as I said, this kind of deep anatomy of all of those systems and I think when we do that we will understand that a lot of CO2 production and a lot of contamination is coming from the process of production and the end user at the end except buying the device. It's just like giving a little amount to that and I'm always like, you know, surprised how we tend not to look deeper into things, for example, and try to understand how, you know, like how many kilograms of lithium do you have in, I don't know, Tesla battery, car battery, but that way it's like 500 kilograms and at the end I think have like 63 kilograms of lithium inside and it being then, you know, sold as some kind of ecological solution to two things. Yeah, I don't know, but I also agree on the idea of like that we are not all in the same, same situation and sometimes I like to think about the idea that maybe, you know, once maybe we are able to quantify amount of CO2 historically, you know, like how much for example, like British Empire was like spending from like beginning of industrial revolution until today, maybe then we can start to charge some kind of historical price, you know, and then we are kind of equal in a way like, you know, like starting point of like how to share this responsibility. Maybe about the end consumer they don't have all the information that we were able to see today about how the manufacturer takes place and the impact so it's very interesting to raise awareness. I think also like it I think it's like a question of shifting and like thinking because like now we are more and more stuck into this like cave, and that is basically like the depends on on many of those systems, you know, and then then the question is like, who have a privilege or who is in position to say okay now I'm not going to use a mobile phone. And many people are not in that position and then that means like, yeah it's a question of like how we are going to deal with our dependency on those systems that we build and yeah. I think it was a difficult answer to look for a specific one and a specific and safe solution. I would say, well, this is the clear path. Alicia was mentioning that we are reaching a limit in the extraction of some minerals. And Alicia, I don't know what you think. Do you think the decrease is a possible way out? I think it's the only way out, not just a way out, right? If you crunch your numbers you can see that we don't have enough resources of all types, starting with water, as Mel mentioned, because not only we will need more water, but because of climate change we have less water availability. So here, the problem is so complex that it will mean that we have to reduce the consumption a lot. And I agree with her that the requirements cannot be the same for all. There has to be a global justice, depending on the way in which we will have to reduce and then the north we will have to reduce way more than in the south. In the south they will have to increase the consumption. But on a planetary level we have to reduce a lot because we cannot continue in the same path. Thank you so much. We have reached the ending of this first session of the cycle about the dark side of the cloud. Maybe there's a light side. We'll see in the next session. So thank you, Ladon, Alicia, Loren, Melissa, for sharing your time with us. I want to thank Transition Verde, the European gas. Next Thursday, please join us. It will be very interesting for a second part of feeding the beast. We'll talk about data energy. If you haven't registered, please do so. Thank you for your participation. See you next time.