The clean energy transition sure needs a heck of a lot of mining. What do we do when there are environmental or spiritual costs to getting the materials we need for EVs and batteries?
Ernest Scheyder is a Reuters reporter covering critical minerals, and the author of The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives.
His reporting strives to let audiences draw their own conclusions about where the line should be on environmental extraction, which is a rarer approach than maybe meets the eye.
Tune in to also learn where the political battles of the second Trump Administration over critical minerals in Ukraine and clean energy politics at home may lead, and what we should keep our eyes on in the future.
Resources
Become a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate Change
The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives
The Irresponsible Pursuit of Paradise by Jim L. Bowyer
Follow the Reversing Climate Change podcast on LinkedIn
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and thank you for listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am a long-time climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur. Today I have Ernest Scheyder. Ernest is the author of The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. It’s a great book on mining. It’s one of those things that we all take for granted, well, maybe less so these days, but it is a great book to get caught up to speed on both what is happening in the world of mining, how that’s changing with the clean energy transition or perhaps its rollback, as well as some of the fights that are inside of the environmental movement.
Should we have a pro-development, pro-mining, getting minerals that we need for electrification out of the ground? Where should we do that and how? These debates are all happening right now. What I respect about this book a lot is that it really does try to honor that there are many people who disagree about this. I learned a lot. If you’ve been sleeping on the materials needed for clean energy, this is a great book to catch you up to speed. I certainly recommend it.
You don’t need to know much more than I told you for the content of the show. The show is short. We didn’t have a lot of time to record, but it does a great job of setting up the reasons why you might want to read this book and also catching us up on what’s happened since the book was written. Thank you, Ernest, for being here.
And before I cut to the show itself, a brief plug. If you would please become a paid subscriber of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. It’s $5 a month. The link is at the top of the show notes and it helps me keep doing this and just helps keep the entire machine running. It’s a surprising amount of work to keep a podcast going. Anyone who has tried and failed, or even tried and succeeded, surely knows this at this point. So thank you very much for your support. Please become a paid subscriber if you at all can. If you can’t, a great rating and review in your podcast app is also very much appreciated. And that’s enough of that for now. Thank you for hearing me out. And here is the main body of the podcast.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being here, Ernest.
Ernest Scheyder: Hey, it’s great to be with you, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: I’m happy that you’re here. I really love The War Below. It taught me a lot about the minerals industry and mining. Although I know books take a long time to publish, so if you published in 2024 I suspect you probably submitted it about a year before that, and the world has changed radically since then. In the intro I will have already caught everyone up on what is in the book, but what’s changed since the book has been published?
Ernest Scheyder: Yeah, so I think definitely each of the projects that I look at in the book has had news developments since then, but I wanted the book to stand the test of time and really be a philosophical exploration of these choices that we face if we want this electrified future.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, that really was one of the key themes that I saw in the book, the idea of choice.
Ernest Scheyder: And so each chapter looks at a certain point of tension, whether it’s around Indigenous rights, whether it’s around biodiversity, whether it’s around local landowner rights. And I think those issues are evergreen and will be ones that we’re going to have to continue to debate over and over again.
So let’s just take Indigenous rights, for instance. There is a chapter in the book, Chapter 2, about the fight over the Resolution Copper project in Arizona. And this is strongly opposed by the San Carlos Apache people and many of their allies for Indigenous and religious rights reasons. Now, at some point there will be some kind of resolution, lowercase R, to that case. But even beyond what happens in that case, I wanted the topic or the issue of do Indigenous rights matter more than the fight against climate change, I wanted that to be the issue that the reader is sort of sitting in.
And it’s a sticky [unclear], Ross. There’s no clear-cut answer there. We obviously need a lot more copper in order to fight climate change and have the electronics that increasingly are powering our lives. Yet Indigenous rights matter, full stop. And religious rights matter. And if there was a lot of lithium under Saint Peter’s Basilica, for instance, would we be digging it up in order to fight climate change?
So regardless of what happens in the chapters, and yes, there have been developments for some of the projects in the book, I think that the broader themes are things we’re still going to have to grapple with. And that’s what I really want to encourage the reader to think through.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one of the parts of your writing that stuck with me long after I read it. It’s not surprising that you write for Reuters. Reuters is very well known for not editorializing, more than may be strictly necessary. But I think you do try to honor the fight here. I wish “teach the controversy” weren’t so tainted as a phrase from the intelligent design debates, because I think you really are trying to show that people in good faith can rank these things differently, and that’s part of your mission. I think that’s what I’m reading into this. Am I correct about that?
