Speaker 1: Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today. I want
Speaker 1: to talk about something that has been getting a lot
Speaker 1: of attention lately and is kind of rife with misinformation.
Speaker 1: That is the environmental impact of the electrify Everything movement.
Speaker 1: This is something that a lot of climate folks have
Speaker 1: been really hesitant to talk about, or even have been
Speaker 1: kind of defensive about, because they don't want people talking
Speaker 1: as though renewables have the exact same impact as fossil fuels,
Speaker 1: or this idea that they'll be even worse, or that
Speaker 1: they're not an improvement. All of these our talking points
Speaker 1: that several folks on the right are starting to push.
Speaker 1: You've got Ted.
Speaker 2: Cruz ringing hands about child labor in cobalt mines, for example.
Speaker 2: You've got a lot of pundits who carry water for
Speaker 2: the fossil fuel industry claiming that the land required for
Speaker 2: both mining and installing renewables, the materials required, all of
Speaker 2: that is going to be a bigger environmental problem than
Speaker 2: drilling for oil.
Speaker 1: That is not true. However, there are definitely impacts, and
Speaker 1: one of the key ways that we can minimize those
Speaker 1: impacts is to curb energy consumption across the board. We
Speaker 1: are at this moment right now that's very pivotal, where
Speaker 1: the US in particular is trying to plan out an
Speaker 1: energy transition, and instead of going, oh, no, electric is great,
Speaker 1: we don't need to think about this stuff, it's actually
Speaker 1: the perfect time to figure out how to minimize the
Speaker 1: environmental impact of our energy system. One way to do
Speaker 1: that is to curb consumption. That is not something that
Speaker 1: any energy company wants to talk about, it's not something
Speaker 1: that most American capitalists want to talk about, but it
Speaker 1: is absolutely necessary for systemically addressing the problem of climate change.
Speaker 1: I wrote about this recently in the Intercept, and for
Speaker 1: that piece I interviewed a really interesting researcher on this subject,
Speaker 1: the a Rio Francos. She recently put out a report
Speaker 1: for the Climate and Community Project entitled Achieving zero emissions
Speaker 1: with More Mobility and Less Mining. That report concluded that
Speaker 1: even relatively small, pretty easy to achieve shifts in our behavior,
Speaker 1: like reducing the size of cars and their batteries, could
Speaker 1: deliver big returns a forty two percent reduction in the
Speaker 1: amount of lithium needed in the US, even if the
Speaker 1: number of cars on the road and the frequency with
Speaker 1: which people drive stayed the same. I asked Rio Francos
Speaker 1: to talk me through her report and all of its
Speaker 1: very interesting findings, and that conversation is coming up after
Speaker 1: this quick break.
Speaker 3: I am Theoreo Francos, and I'm an associate professor of
Speaker 3: political science at Providence College and also a member of
Speaker 3: the Climate and Community Project.
Speaker 1: Can I have you, And I know this is annoying
Speaker 1: because you just wrote an eighty plus page report on it,
Speaker 1: but can I have you just give kind of a
Speaker 1: brief summary of what this report is and kind of
Speaker 1: what you're putting forth in it.
Speaker 3: You know, maybe I'll start with like the origins of
Speaker 3: why we even thought to create this report, because I
Speaker 3: think it helps listeners understand what the state of the
Speaker 3: kind of policy and academic conversation is on these topics
Speaker 3: and what some of the gaps are. So many years ago,
Speaker 3: in early twenty nineteen, when I was first in Chile
Speaker 3: researching the social and environmental impacts of lithium mining there,
Speaker 3: and Chile is the world's number two producer of lithium,
Speaker 3: and also some of the kind of contentious politics around
Speaker 3: extraction of this mineral, I started to kind of think,
Speaker 3: you know, would it matter in terms of how much
Speaker 3: lithium was needed, how the sort of global energy transition
Speaker 3: is designed, or how the US energy transition is designed. Right,
Speaker 3: are there futures in which less lithium and less of
Speaker 3: these other transition minerals are required than some of the
Speaker 3: most alarming kind of reports and predictions I began to
Speaker 3: see from the International Energy Agency and then the World
Speaker 3: Bank and multiple other forecasting agencies which were and remain
Speaker 3: pretty alarming in terms of how much mining they are
Speaker 3: predicting will occur or be demanded. And I started to
Speaker 3: kind of look for that research. And at the same time,
Speaker 3: I was doing a lot of climate advocacy work, a
Speaker 3: lot of Green New Deal organizing, and so I was
Speaker 3: thinking a lot about an urgent and rapid and just
Speaker 3: energy transition in the US. But I was kind of
Speaker 3: thinking about both ends of the supply chain at once,
Speaker 3: Like here I am in Chile and the Atacama Desert
Speaker 3: seeing these mining related harms, and then there I go
Speaker 3: in the US kind of advocating for a rapid transition,
Speaker 3: Like how do I align these two goals? And is
Speaker 3: there a way to kind of have a less extractive
Speaker 3: energy transition? And the answer was that research didn't exist,
Speaker 3: at least not for the US transportation sector. Right, And
Speaker 3: each year that went on up until the present, up
Speaker 3: until the launch of our report, that research still didn't exist.
