Vince Beiser
Appearances
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Yeah, so the issue is it's this great contradiction that in order to save the planet from the risks of climate change, we risk doing terrible damage, other forms of terrible damage to the planet. So in a nutshell, renewable energy and digital technology are together causing massive environmental damage, mayhem and murder. But we can do better.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
So the problem is that in order to build all of the new technologies, all the machineries that we need for the energy transition, to build all the electric cars, all the wind turbines, all the solar panels, and also, by the way, all the digital tech that we all rely on every day, we need to build those things out of metals.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
So we need billions and billions of tons of metals like nickel and cobalt and lithium and rare earths and copper. In some cases, we're going to need to dig out more metals than we have dug in the entire history of the human race to build all that stuff.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And so that huge demand that's already been sparked by the energy transition, in order to get those metals, we're cutting rainforests to the ground in Indonesia to get it nickel. Children are being put to work in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We're endangering a unique desert ecosystem in Chile. And on and on and on.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
It's all basically driven by this enormous worldwide scramble for the metals that we need to manufacture the hardware of the energy transition.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
I don't know. I mean, there certainly has been some reporting on it. I'm not the first person to take a look at it, but I think a lot of it gets obscured because, you know, most people think of, you know, if you're concerned about climate change, most people think like, oh, great. Well, I can switch from my fossil fuel powered car, my gasoline powered car to an electric car, and then I'm done.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Then I'm done my bit. That's exactly what I thought. I bought my first electric car about six years ago, back in 2018, and felt all good about myself, all righteous, like I was helping to save the planet. But then I really started to wonder, well, how is this car actually built that makes it different from my old car?
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And that's when I started looking into the supply chain behind the battery that powers that car, the motor that makes its wheels turn. And that's when I came to find out that the sources, many of the sources that we rely on for these metals that we need to build this stuff, for all the batteries that we need and all the rest of it, comes from these really damaging sources.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And I think, to some extent, that's a story that folks don't necessarily want to hear because we want to believe that that there is a solution to climate change, that we're doing a bad thing and we can just switch to a good thing and everything will be OK. Well, I don't want anybody listening to this podcast to think that you should not buy an electric car.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And don't think that renewable energy like solar and wind is bad. It is better than fossil fuel-derived energy. But it all comes with its own costs. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has downsides. Everything has trade-offs. And that includes the push towards renewables. That said, we are doing a lot of damage. We're set to do even more.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
But there are a lot of things we can do to minimize that damage, to reduce the harm that we're causing.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Yeah, that's a great question. And that's what most people go to when they hear about this, because recycling also sounds great, right? It's one of those things that we think, oh, recycling is nothing but good. It's a solution. Well, again, recycling is definitely better than digging fresh metals out of the ground. It's much easier on the planet. But recycling too comes with its own costs.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
When we're talking about recycling metal, it's a really complex, very energy intensive process that basically doesn't even really happen for a lot of these materials in the United States. So when you look at the big picture, Recycling is very energy intensive. It uses up a lot of energy, much of which comes from fossil-fueled coal plants, natural gas plants.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Recycling does create a lot of carbon emissions. It creates a lot of pollution. When you're melting down these metals at incredibly high heats, all kinds of other stuff, toxic byproducts that get released. Also, it's often done on the backs of some of the poorest people in the world. I'll give you a quick example. I spent some time reporting for this book in Lagos, Nigeria with e-waste recyclers.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Because what I'd come to find out is that often what happens, if you drop off your old laptop, your old cell phone, you know, at the Best Buy recycling bin or your local church e-waste recycling drive or whatever, a lot of that stuff winds up in recycling.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
developing countries in poor countries like nigeria where it gets into the hands of people who sit around all day uh people earning you know three four dollars a day cracking open those cell phones pulling out the little bits of valuable metals that are inside them there's little bits of copper and gold which they can then sell to uh to metal smelters who are usually somewhere far far away in china or in europe