Ernest Scheyder: Completely. What I wanted to do was to take my opinion out of it and to encourage the reader to think for her or himself about what they would do if they were in a policymaker’s or a politician’s perspective, or a manufacturer’s perspective. Certainly I have my opinion. Every human being has opinions. But what I wanted to do is encourage the reader to really think through all sides and to meet the people on all sides.
This is not really a book about mining or energy, although obviously those are key themes in the book. It’s a book about community and about choice. And so getting to spend time with the people at the center of all of these fights was so important to me, and to bring their stories to you, the reader, and to encourage you to see their humanity and to recognize that there are, as you say, people on all sides of issues that have very earnest perspectives on these topics and want their [unclear] to move things forward positively.
Now, obviously there’s disagreement all throughout the narrative, but encouraging the reader to determine how he or she would come down on these issues was a main push for the book. I didn’t want to just say, hey, here is right and here is wrong and here’s what you’re going to do, because there are no clear-cut answers here. Now, I think there are other books out there related to the thematic that can have very clear-cut answers on it, but I don’t think that the issue of where and how to put extractive projects is as clear-cut as people think it might be.
Ross Kenyon: I ended up reading as secondary research for the show a book that you recommended, or maybe many people recommended to you in the process of your reporting, The Irresponsible Pursuit of Paradise by Jim L. Bowyer. That’s like a YIMBY book for mining, essentially, right? Like we should not be exporting our mining or consumptive processes abroad to people who are maybe less well off. But it’s also cited by people seemingly that have a pro-mining agenda. It’s a book that is cited more commonly by right-of-center people in the US as a way of saying we actually need these projects here. They also oftentimes potentially benefit commercially from the presence of mining in the US. So it has a social justice orientation, but it also isn’t used for purely social justice ends.
Ernest Scheyder: Yes. So that book was cited to me a lot by people I spoke with for the reporting of The War Below, but especially in Minnesota, where a company known as Twin Metals would like to dig an underground cobalt, nickel and copper deposit and produce those metals for the energy transition.
Now, the rub here, Ross, is that that metal lies underneath a watershed that feeds into the Great Lakes. And the metal is found in a type of rock known as sulfide ore that, when exposed to water, can form acid, sulfuric acid. And so the concern is that even though that project is underground, if it comes into contact with water at the surface, which obviously it’ll be exposed to the elements and you’re going to have lots of waste rock that will need to be stored, that that acid could then feed into the Great Lakes and pollute the Great Lakes.
Now, I should say that the mining company that wants to develop this project has been very vocal that it would take all the safety precautions necessary. And yet the concerns exist from the conservation and from the environmental community. So that’s setting the scene here. And so as it stands right now, that project is on ice. President Biden had blocked it. President Trump in his first term had moved it forward. President Obama had blocked it. And so it’s technically on ice right now.
And the companies and the people that would like to develop it, they often point out places like Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, world’s largest cobalt producer. Sometimes there can be child labor used there. And it’s very hard to track people as young as six or seven breaking onto mine sites or digging near mine sites and taking ore or rock and selling it to a processor for maybe the equivalent of a dollar or two a day. Now, sometimes those children can be injured, have arms broken, legs broken, and sometimes they can even be killed, because they don’t have safety standards, they don’t have training, and they’re children.
So we don’t want, I think we can say point blank, we don’t want children to be part of a mining supply chain at all. And so when people cite that book, Jim’s book, this is often one of the main points that they bring up. Why would we not want to bring mining back to the United States, where we don’t allow child labor? We have really high safety standards and training standards. We require emergency gear, et cetera, et cetera. And so these are things that I think people need to be thinking through more.
One of the issues beyond safety, which of course is extremely important, is the economics. It’s going to cost more to have cobalt and copper and nickel produced in the United States than perhaps some other countries out there. Are we willing to pay more, knowing that metals are produced at higher standards and at higher safety standards here in the country? Or do we want to export their production and processing to a place we’ll never go, never visit, never see? And these are some of the themes that Jim brings up in the book, and that’s why it resonated for a certain amount of the populace. But we’re not really having those conversations.
