Robert Friedland arrived fresh off a flight from Mongolia just in time to be the last keynote speaker of The Northern Miner's Canadian Mining Symposium in London, U.K., Oct. 12-13.
In no-holds-barred remarks that covered everything from climate change and the role of miners in the green energy transition to the recent outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, the famed mining financier and founder of Ivanhoe Mines pledged to be completely honest with the audience of mining investors.
"Since I'm old and I'm cranky, I might as well be a truth teller," he said. "The first thing I want to tell you is that the current generation of batteries is gonna be toast. It's good for another three or four years, but there's a whole new generation of batteries coming, so if you can't look forward in technology and figure out what these things are going to be made out of, you don't know what to start mining now."
Friedland also discussed the dangers of an increasingly polarized and divided world - economically, philosophically and otherwise as half of humanity is bent on war and the other half on fighting climate change.
"We're right on the verge of destroying ourselves as a species," he said. "We really need to calm down this dialogue because we're balkanizing the world economy into two very apparent opposing camps."
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