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And the rest of the stuff, the plastic, the cables just gets dumped or it gets burned in incredibly toxic pits. I went and visited this one spot where they do a lot of this kind of e-waste recycling and just burn the cables.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
all this stuff comes with so there's these like huge plumes of thick oily black toxic smoke coming off of these burn pits you know getting into the lungs of everybody nearby adding to the already incredible pollution of of legos and then you got to figure what's happening to those little bits of copper and gold well they're getting put onto container ships power enormous container ships powered by diesel fuel they're being shipped halfway around the world
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
to China where they're going to be melted down in an enormous hot melting smelter furnace. So that's the first problem with recycling is that it is not cost free. Second problem is there's no way we can recycle all of the metals that we need. We're not even collecting most of it. In the United States, only about one out of every six mobile phones ends up getting collected for recycling.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And even if we could recycle all the metal that we're using, we'd still need more because demand keeps growing, right? We're building more and more of this stuff all the time. There's more of it. There isn't enough metal above the ground already to build all the stuff that we're going to need in the next few years. So recycling helps. Again, I don't want anybody to think it's a bad thing.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
It is a better approach. But all by itself, it's not a solution for the problems that we face.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
what is what's the solution if you got to get these metals for progress to continue what's the solution yeah well i you know i wish there was just one silver bullet solution but you know of course there isn't it's a huge complex problem and it's going to require a lot of different kinds of solutions so recycling is one piece of the puzzle for sure but much better than recycling
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
is the idea of reusing. I mean, it all goes back really, most of the answer is in that old slogan from the 70s, reduce, reuse, recycle. It is truer now than ever. So again, recycling is one part of the puzzle that can help us offset some of the demand for fresh metals. Reusing things or extending the lives of things that we're already using, that is a much more efficient way
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
to get extra mileage out of the metals that are already in circulation. So for instance, there's a lot of our, you know, you've probably had this experience, Mike, like most of us, you know, like your cell phone crack, your cell phone screen cracks, or your dust buster, you know, stops working.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Maybe you take it to a repair shop, of which there are fewer and fewer in this country all the time, and usually what do they tell you? They tell you, eh, it's not worth repairing, you might as well get a new one. So a lot of that, the reason that things are difficult, electronic items are difficult to repair, is a deliberate result of the strategy of the companies that make them.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
They deliberately make these things difficult to repair. It's very hard to get spare parts. It's hard to get the information. Sometimes you even need specialized tools to open them up. Like the MacBook that I'm talking to you on, you can't open this thing with a regular screwdriver. You need a special Apple-only screwdriver just to open the thing.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
so there's a push on there's a there's a thing called the right to repair movement which is uh folks all across the country who are pushing for laws to force manufacturers to make their things their products easier to repair and just in the last couple of years they've actually started to notch up some victories massachusetts california a couple of other states have recently passed laws to make their things easier to repair which is a big step forward right because if we can just keep
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
You know, if you can get another year or two or three out of your fan, out of your Game Boy controller, well, again, you're reducing the demand for metals.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Nobody, like, it's a fact that there are children working in the mines in Congo. Nobody disagrees with that. People disagree about how many and what we can do about it. Nobody, there's no question that rainforests are being bulldozed to get at nickel in Indonesia. But the counter argument is, well, we need this stuff, right? The biggest threat we all face is climate change.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And in order to stave off that threat, we need to switch over to renewables and we need to get electric cars. What I am saying is, though, that if we continue on the way that we are, if we continue to rely on digging all these metals out of the ground with all the destruction that entails, we're going to wind up swapping one set of problems for another.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And there's no question that we're going to have to do some mining. We are going to have to do some damage to the planet in order to make the transition to renewable energy. No question. But we can do, as I say, there's a lot that we can do to reduce those harms.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