And that’s a very academic tone. What I wanted to do with The War Below is to humanize a lot of these issues and to say, here are the people at the center of these areas. And all the people I spoke with for the Minnesota chapter, for the Twin Metals chapter, were just fascinating. Grateful to give their time to me, and it was my honor and privilege to tell their stories. But there again, I don’t come to the end of that chapter and say this project is good or bad. I wanted you, the reader, to say, hey, gosh, what would I actually do? Would I be willing to have this mine developed, knowing that it would increase US production of these really important metals and reduce our reliance on a part of the world where safety standards are a lot less, even knowing that the risk to the Great Lakes could be there, as distant as it might be? These are things I think we need to be thinking through.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely we do. Many of the cases that you present, I’m not even sure how I would decide on. One exception I might say is I thought the Thacker Pass case for not mining for lithium there was relatively weak.
Ernest Scheyder: Well, so just to catch folks up, Thacker Pass is the largest lithium deposit on the North American continent. It’s on the border between Oregon and Nevada, and it’s in a sedimentary deposit, or clay, essentially, to put it another way. And a company known as Lithium Americas currently holds the rights to that. It’s been bounced around between a bunch of owners, including Chevron decades ago. And so Lithium Americas wants to develop it, and it had been working to get not only the permits, but the buy-in from local landowners, as well as get some financing from private partners.
And so the tension right from the beginning of the book, because the company started this during Trump’s first term, was how it would go through the permitting journey and what the opposition could be. And so there has been some opposition from local Indigenous groups that say that the land where Thacker Pass is was the site of a massacre in the 19th century that holds special cultural and religious significance for their people. And then an environmental group comes on and sort of joins forces with them. And so you’ve got a pretty strong, at least from the outset, opposition growing to this project.
And my question from the beginning was, could this end up mimicking the fight that we saw with the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota about eight or nine years ago? In that case, we had thousands of people show up in frigid North Dakota to oppose a pipeline underneath a major waterway. And the concern there was that the pipeline could rupture and basically pollute these Native American lands. So could that replicate itself in this situation? That was what I was curious about as a journalist and as an author from the very beginning with Thacker Pass.
And during the course of the chapter, you get to read how that happens and comes to be, and what the opposition looks like. The opposition takes a very unexpected detour, which I’ll just leave as a tease for your audience.
Ross Kenyon: One day I did not have on my bingo card, that’s for sure. We see General Motors get involved in the project.
Ernest Scheyder: Major American automaker that wants to grow in the electric vehicle space. And so it’s a huge source of lithium. And so when you think about reducing our dependence on places like China for lithium, here’s a major deposit in a pretty rural part of the country, yes, surrounded by ranch land and Indigenous lands, but one that’s still very important and technically controlled by the US federal government. So there again, we get back to the idea of choice. What are we willing to do?
Ross Kenyon: We’ve got to talk about what’s going on now, though. Reading your reportage at Reuters, clearly you’ve been covering this beat for a long time, and all of a sudden your beat has become one of the most important, seemingly, for geopolitics, for energy production. That’s probably a really great thing for you. People are probably very curious about this beat, maybe for the first time in a while. What’s happening now? I have a hard time tracking what Trump actually believes, if anything. There’s energy independence, but there’s also a pullback from renewable energy that a lot of these critical minerals support. What actually is happening that you’re seeing? Can you make sense of it?
Ernest Scheyder: Yeah. So just in a broad brushstroke, Trump fancies himself a dealmaker, and he has talked about making some kind of deal with Ukraine, with Greenland and potentially with the DRC about critical minerals. And they sort of are different for each country.
The biggest one, perhaps the biggest one of the headlines, is around Ukraine, where President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky have talked about some kind of critical minerals partnership, and that the rough contours would allow US companies or Western companies to go in and access some of the critical minerals in the Ukrainian countryside. There’s a lot of questions around where the largest deposits are. There is some thought that they could be in eastern Ukraine, which is currently controlled by Russian forces. There’s some questions around, would a Western company invest the large capital needed to go in there? You’re talking five, ten billion dollars probably at the least in order to go in there.
We’re also talking about exactly what is in the ground, because a lot of the deposits were last mapped during the Soviet era. So it’s not entirely clear what the actually prolific deposits are. So you’d have to go back in and do a lot of surveying, which of course takes time and costs money. And then you have the question of processing. Just because you took a rock out of the ground doesn’t mean you can make a battery with it. You’ve got to then process it into a form that can be put into a battery or another electronic. And so are you going to build the processing facilities in Ukraine, or are you going to ship that rock elsewhere, i.e. to the United States or to China or to someplace else? So I think there’s some logistical questions there as well.
