Blog by Timothy Workman for Rainforest Action Network, originally posted on The Understory blog.

Global sales of electric vehicles currently account for a quarter of all vehicles sold, but before anyone celebrates this as a victory for environmentalism, it’s worth taking a look under the hood of the electric vehicle industry.

As critics have already noted, current EV batteries and clean energy technologies, like solar panels and wind turbines, are full of nonrenewable resources that rely on extractive processes that cause major social and environmental harm—namely, minerals like lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel.

Our latest report delves into this burgeoning sector and finds that the same big banks handing out billions to Big Oil and the agribusinesses driving deforestation are also pumping hundreds of billions into a 21st-century gold rush for these so-called “transition minerals,” which are destroying forests, contaminating water, and violating peoples’ rights.

Between 2016 and 2024, big banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citi, provided $493 billion in credit to 100 transition mining companies. For a sector where nearly 70% of transition mineral mines overlap Indigenous and peasant lands and 71% are in high-biodiversity regions like Indonesia, Brazil, and the Congo, the social and ecological footprint is massive.

Many of these mining companies have an abhorrent human rights record—since 2010, the transition minerals sector has been connected to 835 recorded allegations of abuse, including land grabs and attacks on environmental defenders.

So what are banks doing about it? Perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re choosing profit over people and planet. Our report delved into the policies of 30 major banks and investors financing the mining sector and we gave them an average environmental and social policy score of just 22% and 19%, respectively. About as failing of a grade as you can get.

While electric cars and “renewable” energy may have lower tailpipe and lifetime emissions than their fossil fuel counterparts, the production of those technologies remains ensconced in structures of social and environmental harm, exacerbated by wealthy institutions exercising minimal oversight over their financing and investment activities to maximize profits at any cost.

Low-carbon technologies are a necessary part of our future, but society must reject business-as-usual in the mining and finance sectors. We need strong financial regulations centering human rights, biodiversity, and ecological limits at every stage of the mineral value chain.

To build a future powered by clean energy, we must first transform how it is financed—with justice as the foundation, not an afterthought.