First of all, it's a question of volume, right? Anything that you can create in a lab, you have to be able to create on a massive scale. I mean, if we're talking about batteries, so let's talk about batteries. So there's lithium ion batteries is a type of battery that powers, it's in your cell phone, it's in your laptop, and it's in most electric vehicles all over the world.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
And these are batteries that use mainly lithium, which is a metal battery.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
uh cobalt and nickel the reason they use those particular ones is that particular chemistry is really energy dense meaning you can pack a lot of juice into a very small um package but if you think about like the big old d-size flashlight flashlight batteries that we used to use these lithium ion batteries can pack you know much more energy into a much smaller um
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
footprint just because of the chemical properties of those elements, cobalt, nickel, lithium, the ways they interact. And there just isn't, nobody's come up with a good substitute for those. And there are other chemistries that we can use, right? There's a type of battery called lithium phosphate batteries, which also use lithium, but use iron and phosphate instead of that cobalt and nickel.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Iron and phosphate, there's much more of them around. They're much easier to get.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
um and china electric vehicles in china many many about half of them half the new ones coming off the line in china right now have these lithium phosphate batteries which are uh like i say they look like they have a lower environmental footprint so that's promising that's one of the ways in which i really when i say we can do better that's one of the ways that we uh that we might be able to substitute one material for another um
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
in order to do less damage that said here in north america people are really concerned about performance right one of the big reasons people are nervous about buying an ev is is you're worried that it won't be able to get you far enough that the charge won't last long enough so the lithium ion batteries the ones with nickel and cobalt they've got the most energy density they'll take you the furthest so those are the ones they're really pushing here in north america
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
International Energy Agency just put out a new report showing that, well, solar power is on track to become the world's number one source of electricity just in the next few years. And wind isn't far behind.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Yeah, no, it's really, that's a piece of it that a lot of folks don't realize is that the energy transition is happening really fast, much faster than most people realize. That's the good news. You know, the bad news is it does come with a lot of significant costs. To your point that a lot of folks maybe haven't heard about this stuff so much is we hear a lot about it's not as sexy of an issue.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
I mean, you hear more about, I would say, wind turbines killing birds, which does happen, right? Birds fly into these things and they get killed. And that really upsets people because you have a picture of a dead bird. That is one of the downsides of them.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
i agree with you a hundred percent mike i mean the the reason to get like we're never going to get people to switch over to electric cars by wagging our fingers at them nor should we i mean they got to be they've got to be competitive with with gas-powered cars i mean by now actually they are i mean you know you can go further on it like new electric vehicles you can go three four hundred miles on a single charge they are more expensive in this country though
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
which is a problem that I think we can fix. I'll tell you where electric cars, let me actually take a step back and I'll circle back. This will bring us back to electric cars. But when you ask about folks who, whether folks are aware of this problem, let me tell you one group of people who are very aware of the problem of the critical metals that we need, and that is the Pentagon.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
The United States military is very, very aware of the need for these metals, and their concern is basically this, the supply chains for all these metals that we're talking about, lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earths, they all run through China.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
one extent or another china really dominates the the extraction the refining the production of these metals which by the way we need not only for renewable energy but also for many military applications right they're used uh rare earth metals which are what what uh ev motors are made out of are also used in f-35 jet fighters in advanced uh avionic systems and all kinds of military applications
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
China overwhelmingly controls the supply of those metals. The US really started taking notice of this back in 2010. China and Japan got into a diplomatic spat and China cut off the supply of these rare earth metals to Japan, which needs them for their consumer electronics industry, sent shockwaves to the world economy, and really got American policymakers to sit up and take notice.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
As a result of that, there was a bunch of congressional hearings, and the Pentagon is now pushing very hard to develop non-Chinese sources for these materials.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
Well, listen, I really appreciate you, you know, helping me to get the word out about it all.