Speaker 3: I saw forecast after forecast that assumed basically a binary
Speaker 3: of the future. Right, Either we stay with the fossil
Speaker 3: fuel status quo and the existential crisis that that is
Speaker 3: causing for the planet and all of its people, or
Speaker 3: we transition to an electrified, renewably powered future. But that
Speaker 3: doesn't really change anything about how these sectors or economic
Speaker 3: activities are organized. Right, So it's binary. It's either fossil
Speaker 3: fuel or kind of electrified version of the status quo,
Speaker 3: and there was very little research sort of in between
Speaker 3: those two or that mapped out or sort of broke down.
Speaker 3: Let's look at the electrified future and say that there
Speaker 3: are multiple ways to design it, with implications for all
Speaker 3: sorts of things, including how quickly advanced towards our climate goals,
Speaker 3: including how equitably we do so, and including these kind
Speaker 3: of supply chain considerations that we also bring to the
Speaker 3: table in this report. So, you know, with that kind
Speaker 3: of frustration, but also that kind of continued curiosity about like,
Speaker 3: is there another path forward that's not currently being modeled.
Speaker 3: We set out to create that model and kind of
Speaker 3: actually have a data driven analysis of the very different pathways,
Speaker 3: all of which are zero emissions, all of which are electrified,
Speaker 3: all of which are renewably powered, but very tremendously in
Speaker 3: the specifics in ways that, as I said, have these
Speaker 3: kind of broader implications. And to combine that with more
Speaker 3: qualitative research on the harms of mining, on some of
Speaker 3: the supply chain bottlenecks and constraints that we see on
Speaker 3: the horizon, and to produce something that we hope is
Speaker 3: kind of useful to advocates across the supply chain, you know,
Speaker 3: whether it's climate transit, folks that are concerned about mining impacts,
Speaker 3: whatever the issue at stake is. I think that there's
Speaker 3: a way to align them if we think holistically about
Speaker 3: the design of the energy transition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, And I think that one of the things
Speaker 1: that really jumped out to me in this report was,
Speaker 1: you know, again like kind of along the lines of
Speaker 1: this binary that you're pointing out. I think people are
Speaker 1: often like, Okay, we can either electrify cars or have
Speaker 1: fossil fuel cars, and that's it. You know, there's been
Speaker 1: very little conversation about moving away from car dependency in general,
Speaker 1: and very little policy movement on that front. I feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, every once in a while, Elon Musk will
Speaker 1: like pooh pooh the idea of public transit, and we'll
Speaker 1: get a little bit of like a Twitter dispat going
Speaker 1: about it, and like there's I don't know, there just
Speaker 1: hasn't been as much conversation about that as you might
Speaker 1: expect when we're talking about decarbonizing transport. So I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if I could have you kind of map out these
Speaker 1: three different or four different scenarios that you in the
Speaker 1: report and kind of walk people through what would be
Speaker 1: required to.
Speaker 3: Do each of those.
Speaker 1: I was really struck by the fact that, like, even
Speaker 1: if nothing else changes and we just have some policy
Speaker 1: around the size of EV batteries, for example, that would
Speaker 1: deliver a pretty major reduction in these impacts that you're
Speaker 1: talking about.