And then President Trump has talked about potentially having revenue generated from these projects offset the financial investment that the United States has made in supporting Ukraine from a defensive perspective. Would there be enough production there over X number of years to reimburse the United States? These are all the questions that I think I and many other people have when I think through that.
When we talk about Greenland, obviously a very small country population-wise, but prolific and large deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals. And so where would the know-how come from to process it? I think that’s a question, the technical know-how, to get people in there. And these are not coveted assignments when you’re north of the Arctic Circle. Just look at parts of Canada and Russia where they have large nickel and diamond mining. People aren’t exactly racing to work there in the mining industry, which is already losing talent.
And there again, you also have the processing question, because Greenland does not have processing facilities for these critical minerals. And so you’d have to export that rock or that ore someplace else in the world in order to turn it into a part that’s usable for batteries, et cetera. So there’s some logistical questions there as well. And of course your costs would be very high because you’re operating in a very remote, frigid region. So you’d have to thaw the ground and take other steps there as well.
So, perhaps more information than you wanted, but I have some financial and logistical and diplomatic questions around how any of these critical projects would work out there. I think writ large, what this shows, when we look at it from a 10,000-foot perspective, is that critical minerals of course are growing to be the most important commodity of the 21st century. Whoever controls the production and processing of lithium, copper and other critical minerals will control this century’s economy, just the way that oil defined the 20th century economy.
And so I think that just goes to show you that they’re extremely, extremely important. So much of our lives now are electrified, are powered by lithium-ion batteries or other electronics that weren’t even around, say, 20 or 30 years ago. And so I’m not saying oil is going to go away. I don’t think petroleum products will ever go away. But what I am saying is we’re increasingly seeing more of our economy powered by materials that are dug out of the ground.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think the drive towards autarky, economically speaking, is going to continue? Or are we going to pull away from the supply chains and either try to absorb other countries, like Greenland is going to be ours one way or another kind of talk? Is that going to be a future outcome? Is that bluster? And how much is just negotiation and the art of the deal?
Ernest Scheyder: Oh gosh, I will let other people more astute as to Trump’s thought pattern answer that question. What I would say is that for too long, I think a lot of audiences, especially in the West, have not actually thought through where we get the building blocks for everyday lives, regardless of what happens in Ukraine or Greenland. What I hope that this attention to critical minerals does is encourage a deeper reflection on where we actually get the stuff we use every single day.
You know what I mean, Ross? We’re talking to each other right now through microphones that are connected by copper wiring. That copper probably came out of the ground from Peru or Chile and was processed in China before it was turned into a wire that got attached to the microphones that you and I are speaking into right now. And that’s just one basic device where we use critical minerals every single day, but we don’t really actually think through where they come from.
And I really think that we need to. The United States has large supplies of critical minerals in the ground, but it doesn’t have as much as it needs. And it also has very little processing capability. It only has two copper smelters. It doesn’t have any nickel processing facility, no cobalt processing facility, relatively little rare earths processing facility, and all of those metals that I just mentioned we use every single day. And so we’re relying on so many other parts of the world. And so by talking more about critical minerals, regardless of what happens with the geopolitics of it, I really, really do hope that the average person says, gosh, this is in the news a lot more, I should probably learn more about critical minerals and why they’re so important to my everyday life.
Ross Kenyon: People involved in clean energy often point to Liberty Ships and Lend-Lease and the ability for the US to, you know, sleeping giant has awoken industrially and militarily. Is that easily duplicatable in terms of critical minerals inside of the US? Could we just do that again, or is it more complicated for some reason?
Ernest Scheyder: I would say it’s complicated, and I would say from a talent perspective. If you talk to a 17 or 18 year old today who’s graduating high school, she or he nine times out of ten would have no interest in mining engineering. Or if they do have any interest, they might think maybe I’ll go into coal. They have just no realization that mining can actually be a really interesting, fruitful and diverse career, where you use a lot of high tech like AI, where you actually are building the mines and other facilities that really underpin our global economies. But it’s just not considered a sexy industry anymore. It’s not even considered a stable one like law or medicine. It’s just considered sort of an afterthought.
And the US has only 13, I think it is, 13 or 14 accredited mining schools. In 1980 it had 50, and it had even more a few decades prior. China has hundreds. Western countries are facing this huge brain drain where most of their workers are in their 50s or early 60s and obviously will retire in the coming years. So who’s going to replace them? Yes, we can have some automation, and yes, there can be some technological advancements that will require fewer workers on site, but still we’re going to need people that are actually replacing them.
