Speaker 1: Critical minerals are well critical to making electric batteries and
Speaker 1: therefore to decarbonizing the economy, but what are we willing
Speaker 1: to give up to get them? On today's podcast, we
Speaker 1: head up about as far north as you can go
Speaker 1: to look at a mining project that may be sweeping
Speaker 1: away a whole way of life. Hello, and welcome back
Speaker 1: once again to Parts per Billion Environmental podcast from Bloomberg Law.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, David Schultz. So today we have another
Speaker 1: story for you about the trade offs we're going to
Speaker 1: have to make to get the zinc, cobalt, and other
Speaker 1: minerals essential to an electric economy. But in this case,
Speaker 1: the costs aren't necessarily environmental, but more cultural. High up
Speaker 1: in northern Alaska, on a latitude higher up than Iceland
Speaker 1: is Amber Metals Born Night Camp. The company thinks there
Speaker 1: may be a motherload of copper and maybe also a
Speaker 1: lot of critical minerals in this vast, unexplored, often forgotten
Speaker 1: part of the country. But to really figure that out,
Speaker 1: they need a road. Because this camp is so remote
Speaker 1: it's actually not connected to any roads. So Ampler Medals
Speaker 1: has applied to the Interior Department to build a more
Speaker 1: than two hundred mile road to improve access to these
Speaker 1: untapped resources. And while the Department hasn't decided whether to
Speaker 1: okay this yet, the Biden administration has been crystal clear
Speaker 1: that I think solving climate change will involve sourcing a
Speaker 1: lot more of these materials and sourcing them domestically. But
Speaker 1: even though this area is almost totally off the grid,
Speaker 1: there are people living here, tens of thousands of them.
Speaker 1: Native Alaskans have been living off the land here for centuries,
Speaker 1: and many of them fear that road access could pierce
Speaker 1: the fragile and isolated ecosystem that they rely on. Bloomberg laws,
Speaker 1: Bobby McGill was granted a rare opportunity to actually visit
Speaker 1: the Bore Night Camp and see what Ampler Medals is
Speaker 1: up to and to see how the Native villagers live.
Speaker 1: I brought him into the studio to learn about what
Speaker 1: he saw there, and I started by asking him why
Speaker 1: the Alaskan ecosystem is so fragile. Yeah, it's complicated, but
Speaker 1: it's called Arctic amplification. And though there are other factors
Speaker 1: involved and other possible expl nations, scientists generally think it
Speaker 1: boils down to this, which is the global warming is
Speaker 1: quickly melting the Arctic sea ice. And because the Arctic
Speaker 1: sea ice under normal conditions reflects the radiant heat from
Speaker 1: the sun back out into space, um global warming. As
Speaker 1: it melts the sea ice, there's less sea ice to
Speaker 1: radiate that sunlight and the heat back into space, which
Speaker 1: means that the region warms up even more. That makes sense.
Speaker 1: It would be like if you had some sort of
Speaker 1: heat absorbing thing on your roof and that thing was
Speaker 1: slowly shrinking, and as it shrunk, your house got hotter
Speaker 1: or your roof got hotter. That's it, is it? I mean,
Speaker 1: that's it grows over simplification, but is that essentially the
Speaker 1: idea more or less. And you know, it's a big
Speaker 1: deal up there because most of the most of the
Speaker 1: ground up there is frozen all year. When the permac
Speaker 1: permafrost melts, there's a lot of like subsidence in the landscape,
Speaker 1: and it also creates a feedback. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of there's a lot you can talk about there,
Speaker 1: but it's a really big deal up there. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you've never been up there, you don't know what
Speaker 1: to expect. And I didn't really Um, it's it's hard
Speaker 1: to know exactly what it is you're looking at. But
Speaker 1: as you drive around Fairbanks, you you notice that a
Speaker 1: lot of the roads are in kind of bad shape.
Speaker 1: And that's you know, from the beating they take in
Speaker 1: forty below zero winter temperatures. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: subsidence there too, and it it's kind of a bumpy ride.
Speaker 1: So just to clarify what we're talking about here, that
Speaker 1: the roads are cracking and there and are are essentially
Speaker 1: sinking because the ground below them, which is usually frozen,
Speaker 1: is now thawing and is not frozen. Is is that right? Right?
Speaker 1: And so, I mean it's it's it's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons like on the on the north slope of Alaska,
Speaker 1: north of the Brooks Range, you have oil companies needing
Speaker 1: to use chillers to keep the ground, you know, frozen
Speaker 1: beneath their equipment all year. That yeah, and I mean
Speaker 1: that's just wild unto itself, the idea that you would
Speaker 1: need to use you know, machines to chill something that's
Speaker 1: in the Arctic circle essentially a really close to it.
Speaker 1: But let's back up a little bit. You know, we're
Speaker 1: talking about you know, what's going on in Alaska. I
Speaker 1: want to talk about how you got to Alaska, because
Speaker 1: I remember you and I were in a meeting a
Speaker 1: couple of months ago and you said, Hey, I just
Speaker 1: got this call, uh from this mining company. They want
Speaker 1: me to come up to Alaska. Like now, UM, tell
Speaker 1: me about how you wound up there and how this
Speaker 1: all came together. Yeah, So the deal is this, I
Speaker 1: went to I've been wanting to write about the Ambler
Speaker 1: Mining District for a long time, and you know, really
Speaker 1: the only way to to write about it is to
Speaker 1: actually see it. Um, because this place is so remote.
Speaker 1: The only way to actually get into the to the
Speaker 1: mine is or even around the mine for that matter,
Speaker 1: is you know the companys to grant you access. Well,
Speaker 1: their operation there is seasonal, and it turns out that
Speaker 1: I called him up right around the time that they
Speaker 1: were shutting down for the season. So they said, well,
Speaker 1: I would love to have you up here, but you
Speaker 1: gotta you gotta do it next week. And uh, so
Speaker 1: I booked a flight and went. So you flew into
Speaker 1: Anchorage or Fairbanks or where did you use? From DC
Speaker 1: to where? Uh d c to Fairbanks through Seattle and
Speaker 1: uh I jumped on a charter flight to a little
Speaker 1: place called Doll Creek. It's a gravel airstrip about three
Speaker 1: miles or so northwest of Fairbanks. And as you're flying
Speaker 1: between you know, the two places, there's no um, I
Speaker 1: mean you can it's it's a roughly two hour flight.
Speaker 1: You don't see any sort of there's no roads down there,
Speaker 1: there's no power lines, there's it's all wilderness down below.
Speaker 1: So tell me what the accommodations were like here. I
Speaker 1: imagined that. You know, we're not talking Hilton's or Marriott's. No.
Speaker 1: I mean when I say that Bournight is a mining
Speaker 1: exploration camp, it's literally a camp. It's you know, all
Speaker 1: the workers their stay in tents um and there are
Speaker 1: these platform tens. I was a boy Scout when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, and so that makes one, that makes
Speaker 1: one of us. You get, uh, you know, you're familiar
Speaker 1: with what If you ever worked on like a boy
Speaker 1: scout camp staff, you understand what a platform ten is like.
Speaker 1: This is kind of like that, excepted slightly insulated. It
Speaker 1: looks like a space blanket on the inside, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there are a little signs inside warning you
Speaker 1: about bears and whatnot. So um, you know, but it's
Speaker 1: a real tent they had. It's got electricity. They had
Speaker 1: a heater that only that warmed up the tent by
Speaker 1: a couple of degrees. And so one of the guys
Speaker 1: I talked to was Alaska tele Communications Company UM satellite
Speaker 1: Internet repair guy who had flown in to fix the
Speaker 1: satellite internet and which was down. And it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: the internet there. The network was called Morale because they know,
Speaker 1: if you know, workers can't communicate, that's gonna be all yeah, wow, Well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up the folks who work at
Speaker 1: the Mind because I wanted to talk about them. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, it sounds like a lot of the workers
Speaker 1: who work at Bournnite are drawn from the local Native
Speaker 1: villages that are in and around that area. UM. Tell
Speaker 1: me about the relationship between the native communities and this mine.
Speaker 1: So as with everything, UM, in that part of the world,
Speaker 1: things are complicated, right, So a lot of Ambler Metals
Speaker 1: workers are are from the native villages. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean that all the villages up there support the Mind,
Speaker 1: because the issue is that those in favor see the
Speaker 1: jobs that this would create. UM, because other minds in
Speaker 1: the region, the you know, Red Dog Zinc mine in
Speaker 1: northwest Alaska has has generated just tons and tons of
Speaker 1: jobs up there. There are villages scattered all around northern Alaska.
Speaker 1: There there aren't a lot of jobs, if any jobs
Speaker 1: in in these villages, and so you know they rely
Speaker 1: on these minds for um, you know, for for employment. Well,
Speaker 1: let's hear from one of those actual workers themselves, Bobby.
Speaker 1: You spoke with Clara Newland, who uh lives in a
Speaker 1: Native village and works on the Fortnite mine. Here's what
Speaker 1: she had to say about working there local. It's very
Speaker 1: important for our income because we don't have very many
Speaker 1: local jobs available at home. So it's good for us
Speaker 1: most of the people that come up here and work,
Speaker 1: and it's the sacrifice that we make. But good so, uh, Bobby,
Speaker 1: As you just heard Clara say, you know, this is
Speaker 1: a really economically depressed part of the country. It's very rural,
Speaker 1: very sparsely populated. But you also spoke with several other
Speaker 1: people who are villagers who say, no, no, this is
Speaker 1: not economically depressed. We're just kind of off the grid.