Speaker 3: So the way that we design our report it is
Speaker 3: kind of interesting, and I think again it draws out
Speaker 3: these themes of connecting the dots kind of across the
Speaker 3: supply chain. We first kind of sketch out what are
Speaker 3: different possible zero missions transportation futures, Like, if we look
Speaker 3: ahead to the US in twenty fifty and assume that
Speaker 3: our transportation is one hundred percent without carbon emissions, what
Speaker 3: would that actually concretely look like. And we sketch out
Speaker 3: four different scenarios, again, all of which eliminate emissions, but
Speaker 3: they differ and in some cases pretty dramatically, on a
Speaker 3: variety of parameters. So the first scenario, as you kind
Speaker 3: of suggested, and as I was hinting at earlier, just
Speaker 3: keeps everything the same except electrifize it. Right, So we
Speaker 3: have the same patterns of car usage and car dependency
Speaker 3: and vehicle ownership. We also have the same kind of
Speaker 3: land use patterns of that suburban sprawl that itself incentivizes
Speaker 3: car use or even requires it. And so we change
Speaker 3: basically nothing about American society, built environment, infrastructure, but we
Speaker 3: swap out ice vehicles for evs, and we do so
Speaker 3: in a growing manner over time, until we get to
Speaker 3: twenty fifty. That scenario one electrified status quo. We have
Speaker 3: three others, and what they do is kind of progressively
Speaker 3: in a stepwise fashion, add in more changes. Some of
Speaker 3: them are not huge changes, some of them are more dramatic,
Speaker 3: and so it gives us a real range and as
Speaker 3: I said, gets into the black box of electrification and
Speaker 3: opens it up and reveals it to be a whole
Speaker 3: host of choices. So in scenario two, what we look
Speaker 3: at is shifting mode share and that's just a fancy
Speaker 3: technical term for what percentage of people are using what
Speaker 3: types of transportation for their trips. You know, am I
Speaker 3: using a bus or am I using a bike? Or
Speaker 3: am I you know which mode of transportation? Or am
Speaker 3: I using a car? Right? And so we move people
Speaker 3: so that more of those trips are being taken in
Speaker 3: non car options. But we still have cars, we still
Speaker 3: have evs, but we start to nudge people towards buses
Speaker 3: and cycling and walking.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: In the third scenario, we do more of that. So
Speaker 3: we do more of that mode shift towards transit, cycling,
Speaker 3: and walking. We also densify metropolitan regions. Right. We see
Speaker 3: a lot of sprawl in ways that are very out
Speaker 3: of line with like the rest of the world. Like
Speaker 3: when we move especially to the edges of a city
Speaker 3: or to those first string suburbs and then out to
Speaker 3: the excervs, like the distances just get really big, and
Speaker 3: we don't even have to go to rural areas to
Speaker 3: see those that sprawl or that distance. And so we
Speaker 3: densify things a bit so that the distances are shorter,
Speaker 3: and those changes also get accompanied by a decrease in
Speaker 3: how many people own vehicles, right, so that scenario three
Speaker 3: more of a mode shift, slightly denser metropolitan regions, and
Speaker 3: lower levels of car ownership. Scenario four is like our
Speaker 3: turbocharged in a positive sense scenario, right, our most ambitious one.
Speaker 3: We do all of those things, but more we say, like,
Speaker 3: you know, what if we really brought mode shares in
Speaker 3: line with like the places in the world where folks
Speaker 3: use like the most transit or cycle the most, Right,
Speaker 3: what if we densify even more, right, or bring vehicle
Speaker 3: ownership rates down even more? And I just want to
Speaker 3: flag that even in scenario four, there are lots of evs, right,
Speaker 3: you know, and I'm aware of, you know, the debates
Speaker 3: around this topic, right, So I just want to flag
Speaker 3: that we don't actually eliminate electric vehicles in any of
Speaker 3: our scenarios. We just play around with getting people to
Speaker 3: take trips through different modes, making those distances shorter and
Speaker 3: discouraging car ownership, which tends to happen when there are
Speaker 3: other modes available and also when the distances are shorter. Right,
Speaker 3: can you talk through what the obstacles to those kinds
Speaker 3: of shifts are? You know, what are the things stopping either.
Speaker 1: The options being made available or people availing themselves of
Speaker 1: those options.
Speaker 3: Right? I might, if you don't mind, just slightly personalize
Speaker 3: this because I have experienced this firsthand where I know
Speaker 3: that in the US, and especially in auto industry advertising
Speaker 3: to consumers, cars are very associated with freedom.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: You know, this is like the American dream is like
Speaker 3: you drive anywhere everyone owns their own car. But you know,
Speaker 3: for me, when I look at the transportation system and
Speaker 3: also my own interaction with it in my own life,
Speaker 3: I expect he instance is like a lack of choices,
Speaker 3: like a lack of freedom. Right. Like I have lived
Speaker 3: in places where it was not only not required, but
Speaker 3: actually more annoying to have a car than to use
Speaker 3: a bike or bus or a subway or something else.
Speaker 3: And I now live in a place where the opposite
Speaker 3: is true. I live in a city which is Providence,
Speaker 3: Rhode Island. But it's very hard to just live your
Speaker 3: daily life and be a full member of society without
Speaker 3: owning a car. And it's actually the first place where
Speaker 3: I got a driver's license. I think I was thirty
Speaker 3: one or thirty two. In other places I lived, as
Speaker 3: I said, in the US and elsewhere in the world,
Speaker 3: it was just not a thing. You didn't have to
Speaker 3: own a car. I grew up in New York City,
Speaker 3: so I know I'm weird, but I more kind of
Speaker 3: just want to say that, like I moved to a
Speaker 3: place that, again was an urban environment, and there are
Speaker 3: buses and people, there are some bike lanes a little bit,
Speaker 3: but it was impossible for me to commute to work
Speaker 3: and to do the rest of my daily life stuff
Speaker 3: without a car. I had this exact experience.
Speaker 1: I lived in San Francisco and Oakland forever, and then
Speaker 1: I moved to the mountains, and like, there's theoretically a bus,
Speaker 1: but it's like there's like a two hour spectrum of
Speaker 1: time when it may or may not come.
Speaker 3: So you know, if you have like a normal.