Something You Should Know
True Stories Behind the Greatest Christmas Songs & The Downside of Renewable Energy
So in a nutshell, renewable energy and digital technology are together causing massive environmental damage, mayhem, and murder.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
You know, I'm going for the broadest audience I can get.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
So what it's about is, it's about the terrible paradox of electric vehicles and renewable energy.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Please continue. All right, so the paradox is this. So we are moving towards those things, right? EVs and renewable energy, which is great because we need those things to avoid climate change, which is the biggest threat that we face. But there's a catch, and the catch is metal.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Because to build all those things, to build all those millions of electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, and by the way, all of the digital gadgets that we all rely on, our phones and our laptops, everything about the internet. My phone has metal in it? Your phone has metal in it, my friend. I don't know about your phone, personally.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
So we need billions of tons of those metals. So there's a worldwide rush on to get those. They're called critical metals, the same basket of metals that we need for renewable energy and for digital tech. And as a result of that, we are cutting rainforests to the ground. Children are being put to work in mines. Oligarchs are getting rich.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
You might, the cobalt that those kids mind might be in your pocket right now. Not yours because your phone is wooden. Right.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Well, I'm just, you know, I'm a journalist, so my job is to just try to tell the truth as best as I can. And there is, you know, renewable energy is much better than fossil fuel powered energy, but it comes with its own cost. It has its own serious downsides, which is not to say that, you know, you shouldn't buy an EV, that we shouldn't be turning on to renewables. We should be.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
We have to understand they come with serious costs and we have to do what we can to minimize those costs.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
It's such a big topic in such a big country, it's hard to really pinpoint. So in a nutshell, what's happened is, so every single one of these metals that we're talking about that we absolutely need for EVs, for renewables, and for digital tech, China dominates the entire supply chain of those things.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
From digging them out of the ground, to refining them into metals, to building the actual, to manufacturing them into the actual car batteries and digital gadgets and all the rest of it. That is a big problem because it gives them enormous geopolitical leverage, right? They've really got us over a barrel with this stuff.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Cobalt, nickel, yep.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Copper. So for a guy like Steve Nelson, who's this scrapper that I followed around in Vancouver, Canada.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
That's right. That's right. That's the glamorous world of journalism, my friend. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so for those guys, copper is the most valuable thing. But Steve is a guy, he's a super entrepreneurial guy who has basically been spending the last 20 years or so just digging through dumpsters in the back alleys of Vancouver for any kind of metal that he can find and sell and recycle.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Not just like raw metal, but like old toasters, old light fixtures. He can look at practically any... you know, electronic thing and tell you, oh, there's gonna be, you know, this much aluminum. There's probably about six ounces of copper I can get. Two bucks for it at today's price. He carries it all on his bicycle.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
He's got a little cart hooked up to his bike, and he just rides around collecting all this metal and then taking it to his scrapyard. I don't think about metal every day.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Turns out there's pretty much no limit to how much stuff we can buy and use.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Exactly. Exactly. But this is where we get into how we can do things better. So we need metals, right? That's what so much of our civilization depends on. But we can be way more efficient with how we use it. We can do a lot more recycling, which is exactly what a guy like Steve is doing. We can also be reusing and repairing our gadgets, right?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Like for a long time, all these manufacturers have deliberately made their things difficult to repair. So now there's a movement on to force them to basically make Apple and Samsung and everybody else to make it easier to fix their stuff so that it lasts longer. And you know, as consumers, we can also take some responsibility, right? You don't have to get a new iPhone every single year.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Well, you've got that wooden one.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Yeah, so recycling too turns out to have some serious downsides to it. It's really energy intensive, it's really polluting, and it's often done on the backs of the poorest people in the world. So one of the places I went was Lagos, Nigeria, the biggest city in Africa. And I spent some time there with guys who are recycling digital junk, right? Our old cell phones, laptops.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
These are guys sitting around with hammers and screwdrivers just cracking open those things like walnuts and picking out the little bits of metal in them.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Exactly. All our cables, you know, they've got plastic and rubber outside and copper inside. They want the copper. They burn the rest of the stuff. And these guys are just standing around this incredibly like thick, toxic, oily, reeking smoke. Right. And, you know, I asked one of them, I was like, well, aren't you worried?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