Speaker 1: We uh you know, live off the land. We engage
Speaker 1: in subsistence farming and hunting. Can you explain that a
Speaker 1: little bit. Well, that's that perspective. Here's the thing. It's
Speaker 1: sort of both because to give you an idea of
Speaker 1: what of how remote this region is, like Burnit and
Speaker 1: all of these minds are literally hundreds of miles off
Speaker 1: the North American road roadway now work, and so all
Speaker 1: of these villages they're either along rivers and they might
Speaker 1: rely on barges for for supplies if they can't get
Speaker 1: a barge because you know, for all manner of seasonal
Speaker 1: and environmental reasons. You know, they rely on on air
Speaker 1: travel as the only way in and out. So these
Speaker 1: are these are very traditional communities. They literally live off
Speaker 1: the land in part because they have to, but also
Speaker 1: because it's it's the basis of their culture. I think
Speaker 1: one thing that really came through in your story for
Speaker 1: me was just the ambivalence that a lot of these
Speaker 1: people feel about the mind, and specifically about the road
Speaker 1: that would connect the mind to the rest of the
Speaker 1: road network. Uh. You spoke with Angel Stickman, who is
Speaker 1: a former resident of Thesetive villages we're talking about now
Speaker 1: lives in Fairbanks, and she said, you know what, living
Speaker 1: in a subsistence kind of fashion one way of fighting
Speaker 1: off inflation. Looking at the example of inflation, I feel
Speaker 1: like people who live in rural religions are the luckiest,
Speaker 1: and we'll survive because they got their fish, they got
Speaker 1: their water, they got their moose, they got their cariboo,
Speaker 1: they got their berries. And here in Fairbanks it's like
Speaker 1: I'm depending on the stores. Right For the last like
Speaker 1: three months, I've been living on only chicken and beef. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I heard that a lot from folks um. You know,
Speaker 1: they were recounting stories about the Great Depression and the
Speaker 1: two thousand eight recession um, and they said, you know,
Speaker 1: we didn't even know that was going on because you know,
Speaker 1: we've we've got all the resources we need up here,
Speaker 1: they said. You know, the the issue is that if
Speaker 1: you grant greater access to mines up there by building
Speaker 1: a two eleven mile road, you're you're gonna damage the
Speaker 1: subsistence economy so to speak, in which you know, which
Speaker 1: which relies on you know, these caribou herds and other
Speaker 1: wildlife that migrate across the Arctic, and uh, if you
Speaker 1: do anything to damage these intact ecosystems, it really really
Speaker 1: damages the ability, you know, for for these tribes to
Speaker 1: to be able to sustain themselves. One of the most
Speaker 1: kind of compelling pieces of your stories when you spoke
Speaker 1: with Luke Wood, who is another Native, asking who does
Speaker 1: work at at boornight Um and let's hear from him.
Speaker 1: He's talking about how the difference between his generation and
Speaker 1: his father's generation about their views on modernization and substitutence. O.
Speaker 1: Our elders are like, no, but my generation, younger generation,
Speaker 1: for employment, is for it. If my father is a
Speaker 1: life he would be against it because he is a
Speaker 1: man of the land. He totally is a hunter subsistence.
Speaker 1: He provides for my mom's side of family and other
Speaker 1: families for subsistence moose, caribou, bear, fish, um snug like
Speaker 1: where people that are from the cities where they can
Speaker 1: go fred Meyers and cars and everything's already prepackaged six
Speaker 1: dollars upon them to or whatever. So it all depends
Speaker 1: on who you talk to. It's you can hear the
Speaker 1: ambivalence in what he's saying there in that he thinks that,
Speaker 1: you know, subsistence is great, but ultimately you know it's
Speaker 1: better to have a job that pays a salary. Right,
Speaker 1: And he was pretty clear, actually he Um, of all
Speaker 1: the people I talked to, he was he was the
Speaker 1: one who who stated in the in the clearest terms
Speaker 1: that you know, the tradeoff is worth it. He thinks
Speaker 1: and he said that he thinks that, you know, this
Speaker 1: is the subsistence lifestyle is on life support for a
Speaker 1: variety of reasons, and uh, you know, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: a no brainer for him anyway to you know, eventually
Speaker 1: be able to go to a grocery store and get
Speaker 1: your food rather than have to hunt for it. But
Speaker 1: that is not the predominant view up there. I mean,
Speaker 1: these folks are are fighting for their culture, they're fighting
Speaker 1: for their their way of life. But finally, let's talk
Speaker 1: about something that we've talked about previously on this podcast
Speaker 1: with other minds. Um, just the idea that you know,
Speaker 1: the people who are opposing this are sort of out
Speaker 1: on a limb here. And what I mean by that
Speaker 1: is that you know, the Governor of Alaska, who you
Speaker 1: spoke with, is in favor of building this road. The
Speaker 1: White House has not come out in favor or against
Speaker 1: the road yet, but the President has made very clear
Speaker 1: that he is a big fan of mining for minerals
Speaker 1: that would go into electric batteries and e vs. If
Speaker 1: you're trying to block this, who's who's on your side?