Speaker 1: Job where you have to be anywhere at a particular time,
Speaker 1: that's not going to work for you.
Speaker 3: And that's the only option, you know, Yeah, I think
Speaker 3: that it's totally understandable to me that the vast majority
Speaker 3: of Americans use cars to get around because they live
Speaker 3: in context, even some urban context, but especially suburban and
Speaker 3: obviously especially rural context, where there really is no other option.
Speaker 3: And so I neither blame individuals for those choices, nor
Speaker 3: do I see our current transportation system as a paragon
Speaker 3: of freedom, right, especially when we consider how financially burdensome
Speaker 3: cars are for peorn working class people. Right, it's a
Speaker 3: real you know, it's just an expense, and it's a
Speaker 3: set of annoyances of maintaining increasingly old cars and filling
Speaker 3: them with gas that's increasingly expensive, right, right, And you know,
Speaker 3: there's a real affordability concern around electric vehicles, which obviously
Speaker 3: federal subsidies are meant to address. I don't oppose that,
Speaker 3: but I do think that it raises the question of
Speaker 3: is there another path forward? Not that fully eliminates electric vehicles.
Speaker 3: I don't see that as feasible in any like near
Speaker 3: medium term, but that kind of gives them the right
Speaker 3: proportion in a broader transportation system that involves other options
Speaker 3: and other possibilities for people to move around that are
Speaker 3: more equitable, more affordable, maybe even free if we look
Speaker 3: into experiments and like the fair free buses popping up
Speaker 3: in some cities that are more active like biking and
Speaker 3: walking and good for physical and mental health in that way.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a whole host of benefits that a
Speaker 3: company just again not eliminating cars, but bringing them down
Speaker 3: to size and having other modes of transportation available to
Speaker 3: people and sort of creating different types of street scapes
Speaker 3: and land uses around that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, what are the forces that are pushing against that,
Speaker 1: because I feel like most people, average Americans, are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be great if I had a cheap and
Speaker 1: easy way to get around.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's a lot of kind of political and economic
Speaker 3: interactions at a variety of scales of our government and economy. Right,
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that we could go back in
Speaker 3: the early twentieth century and look at what were some
Speaker 3: critical decisions that were made that kind of put us
Speaker 3: on this path dependent which is Scott of course like
Speaker 3: much exacerbated and the sort of post World War boom
Speaker 3: and the sort of great acceleration of the nineteen seventies. Right,
Speaker 3: we could look at all these critical moments where it's
Speaker 3: often a confluence of lobbying efforts by some combination of
Speaker 3: the fossil fuel or auto industry in some cases specifically
Speaker 3: to dismantle what prevailed in a prior era of like
Speaker 3: streetcars in downtown urban areas, right that weren't some cases
Speaker 3: eliminated to make more room for cars or to make
Speaker 3: wider avenues, you know, the neighborhoods that were destroyed by highways,
Speaker 3: the whole emergence and very high levels of government and
Speaker 3: investment in the interstate highway system, the sort of declining
Speaker 3: investment on the other hand for public transit authorities and
Speaker 3: for the commuter rail systems, and let's not even get
Speaker 3: into Amtrak sort of state of affairs. Right, So you know,
Speaker 3: I don't have a conspiratorial worldview, though some times it
Speaker 3: could be tempting, right, Yeah, But there are a lot
Speaker 3: of decisions that took place at relatively high levels of
Speaker 3: power authority and sort of financial investment and resource allocation
Speaker 3: that in combination and at critical junctures of US history
Speaker 3: where we see these inflection points that kind of both
Speaker 3: put us initially on a path of car dependency and
Speaker 3: then reinforce that over time. And my concern and just
Speaker 3: to sort of close this point out is that we
Speaker 3: are at such a critical juncture, you know, between the
Speaker 3: sort of escalating climate crisis and the ways that that
Speaker 3: is destabilizing people around the world and in the United States,
Speaker 3: right on the one hand, and the other hand, this
Speaker 3: exciting and very important opportunity to totally change the energetic
Speaker 3: foundations of the world, right, like to move away from
Speaker 3: fossil fuels once and for all, and to go, you know,
Speaker 3: to power our societies through renewable energy. But we're at
Speaker 3: a critical juncture in terms of specifically how that renewable
Speaker 3: energy transition is designed, who the winners and losers are,
Speaker 3: what decisions made around certain trade offs right in the
Speaker 3: sort of policy and resource decisions. So I'm worried that
Speaker 3: this moment, which could if we think about it, critically
Speaker 3: organize around it, and advocate for it, maybe put us
Speaker 3: on a slightly less car dependent path, right and use
Speaker 3: this as a moment to create a different kind of
Speaker 3: infrastructure of transportation, will instead reinforce not only car dependency itself,
Speaker 3: but with the idea that like evs as an individual
Speaker 3: technology are the panacea, right, but actually reinforce some of
Speaker 3: the worst trends within a car dependent status quo. And
Speaker 3: I specifically am thinking about gargantuan cars with gargantuine batteries,
Speaker 3: which actually take us further away from.
Speaker 1: Communicals right which we're seeing like an explosion of in
Speaker 1: the last year or so.
Speaker 3: I feel like it's like the EV truck and the
Speaker 3: just so many of the Super.
Speaker 1: Bowl ads last year were for these like oversized evs.
Speaker 3: Oh God, why. There are reasons, terrible reasons, bad reasons
Speaker 3: like bad faith reasons, and more understandable reasons that this
Speaker 3: trend is happening and it is a real trend. We
Speaker 3: currently US average battery sizes for electric vehicles are like
Speaker 3: double where they were a decade ago, and also double
Speaker 3: like the global average, and so they're really on their
Speaker 3: own path right now. They are just getting larger and
Speaker 3: larger all of those. Also, it's worth noting the larger
Speaker 3: the battery, the more raw materials. And we'll get into
Speaker 3: in a moment, like what our findings were with different
Speaker 3: you know how much lithium would be required by these
Speaker 3: different scenarios. But you know, definitely larger battery means more
Speaker 3: lithium and more of anything else else that goes into
Speaker 3: that battery. It also, by the way, means more expensive.
Speaker 3: I think the e hummers like one hundred and ten
Speaker 3: thousand dollars. It's so expensive that it doesn't even qualify
Speaker 3: for the IRA subsidies, which max out at eighty thousand
Speaker 3: for an E suv, so they're not affordable. They're very heavy.
Speaker 3: They're even heavier than the equivalent like a gas guzzler
Speaker 3: suv because the battery is so heavy, which poses safety
Speaker 3: risks to pedestrians and other drivers. So there's like they're
Speaker 3: wrong on all counts. The real reason I think they're
Speaker 3: being pushed is because the auto industry has a massive
Speaker 3: need for new financial investment in retooling all of its
Speaker 3: factories to be to create evs instead of ice vehicles,
Speaker 3: and they want a profitable sales item. And as we know,
Speaker 3: just like with gas guzzling SUVs, e SUVs have really
Speaker 3: like wide profit margins, like they're really profitable compared to
Speaker 3: more compact cars. So that's their obvious interest, and then
Speaker 3: they sell this as consumers are demanding it. Now that's
Speaker 3: less clear to me because of how tightly connected consumer
Speaker 3: preferences are with fossil fuel and auto industry advertising. But
Speaker 3: you know, to the extent that consumers want these, I think,
Speaker 3: you know, there are different reasons we could get into
Speaker 3: sort of like toxic masculinity stuff, but to just put
Speaker 3: that aside, like, I think the most valid reason that
Speaker 3: a consumer would want a large vehicle, aside from if
Speaker 3: they're like a construction contractor or something, is that they're
Speaker 3: concerned about range. Right, they think a larger battery is true,
Speaker 3: we'll get them more range. We'll get them to three
Speaker 3: hundred miles right on a charge. And we have a
Speaker 3: really insufficient charging network in the US, so that that
Speaker 3: is real, especially for folks again and those really sprawly
Speaker 3: rural and suburban areas and excerbs where you know you
Speaker 3: might be going long distances between a charging station. Of course,
Speaker 3: most folks are taking really short trips on average, so
Speaker 3: it's more of a mental anxiety than a sort of
Speaker 3: real one, if that makes sense. But you know, the
Speaker 3: way we address that is through thinking about charging stations,
Speaker 3: through thinking also about density and the distances that folks
Speaker 3: I'm traveling, rather than filling that gap with an e hummer,
Speaker 3: which is just not a rational way to fill that
Speaker 3: social need.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like the automotive life Bobby and industry
Speaker 1: kind of in general gets less attention than the fossil
Speaker 1: fuel guys in all of this, and is that fair?
Speaker 1: I see so much more on the oil companies, but
Speaker 1: that's also because of the work I'm doing. So I'm
Speaker 1: just I don't know if it seems to you like
Speaker 1: there's an adequate amount of attention on the way that
Speaker 1: the automotive industry works to shape policies and market preferences
Speaker 1: and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: I don't think there is enough. And it's a really
Speaker 3: important industry to look at both historically and its role
Speaker 3: and as I said, lobbying to dismantle other transportation options.
Speaker 3: So we should have that critical historical lens and how
Speaker 3: deeply intertwined its interests have been with the fossil fuel
Speaker 3: industry and fossil capital. Right, So that's another lens, right,
Speaker 3: it's sort of approximate to your own work. And then
Speaker 3: on the other hand, how they alongside mining companies, some
Speaker 3: of which by the way, are like coal companies too.
