Jessica McKenzie: I was wondering if you could start by telling me how you arrived at this topic—why critical metals?
Vince Beiser: Back in about 2018, I decided to make the switch, and I bought an electric car. I was like, “Yes, here I am doing my part. I’m saving the world. I’m on the side of the angels.” But I’m also a journalist, and I’ve done a lot of reporting about the things that make our modern lives possible.
So I was curious about where all the materials come from for my car. I knew there was lithium and cobalt and nickel in the battery, and the motors made out of something called rare earths. I started looking into it. And I was horrified to find that to get the metals that we need to build cars just like my Leaf we are cutting down rainforests to the ground in Indonesia, children are being put to work in Congo, rivers are being poisoned all over the world, all kinds of bad things are happening. One of Vladimir Putin’s oligarch buddies is getting rich. It’s this terrible paradox that not only my electric car, but also the machinery of the renewable energy I was counting on to power solar panels, wind turbines, and all of our electronic devices—our phones, laptops, everything—they’re all made with the same basket of metals that’s causing massive environmental damage, mayhem, and murder. And I thought this is an important story, so I wanted to tell it…..
Out of all these things that we use these critical metals for, electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, electronics—electric cars are the number one. They are the biggest consumer of all the metals that I’m talking about in the book. If we can reduce the demand from electric vehicles, that’ll do more than anything else to reduce the harm that’s being caused by our need for critical metals.
It’ll also reduce the amount of energy that we need, which again reduces critical metal use, and is just better in general. The less energy we use, the better. So it seems like it’s sort of a couple of steps removed, but in fact, they’re very directly connected. Why do we need all these metals? Primarily because we want to build a billion electric cars. Well, if we do end up building a billion electric cars, we are really going to swap one set of problems for another. There’s already about 1.2 billion cars on the roads worldwide. Rather than trying to swap them for 1.2 billion electric cars, if we can turn that into half a billion electric cars, plus a whole lot of bicycles and subways and walkable neighborhoods, we’ll all be way better off. That’ll do much more than any number of regulations on lithium mining or anything else we can think of, really.
– Jessica McKenzie: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists