One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Given how much Donald Trump says he loves mining, you would think the blood of every environmentalist in the world is now running cold. One possible exception may be the journalist Vince Beiser. Beiser's recent book is called Power Metal, and it's about what's called rare earth metals, elements you've possibly never heard of but that power every device you own. Vince Beiser spoke with The New Yorker's Elizabeth Colbert, herself an environmental journalist of great renown and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Vince, you've written that to make that iPhone in your pocket, 75 pounds of ore had to be pulled up, crushed, and smelted, which is kind of an astonishing figure. And you also note that a cell phone can contain as many as two-thirds of the elements on the periodic table. Can you pick maybe one of the more obscure elements in there and trace its journey for us?
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. 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.
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. 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.
So one of the key points of your book is that, you know, mining is a dirty business. And as a result, countries that tighten their own environmental regulations, like the U.S., tend to get those elements from somewhere else. Are we just outsourcing the damage?
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. 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.
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