Speaker 3: I mean, these mega mining companies mine in multiple including
Speaker 3: in fossil fuel sectors, and so now mining companies and
Speaker 3: auto companies are literally and this is no exaggeration. You
Speaker 3: can go to any of their websites investor relation communicats,
Speaker 3: press releases and see how they're setting themselves up as
Speaker 3: like climate saviors, like the auto industry with the mining
Speaker 3: industry is going to save us from the climate crisis
Speaker 3: that in a deep way the mining industry qua its
Speaker 3: role in fossil fuel extraction, and the auto industry as
Speaker 3: like the main consumer good aside from the power sector
Speaker 3: that uses fossil fuels, Like these are the culprits, not
Speaker 3: the saviors, right, And I don't think we should be
Speaker 3: designing an energy transition or envisioning one in which these
Speaker 3: two industries have as large and sort of strategic roles
Speaker 3: as they currently do. And we should be sort of
Speaker 3: thinking about, like, you know, again, what were the causes
Speaker 3: of the climate crisis. What would a society as zero
Speaker 3: emission society look like that's equitable and just, and like,
Speaker 3: what role then should technologies like lithium batteries, electric vehicles
Speaker 3: and the mind materials that furnish them play in that
Speaker 3: rather than kind of assume, as I worry that some
Speaker 3: colleagues in the climate sort of world are doing, is
Speaker 3: that any new lithium mind built is like climate action,
Speaker 3: or any EV sold is climate action when we know
Speaker 3: that some many people buying evs it's their third car
Speaker 3: and we don't even know if it's replacing the use
Speaker 3: of their gas. I mean, the data is still in
Speaker 3: progress there, right, But it's not the same to buy
Speaker 3: an EV as to bring down emissions. Right. We have
Speaker 3: to evaluate those separately and see how they relate to
Speaker 3: one another. While I'm absolutely in favor of electrifying transportation
Speaker 3: one hundred percent, and evs are going to play a
Speaker 3: role there, I just think we need to disentangle, like
Speaker 3: our goal is confronting the climate crisis and politically confronting
Speaker 3: and economically confronting the actors that caused it, and that
Speaker 3: should be our kind of horizon and our framework for
Speaker 3: what specific policies or practices we advocate for. Yeah, the
Speaker 3: thing I kind of come back to over and over
Speaker 3: again is that just replacing the energy source is not
Speaker 3: ever going to be enough. There needs to be a
Speaker 3: different decision making free work. We can't keep.
Speaker 1: Evaluating decisions in the context of how little change does
Speaker 1: this require of people, or how little change does this require.
Speaker 3: Of companies or whatever. And you mentioned Chile before.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I've been looking at is
Speaker 1: rights of nature as sort of an example of a
Speaker 1: different type of decision making framework that just prioritizes different
Speaker 1: things than you know, corporate profits or you know, lack
Speaker 1: of discomfort for consumers. I'm curious what you think about
Speaker 1: the shift that is happening in some Latin American countries
Speaker 1: towards that and whether it is one of the ways
Speaker 1: that people could start to look at. Okay, what does
Speaker 1: a different decision making framework look like?
Speaker 3: For sure? No, I'm so glad you asked about that,
Speaker 3: because I think that, you know, first of all, in
Speaker 3: and of itself, it's a very interesting legal innovation that's
Speaker 3: been adopted, as you said, in several Latin American countries
Speaker 3: and constitutions, in ordinary law and regulations, and increasing numbers
Speaker 3: of court cases that have been one on nature's behalf
Speaker 3: and so a whole interesting topic in and of itself.
Speaker 3: But just to zoom out a little bit, you know,
Speaker 3: I think that I'm a little biased in terms of
Speaker 3: both family background and also my research area being Latin
Speaker 3: America for so long, But I do think Latin America
Speaker 3: really shows some of the most both harmful but also
Speaker 3: progressive and just and innovative, like instantiations of both attractive
Speaker 3: sectors and potential ways that humans and nature can relate
Speaker 3: to one another, like the whole range is there, like,
Speaker 3: you know, just to make it really stark, like, On
Speaker 3: the one hand, Latin America is the most dangerous place
Speaker 3: in the world to be a water or environmental defender.