And so when we talk about a whole-of-government approach, or we talk about maybe doing something like the events that you mentioned for critical minerals, I think certainly the capital could be there if it needed to happen. I think certainly the land could be there, the resources could be there if it needed to happen. But there’s a question around talent. And every young person I talk to that asks me where they should go into a career, I say, if you have any interest in math or engineering, consider mining engineering, because A, I think it’s going to be a really interesting space, but also B, I know a lot of mining engineering professors that will just hand out scholarships like candy because they’re just so desperate for students.
Ross Kenyon: Are there parts of the world that we’re friendly towards, and that’s even an open question as well, that have the talent that we could induce with visas? Is that even going to happen? Again, it’s hard to know with so much geopolitical uncertainty, but where even could you pull talent into the country to do this work?
Ernest Scheyder: Well, let’s think about countries that have large minerals deposits and that have therefore large mining industries. Chile and Peru are one. They’re in South America, very large countries geographically, population-wise. Chile’s the world’s largest copper producer, Peru is number two, Chile a big lithium producer. Both have really, really strong mining industries. Both do not have a problem at all attracting talent.
And I’ll share a small anecdote with you. There’s a major American company called Freeport-McMoRan. It’s based in Phoenix. It’s the world’s largest copper producer. It operates in the United States, in South America and in Asia and Indonesia. And the company has no problem at all finding workers in Indonesia or South America. It has more workers than it knows what to do with. But in the United States, it actually has struggled to attract talent for many, many years. And actually about two years ago its production in the United States actually slipped, even though most of its copper is in the United States. That is, most of its copper reserves in the ground are in the United States. And its production slipped not because it ran out of money or because of weather or other challenges related to that, but because it just doesn’t have enough people. It doesn’t have enough people on staff in order to produce the copper that it thought it could produce. Now in South America and in Asia, it was able to.
And so for me, I think this gets at the idea of another issue facing the United States, which is that it doesn’t have the personpower right now to grow as fast as it would like in these areas. Now, could it import from other places potentially? But those countries are very focused inwardly and want to develop their own industries. And so if you are a Chilean mining executive or even just mining talent, you’re probably going to work in Chile and you’re going to want to develop the assets there in this hypothetical scenario. So that is the landscape right now when it comes to labor and talent in mining.
Ross Kenyon: How much of it is also that the US does have a fair number of ways to block projects? I have seen people look with envy at China and say, well, why isn’t it easier to build high-speed rail like China? It’s like, well, they probably have much easier ways of doing eminent domain and violating human rights and property rights. That it’s harder in the US should be a good thing on net, one hopes. Does that also happen in another place that maybe has weaker governance, like Latin America?
Ernest Scheyder: Well, I would say there’s no doubt about that. There’s a huge difference between a command-control economy and a capitalistic system. There’s just no way, of course, they’re different. And so we can debate the pluses or minuses for that. But what I would say is, for me, getting back to the central theme of the book around choice, one of those is around what do you demand of your elected officials?
And Ross, the main mining law in the United States has been around since 1872. This governs hard rock mining in the western United States on federal land. So, huge piece of legislation. It was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant. Now, I wasn’t around then. You weren’t around then. We didn’t have cameras then. We didn’t have microphones then. President Grant never even saw a light bulb. But we have this law that’s now governing, still governing, the mining that happens in the United States that is definitely not fit for our times. I think that’s a fair statement to say, because it just wasn’t written for our times. It was written for a very different purpose, that is to encourage population development in the US West. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, they’ve got large population centers.
So what does it look like to demand more from our elected officials, a deeper thinking around these issues and how we actually talk about permitting? How do some projects get to a yes or no? Because I think it can actually be very confusing for a project to get to a yes or no. And we also hear this from conservationists as well, that they would like to see these pieces of legislation updated. One main reason why is because right now, mining companies in the United States don’t pay royalties when they take metals out of federal lands. Now oil companies do. When they take oil out of federal lands, they pay eight percent. Mining companies don’t. So these are a lot of the complex areas that we’ve got to be collectively wading through.
Ross Kenyon: Ernest, thank you so much for being here and writing a tremendous book. I look forward to learning more from you in the future.
Ernest Scheyder: Hey, thanks for your time, Ross. Really great to be with you.