I mean, these guys are just like in flip flops and T-shirts, no safety equipment, nothing. And I asked one of them. aren't you worried about breathing in all this smoke? And he just said, like, you know, it's a job. I'm living in Nigeria. This is the only job I've got. And I said, well, how long have you been doing it? He said, since I was eight. I said, how old are you now? He was 35 years old.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Well, it's a real problem for the world, right? Because all that stuff is just going to waste, right? We should be, we could be recycling it, right? But the problem is there just isn't an easy way to do that. So the good news is, actually, in places like Nigeria, in the developing world, it turns out they're way more efficient at it. They recycle something like 90% of their e-waste.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Whereas here, only one out of every six cell phones gets recycled. The rest gets junked. So there's a lot we can learn from those places.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
I do not. I'm from Canada, my friend, and I know we're next after Greenland.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
And Greenland does have an awful lot of them. There are other places in the world we can get them. So the thing about Greenland, though, it's chock full of especially a bunch of metals called rare earths, which we need for wind turbines. We need them for electric car motors. We also need them for our cell phones. The color red in your cell phone is thanks to one particular metal called europium.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
No europium, no red in your cell phone. Anyway. What?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
So problem is there are a lot of these metals there, but number one, really hard to get them. Greenland's really far away. The weather's incredibly harsh. Also, the people living in Greenland aren't really that hot on the idea. They've already shot down one rare earth mine that folks tried to open up there because they didn't want all the environmental chaos that comes with it.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
So I absolutely love this. It's one of the many solutions that I talk about. And basically, there are several dozen kinds of plants which suck up different kinds of metal, nickel and other stuff from the soil. And in theory, who knew, right?
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
So in theory, you can plant a bunch of these plants in a place where we have that metal, especially places that are already polluted, like where there used to be a mine or whatever. They draw it up, and then you burn the plants, or you somehow pull the metal out of the plants. And it can be done. There are a couple of startups and a couple of research labs working on it. I love the idea.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
So far, sad to say, it's a long way from any kind of commercial scale.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Yeah. So all those things we've been talking about, which is really what most of the second half of the book is about, but also the number one thing that we as individuals can do is, if possible, don't buy a car.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Well, because cars are by far the most material and energy-intensive thing that most of us own, unless, except for your house, if you own a house, right? And I'm not saying you're a bad person if you own a car, even if you own nine cars. I own a car myself. What I am saying is we need to get to a place, we need to reduce the number of cars that are out there.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
Because if we swap all one billion gas cars that are already out there for one billion electric vehicles, we're going to swap one set of problems for another. Much better is we've got to reduce the number of cars by giving people the freedom to choose whether or not to have a car. Because right now, most places in America, you've got to have a car. You need one. Right.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Trump Blames Plane Crash on DEI, Lewis Black on Dry January | Vince Beiser
But if we can, you know, promote things like bicycling, public transit, getting around by foot so that fewer people need to own cars, so that more people can choose whether or not they want to own a car, we'll all be much better off.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
And P.S., it's also a huge savings. That's one less car that I don't have to insure and park and do maintenance on and register. Losing a car has been a big quality of life upgrade for me. And again, that's not going to solve climate change all by itself. And it doesn't mean that Vancouver is carbon zero. It's not. But it helps.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
You know, that's the only way we're going to get to a sustainable future. There is no one single silver bullet that's going to save us all. It's going to take lots and lots and lots of different solutions, each of which is going to help a bit, a little bit, a little bit, that will hopefully all add up to enough to get us to where we need to go. But I'm hopeful, I've got to tell you.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Well, thanks so much for having me on, Elizabeth. It was really a treat. Thank you.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Sure. One of my favorite super obscure metals in your phone is probably europium. There are tiny, tiny amounts of europium in your cell phone screen that make it capable of showing the color red. So what in the world is europium? Europium is one of 17 metals, this basket of metals that are called rare earth metals. There's 17 of them. They're all like down in this corner in the periodic table.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
They've all got weird names. And all of them are incredibly important for renewable energy across the board, for electric vehicles, in addition to our cell phones and pretty much all of our consumer electronics. The thing to know about rare earths, about europium and these other rare earths, is that almost all of them, one way or another, come through China.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