Speaker 3: Right to be someone who is defending their access to
Speaker 3: clean air, to their livelihoods, to culturally sensitive territory, against
Speaker 3: the encroachment of whether it's attractive sectors or the agribusiness sector,
Speaker 3: both of those are are pretty culpable here. It is
Speaker 3: extremely dangerous to be an activist and people get killed
Speaker 3: every year doing that, right, engaging in forms of civil disobedience. Right, So,
Speaker 3: on the one hand, it's an extremely dangerous place to
Speaker 3: engage in this protest. On the other hand, it's the
Speaker 3: place where we see and these are probably in some
Speaker 3: ways not unrelated facts like some of the most militant
Speaker 3: inspiring forms of protests against fossil fuels, against attractive industries
Speaker 3: more broadly, mining, et cetera. Against you know, large scale
Speaker 3: hydroelectric dams, you know, a whole host of projects that
Speaker 3: have been seen to be harmful to people or environments,
Speaker 3: people are willing to fight over them, right, and also
Speaker 3: you know, whether it's direct action, or whether it's in
Speaker 3: the electoral arena and electing people that hold these values,
Speaker 3: or you know, whether it's rewriting constitutions and ratifying them.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, we just see a very contentious,
Speaker 3: both on the harmful end and on the inspiring end,
Speaker 3: kind of political economy of extraction in Latin America. And
Speaker 3: I think this is more relevant than it seems, not
Speaker 3: just because Latin Americas are close by and we share
Speaker 3: a hemisphere, and so we should think about, you know,
Speaker 3: what's happening south of US, let's say, but also because
Speaker 3: you know, as the US, Canada, a bunch of European
Speaker 3: countries are wanting to onshore mining, so called critical minerals mining,
Speaker 3: you know, for strategic purposes, right. We want to make
Speaker 3: sure we have lithium at home, close to home, and
Speaker 3: we build these supply chains at home instead of being
Speaker 3: reliant on you know, foreign entities of concern. I think
Speaker 3: that's the language that's used federally for China and other
Speaker 3: countries that have large roles in these supply chains, right,
Speaker 3: So there's this desire on the part of policy leads
Speaker 3: to onshore a lot of mining, right. I like to
Speaker 3: refer to this map that the Center for Biological Diversity
Speaker 3: Nevada director Patrick Donnelley maintains of lithium mining in Western States,
Speaker 3: and he's mapped like one hundred and ten projects at
Speaker 3: some level of like permitting or financing across just the
Speaker 3: western part of the United States, just the Western States, right,
Speaker 3: one hundred and ten just lithium, right, not all the
Speaker 3: critical minerals and not all the states in the country.
Speaker 3: And of course some of these minds will never happen.
Speaker 3: They'll encounter a regulatory hurdle or a financial hurdle. But
Speaker 3: it's a lot of projects, right. And so as the
Speaker 3: US is kind of scrambling, the US government, I should say,
Speaker 3: and to some extent, you know, corporations as well are
Speaker 3: kind of scrambling and saying like we want to do
Speaker 3: all this mining here. And GM just literally invested hundreds
Speaker 3: of millions of dollars directly into a lithium mining project
Speaker 3: in Nevada. So this is the mining industry auto industry
Speaker 3: relationship is getting very close now, you know, as that's happening.
Speaker 3: It's going to spark conflicts that don't look that different
Speaker 3: from conflicts in Latin America. They're often going to involve
Speaker 3: indigenous peoples, not exclusively, but in many cases they do.
Speaker 3: They're often going to involve concerns about groundwater, about where
Speaker 3: we properly consulted, did we give our consent? And these
Speaker 3: are exactly the structural conflicts in Latin America. And you'll
Speaker 3: see this, you know, similar opposing arguments like mining will
Speaker 3: bring jobs, mining is good for national security, you know,
Speaker 3: et cetera. Right, So that kind of whole gamut of
Speaker 3: the way the politics of mining plays out to sort
Speaker 3: of see how that has happened in Latin America, where
Speaker 3: which contains some of the top producers of x you know,
Speaker 3: xro y mineral in the world, right, Chile is also
Speaker 3: the number one copper producer. I think shows us not
Speaker 3: exactly our future, but does show us what a society
Speaker 3: looks like that is riven over conflicts over extraction, which
Speaker 3: is maybe not how we think about the energy transition,
Speaker 3: right because obviously the energy transition involves moving away from
Speaker 3: the enormous volumes of extraction for fuel and that's important,
Speaker 3: and many a climate advocate will rightfully point out that
Speaker 3: the amount of coal and gas and oil mind in
Speaker 3: our current energy system is so much bigger than the
Speaker 3: amount of critical minerals mining that will take place over
Speaker 3: the next few decades, and that is true and correct.
Speaker 3: But I think just saying that does not really tell
Speaker 3: us very much about how the politics and social conflicts
Speaker 3: and divides around the mining that will happen during the
Speaker 3: energy transition are going to play out. And just saying
Speaker 3: that fact doesn't actually wrestle with the environmental, social, or
Speaker 3: even geopolitical and economic kind of impacts and dilemmas posed
Speaker 3: by the mining that's to come, you know, at the
Speaker 3: same time that we know that overall it's like less
Speaker 3: extraction from the Earth in a system that constantly stracks
Speaker 3: for the purposes of fuel.
Speaker 1: Right, that's such a good point. Okay, So can I
Speaker 1: have you just recap some of your high level findings
Speaker 1: in this modeling?
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for asking that, And I'm going to go
Speaker 3: to the most dramatic finding just because i think it
Speaker 3: shows the full range of possibility ahead of us. Right,
Speaker 3: it's sort of nicely arrays like sort of worst and
Speaker 3: best case scenarios. So if we go to the year
Speaker 3: twenty fifty, our model models eeromission transportation. What that would
Speaker 3: require in terms of lithium mining from now to twenty fifty.