Speaker 1: Are you? Are you alone? Well, you know, the White
Speaker 1: House UM is trying to have it both ways in
Speaker 1: some in some ways. If you look at the Arctic
Speaker 1: Strategy that it came out with UM back in October,
Speaker 1: it says that it it supports domestic minerals production and
Speaker 1: specifically in Alaska, except that it wants it to be
Speaker 1: done in an environmentally sensitive way, in a way that
Speaker 1: does not harm native ways of life. And so you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of caveats to support to this right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the question that everyone has is
Speaker 1: that is that even possible? And it's a good question. UM.
Speaker 1: If you talk to environmental groups, they basically told me, well,
Speaker 1: you know, there are other ways to get these metals.
Speaker 1: I mean there's we need to start you know, recycling
Speaker 1: our our minerals and um, you know, diving into landfills
Speaker 1: to find precious metals there. Well, I get the sense
Speaker 1: that you know, while that may produce some of the minerals,
Speaker 1: we need to build these batteries and you know, ultimately
Speaker 1: decarbonized that there could be you know, huge amounts in Alaska. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they know that there that there are critical
Speaker 1: minerals up there. They don't know exactly how much how
Speaker 1: many there are, in part because it's a state that
Speaker 1: is so large and so unexplored. It hasn't been fully
Speaker 1: mapped for critical minerals yet. The BIDE administration is working
Speaker 1: on that. They're going to spend you know, the better
Speaker 1: part of the next decade and you know, on a
Speaker 1: on a mapping project for this. But they do know that,
Speaker 1: you know, there are critical minerals deposits at in the
Speaker 1: Ambler Mining District, which is part of a two hundred
Speaker 1: mile wide mineral belt. Um, there's a you know, the
Speaker 1: largest graphite find in in the country is up there
Speaker 1: at UH in western Alaska. Graph Fight One is a
Speaker 1: company that's developing that. You know, there's the existing zinc
Speaker 1: mine that's in northwest Alaska, which is you know, slated
Speaker 1: to be expanded. So, um, you know there's a lot
Speaker 1: of potential there. Uh, there's just a lot of excitement
Speaker 1: mainly because you know, they know that there are these large,
Speaker 1: large deposits up there, and um, there's there's likely to
Speaker 1: be a lot more to be found, all Right, well
Speaker 1: that was Bobby McGill fully thought out after his return
Speaker 1: from Alaska um and talking about what's going on up there. Bobby,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for talking to this. This is great.
Speaker 1: You bet anytime. And that's it for today's episode of
Speaker 1: Parts for a Billion. If you want more environmental news,
Speaker 1: check us out on Twitter. We use the handle at
Speaker 1: environment I'm at David B. Schultz if you want to
Speaker 1: talk to me directly. Today's episode of Parts for Avillion
Speaker 1: was produced by myself, David Jolts, with help from Greg
Speaker 1: Henderson and Jessica Coombs. Partical Billion was created by Jessa
Speaker 1: Coombs and Rachel Dagle and is edited by Zack Sherwood
Speaker 1: and Chuck McCutcheon. Our executive producer is Josh Block. Thanks
Speaker 1: everyone for listening. An individual's race should not be used
Speaker 1: to help him or harm him in his life's endeavors.
Speaker 1: A pair of lawsuits has made its way to the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court, and the decision could dramatically change just who
Speaker 1: gets into which college. Bloom is effectively using the Asian
Speaker 1: community as pawns. Every lawsuit needs a villain to mask
Speaker 1: an anti black and anti Latino agenda. Does this demoralized me, No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't demoralize me. This season on Uncommon Law will
Speaker 1: explore the arguments and the pole driving this latest battle
Speaker 1: over affirmative action. Can the Constitution be used to remedy
Speaker 1: society's ills? I'm the only person in class, must raise
Speaker 1: my hand and say, okay, well, actually, here's how this
Speaker 1: affects people that look like me. Does the Fourteenth Amendments
Speaker 1: Equal Protection Clause prohibit all discrimination based on race. You
Speaker 1: let somebody in because of their race, you're keeping somebody
Speaker 1: else out because of their race. There might have been
Speaker 1: two or three Latinos, including me, and so somehow that's
Speaker 1: too much. Somehow that goes too far. It's hard not
Speaker 1: to take that very personally. Coming October, part one of
Speaker 1: a three part series on affirmative action. What's being decided
Speaker 1: is whether black and brown people are going to be
Speaker 1: excluded in significant numbers and only an uncommon law from
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Industry Group