China overwhelmingly dominates the supply chain of these rare earth metals. So... China mines a lot of them within its own borders. They have one of the biggest rare earth mines on the planet, which is also, by the way, one of the most polluted places on the planet. They also own pieces of rare earth mines all over the world, including in the United States.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
We have one rare earth mine in the United States. It's in Southern California and a Chinese company owns a chunk of it. But no matter where those rare earth metals are dug up, anywhere on the planet, almost all of them end up going to China to be refined, to be processed into the pure metals that we can actually use.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Yeah. I mean, the United States used to be, you know, probably the biggest mining power in the world not too long ago. And all of the metals we're talking about, everything that we need for the energy transition and for digital tech, what I call the electro-digital age, came from the United States until pretty recently, until about 50, 60 years ago.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
when basically Americans got tired of all the mess, right? Mining's incredibly destructive. It's incredibly polluting. I mean, still today, something like half of the waterways in the American West, the rivers and streams, are still polluted from all the metal mining that's happened there. So we got tired of it and we decided, you know what, like let it happen somewhere else.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Just like with our heavy industries with, you know, car making and steel making and all the rest of it, we basically decided, you know what, let somewhere like China do all the dirty work, let them do the mining and deal with all the mess and we'll just buy the products at the end of the day.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
That's now coming back to bite us because it's given China this enormous geopolitical leverage in that they really control the supply chain for all these metals. So China, too, is getting kind of fed up with this, right? There's, you know, the environmental devastation in China is just massive. So they also are starting to raise the environmental bar.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
And basically, they're now outsourcing some of their production to other places.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
If you ask me, you know, a lot of people really hate it when I say this, a lot of environmentally minded folks, but I do believe we should be open to allowing more mining to happen in the United States and also in Canada, by the way, where I live. Why? Not because it's nice, not because I think mining is great. It's not. Mining is inherently destructive. There's no getting around it.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
But we need mining. We have absolutely got to get our hands on more of these metals in order to pull off the energy transition. There's just no way to build all the EVs and solar panels and all the rest of it without some amount of mining.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
And in the United States, number one, we do have higher environmental standards than places like Indonesia or Myanmar where we're currently getting a lot of these metals. We have higher labor standards, right? Workers are gonna get treated better. You know, in the big picture, I would argue it can be done with less overall damage to the planet if it's done in the United States.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Number two is that returns control of some of these really critical industries to us, to the West, takes it out of the hands of China. and puts it back under our control. So there's a solid environmental argument and definitely a national security argument for it. And this is something that the Biden administration was pushing.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
There's a lot of money in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is their giant piece of renewable energy promoting legislation that was going to support mining in the United States. And there's some movement for that to start happening, like that rare earth mine that I mentioned in Southern California.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Yeah. It used to be the main rare earth mine on the planet. It supplied most of the world's rare earths for a long time. Not that anybody really cared that much about rare earths until, you know, the last couple, three decades. And it was shut down because they were spilling accidentally all kinds of toxic waste into the desert.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
It's out in the middle of the desert, halfway more or less between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. And you're just driving along, and it's just nothing but empty, silent desert all around you. And then all of a sudden, up on this ridge, there's just this explosion of industry. It looks like some giant desert fortress of industrialization.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
It's like these big holding tanks and warehouses and beltways and connectors. And in the middle of it is an enormous pit.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
in the ground you can stand on the edge of it and you look hundreds and hundreds of feet down and there are these giant trucks the size of a small house they look like bugs down on the bottom of this hole that's how big it is and they're only going deeper and deeper and deeper that hole is just going to get bigger and bigger for the next you know 10 20 30 years So it's not pretty.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
All that said, you know, as environmentally destructive industries go, it's not that bad, right? Again, mining always causes a certain amount of damage. But this particular one, number one, it's way out in the desert. So there's nobody really living nearby. So that's a plus. Number two, what they got in trouble for before was dumping polluted water into the desert.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