Speaker 3: But if we just take that snapshot year of twenty
Speaker 3: fifty and we look at lithium demand, our worst case
Speaker 3: scenario to our best case scenario is a ninety two
Speaker 3: percent difference. So if we just take the year twenty fifty,
Speaker 3: this future that we're looking at is eeromission transportation sector.
Speaker 3: Our worst case scenario is we maintain current levels of
Speaker 3: car dependency, car usage, Cars have this outsize kind of
Speaker 3: share of overall transportation modes, Vehicle ownership rates remain like
Speaker 3: the same as they are now, and we also get
Speaker 3: to continue on the trend of bigger and bigger batteries
Speaker 3: right that are getting more and more out of step
Speaker 3: with like global averages. That's our worst case scenario. Things
Speaker 3: get kind of actually worse but electrified. And our best
Speaker 3: case scenario is we bring battery sizes back to sort
Speaker 3: of reasonable size, We expand how many folks are using
Speaker 3: buses or cycling, We densify our suburbs a bit, we
Speaker 3: have maximum levels of recycling and recovery that are technically feasible.
Speaker 3: That second future is ninety two percent less lithium than
Speaker 3: the first future. And I know that the ambitious future
Speaker 3: is probably beyond the realm of what feels politically possible
Speaker 3: right now. And I understand that, you know, I am
Speaker 3: not like living in the clouds. I'm aware of that,
Speaker 3: but I think that having that option on the table,
Speaker 3: because in that most ambitious future, we totally limited emissions
Speaker 3: and everyone has a way to get around, right, We're
Speaker 3: not denying anyone mobility, and we're not falling short of
Speaker 3: our climate goals. And we could have that future and
Speaker 3: use a lot less lithium and then have all these
Speaker 3: other amazing co benefits of reducing car usage. Right, And
Speaker 3: then I want to throw out one other finding. I'm
Speaker 3: going to go for a drama right now, right because
Speaker 3: you can get into the granule findings where we have
Speaker 3: in between levels of X, Y and Z. Another finding
Speaker 3: that I really like, just because it addresses folks who
Speaker 3: are understandly concerned at like there is no America without car.
Speaker 3: You know, we can't move away from being heard a pendent.
Speaker 3: We just have to suck it up. And I say
Speaker 3: to those people. We could stay in scenario one, which
Speaker 3: is the one where we keep levels of car usage
Speaker 3: and vehicle ownership rates and we don't identify anything, and
Speaker 3: we have lots of sprawl. We could stay in scenario one,
Speaker 3: and we could just bring our batteries to like the
Speaker 3: right size or not this gargantuan size, and in twenty
Speaker 3: fifty we could use forty two percent less lithium with
Speaker 3: the same amount of cars and the same amount of
Speaker 3: car usage and vehicle ownership if we just make the
Speaker 3: batteries a more normal size, like rather than the super size.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about like normal, like completely competitive with
Speaker 1: everybody else's battery size.
Speaker 3: It's not a smart car, you know, those tiny European cars.
Speaker 3: I'm not you know, not even going there because again
Speaker 3: I know my audience, I know my limits of what
Speaker 3: I can suggest. So you know, we're talking about the
Speaker 3: nies on leaf or we're talking about what people drive
Speaker 3: in Berlin or whatever I mean, meaning our peer nations
Speaker 3: in wealthy global cities around the world, Like what are
Speaker 3: people driving if they do drive, and that's the battery
Speaker 3: size I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is incredible and also like quite hopeful and achievable.
Speaker 1: You know, I think that if people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, the fact that there's this option on the
Speaker 1: table that really doesn't require, you know, a heavy lift
Speaker 1: that would deliver forty two percent less lithium is pretty incredible. Awesome,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm going to link to the report in
Speaker 1: the show notes and encourage people to go read it,
Speaker 1: because it like it did. Actually, I don't know, whenever
Speaker 1: I read reports like this, I'm like, oh, okay, like
Speaker 1: there is actually a way to do it, because I
Speaker 1: think that a lot of times that's where people get stuck,
Speaker 1: is like okay, but how on earth would we ever
Speaker 1: do it?
Speaker 3: And you've mapped it out here, which is very helpful.
Speaker 3: I'm so glad, And as I said, like such a fan.
Speaker 3: I've like assigned my students the Drilled podcast from the
Speaker 3: beginning because like when I teach on the politics of
Speaker 3: oil and stuff, Oh, that's so nice to hear. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm thrilled to chat with you and hope it happens
Speaker 3: again sometime.
Speaker 1: Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. Our producer is
Speaker 1: Sarah Ventry. Sound design, mixing and mastering are by Peter Duff,
Speaker 1: who also wrote our original score. Our First Amendment attorney
Speaker 1: is James Wheaton at the First Amendment Project, and the
Speaker 1: show is reported, written, and hosted by me Amy Westervelt
Speaker 1: at a dieted, effective Brooking