So the latest company that owns the place that bought it about five, six years ago by now, they've got a new process to deal with that wastewater.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Now they have an onsite system where they evaporate out a lot of the water and sort of separate out the chemicals and waste, compress it, consolidate it down into something much smaller, which they can then bury in lined impoundments, basically like a huge box in the ground. So it appears to be quite a bit safer and quite a bit cleaner than what was happening there before.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
And wound up killing 20, 30,000 people or so before it was over with.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
There's one that I absolutely love. It's called phytomining, and it's basically using plants to mine. So in a nutshell, there's a bunch of different plants around the world that literally suck metal out of the ground. They suck it up through their roots and bring it up into their stalks and their leaves. Weird plants, but there are lots of them.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
So in theory, you can plant a bunch of these plants in an area that's full of cobalt, nickel, whatever, have the plants pull all the metal out of the ground and then extract, like burn the plants and extract, somehow like get the metal out of the plants. So this is doable. These plants exist. The technology does exist to get the metal out of the plants. I absolutely love this idea.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
You know, because you can use it not only for mining, but also to clean up polluted areas, right? You could plant a bunch of these plants and basically clean the earth. At this point, though, it's really just at the research phase. There's a few different research projects around the world that are looking into it. The U.S.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
government is actually putting a few million bucks into supporting some of them. It's a long way from being something that we can deploy on a big scale, let alone that anybody can make money off of yet. But man, I hope so. I'm pulling for the plant miners.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
I don't know. Yeah, it's a great question. What's going to happen once Trump comes in? So on the mining front, obviously he doesn't care at all about environmental rules. He wants to blow them all up and drill, baby, drill. He loves oil and gas. So on the plus side, it'll probably be good for domestic mining. He'll make it easier, one imagines, for people to open up these critical metal mines.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Because again, there's lots of it here. There are lots of projects in the works. I mean, everything is sort of ready to go. And one of the things that's slowing it down is regulations. So it may be good for the mining industry, which to some extent is... indirectly good for the planet and for the rest of us.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
On the other hand, Trump has no interest in renewable energy per se, especially hates offshore wind turbines, apparently because they block the view from one of his Scottish golf courses. He's said many times that he really has no use for electric vehicles, loves gasoline.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
On the other other hand, now Elon Musk is his best buddy, and Elon Musk is still the boss of the world's number one electric vehicle maker. So presumably that's going to change his views. On the other, other, other hand, so... A lot of hands. A lot of hands. I don't even know how I got so many hands.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
So one of the things the Biden administration did to promote electric vehicle use was to give rebates, right? If you buy an EV right now in the U.S., I think you get something like $7,500 in federal rebates back, something like that. Trump wants to kill those. And Elon Musk actually also might be in favor of killing those. Why? Because Teslas are already profitable.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
The people who are going to suffer are his competitors, right? It's like these guys whose EVs are not yet profitable. So how's that going to affect EV adoption across the board? Hard to say.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
I say you're right and I have hope. And here is my hope. I think that the most important piece of the many solutions is indeed stop moving the problem around and reduce it at its source. And the source is us. The source is demand. The most impact that we as individuals can have on all these issues that we're talking about is demand. don't buy a car, not even an electric one.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
If you must buy a car, make it an electric one, but we're all way better off if we can reduce the number of cars that are on the world's roads. Cars are far and away the biggest consumers of all the metals that we're talking about and also of energy. That's the biggest energy and resource hog of anything that any of us own, except for our houses, if you own a house.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
There's about something like 1.2 billion cars automobiles on the world's roads right now, almost all of them, you know, gas powered. And if we swap those 1.2 billion gas cars for 1.2 billion electric cars, then we're just going to swap one set of problems for another. But if we can instead turn that 1.2 billion gas cars into half a billion electric cars, we'll all be way better off.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
And by the way, I really believe we'll also see an improvement in our quality of life. Quick example from my own life. I used to live in Los Angeles with my wife, our two kids, pretty typical setup. And of course, we had two cars. Well, a few years ago, we moved back to my hometown of Vancouver, Canada, and immediately... we got rid of one of those cars. Why? Because we just didn't need it.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
Because the city, Vancouver, has put a lot of energy and effort just in the last 10, 20 years into building up a great network of bicycle paths so you can bicycle around safely and easily all over the place. There's a pretty decent public transit network. They've done a lot to promote walkable neighborhoods so it's easier to get around on foot. It's a way more pleasant way to live.