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The Global Race For Critical Metals! with Vince Beiser
00:59:18
In this week’s episode Robert talks to Vince Beiser about his latest book “Power Metal: The Race for Resources Shaping Our Future” which gives us an insight into the global competition for essential minerals, like lithium, cobalt and copper,...
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- [00:08]
Robert Llewellyn
Hello and welcome to another sizzling episode of the Fully Charged show podcast. I'm talking about a book today and normally I would have a book to show you a physical item. I don't have that because I only have a digital copy of this book and it is a, it is a challenging. It's an incredible, illuminating and wonderful read. I really enjoyed reading it. Well, I say I enjoy it. I enjoyed the entire experience. But there were moments during the time I read it where I was pretty depressed because it's very hard hitting. It is about. It's called Power Metal. It's by an amazing writer called Vince Baser. He's based in Canada but he's clearly traveled. He's very well traveled man. He's been all over the world. He's seen firsthand what we do as the human race to ensure the supply of the materials we need to make the things that we all rely on. And I think it's, it's, you know, it's one of those, it's been a long term bugbear of mine that we just accept things. And I do this from experience because for decades, for instance, I would buy petrol or diesel for my cars and I just didn't think about where it came from, didn't think about where it went after I'd burnt it, didn't think about it, did not think about it for a long time until. And then once you start thinking about it's really annoying. Then you've got to think about it. Oh God, now I've got to be aware of that. Same with meat, you know, where does meat come. I kind of always knew where meat came from because I did work on farms when I was a kid. So I've always been one step ahead in the world of meat, but not with anything else. You know, where does your frying pan come from? What's it made from? You know, what about your cooker? What about the, your shoes? What about your undies? You know, they've all come from somewhere, that's all been made by someone somewhere and it's been moved around somehow on something until it arrived at the shop where you bought it. You know, that's. Or online when it's delivered to you. Those things are kind of partly deliberately obfuscated by manufacturers, by mining companies, by oil and gas companies. They don't want us to think about it because then we might start worrying about it and not want to buy it. And what Vince has done in this book is just peel back all the layers, go. This is where the materials come from that are in your cell phone, your laptop, your lights, your car, your e bike, your everything, your routers, the copper wires in your house. Where does that copper come from? You know, we're all completely and utterly culpable. We're all involved with. No, there's no one I've ever known in my life. I'm just trying to think of the most mad hippies that lived on the land and lived in teepees. They had metal pans and cups and knives and forks. Still, they didn't mind that or melt it down and make them make the iron tools themselves. I'm just trying to think of really extreme examples of human beings who've tried to shed the guilt of living in the modern world and they failed miserably, all of them, including me. So that is. It is a fascinating book. It does not pull its punches. It is very, you know, very, you know, slap you in the face with a cold fish wake up, call for all of us to know where the things we use come from. But there is a kind of optimistic element to it because what we're looking at now is more and more, the mining we are doing in the future and we will do increasingly in the future, is we're mining the materials we've already mined, we're recycling everything. That too has enormous challenges, but it is better still, no matter what, to recycle a load of material that we've already used rather than dig up some fresh stuff. And that's really where we've got to get to. And that's what Vince's book is really about. And I'm very grateful that I came across it and got the chance to talk to him. He's a really lovely man. And so that's all I'm going to say now because we explain more of it in this podcast. So please welcome to the Fully Charged show podcast Vince Baszer talking about power metal. This episode of the Fully Charged Podcast is brought to you by OVO's Charge Anywhere. Charge Anywhere helps you power your car wherever you are, plan your route and pay. You'll have access to over 34,000 chargers across the UK's largest charging networks and more than 400,000 chargers across Europe. Setup is easy. Just download the OVO Charge app, create your account, add payment details, hit the road and start charging. There's no need to be an OVO customer. Either simply pay as you go or benefit from up to 15% off your charging. With monthly boost packages, Ovos Charge Anywhere Power your next journey with peace of Mind. So, Vince, two things that happen with this. Sometimes you get sent a book, you know, which never used to happen in my previous life, but now I get sent books or I know people who've written books and I read their books or I sometimes buy books even, even that radical, shocking. And I kind of know what it's basically about. And that's exactly. I felt, I know about this. I know all about metals and mining and refining and transportation. And every time I turned a page in your book, I went. I didn't know that. It's been a real proper steep learning curve because I'm kind.
- [05:52]
Vince Baszer
That's very high praise.
- [05:53]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah. No, I'm serious. It's, it's. I was, I'm really impressed with it. It's called Power Metal and it's, I love that, you know, that, you know, the race to get. I mean, it's just, it's so. I knew it was a big topic, but you've expanded it way beyond anything I could imagine because it's just huge. But I think you've got, I love, I think you've got the balance right. Is as in this is a massive problem. But also we've got to do something. I think that's my baseline is what we do now. Okay. Which is extracting fossil fuels, transporting them, refining them, burning them once and pretending nothing else matters. Kind of feel we're on the same page on that particular score. That we might need to do something a bit different.
- [06:45]
Vince Baszer
Yes, I would say so. That is the understatement of the year, I would say.
- [06:52]
Robert Llewellyn
But can you, can you just give the listeners and viewers a bit of background of how you got into the topic? Because I would classify you as a proper journalist, someone who does research.
- [07:06]
Vince Baszer
That's a flattering way to put it, I guess. Yeah. I'm a full time freelance journalist and really what got me going was about seven or eight years ago by now I got my first electric car because, you know, like so many people, I was really concerned about, still concerned about climate change and really felt like, you know, we've, we've got to get off of fossil fuels and it's time to put my money where my mouth is. So I got myself a used Nissan Leaf and felt very good, you know, very righteous and virtuous. Ah, here I am now. Like I'm on the side of the angels now. Like I'm, I'm saving the planet. But then I started thinking about, you know, I do a lot of reporting on sort of, you know, materials like the, where the Raw materials that make our lives possible. Where does all this stuff come from? And I started wondering that about this car. You know, it's battery that's full of nickel and lithium and cobalt, and the motor that's full of rare earths and the copper that's in the wire. How do we get all that stuff? So I started looking into it and to my horror found that, you know, in fact, this, this in the name of saving the planet, of helping the planet. My car was actually really doing serious damage to the planet and people on it, you know, to get the materials that go into my car. Rainforests are being cut to the ground in Indonesia, children are being put to work in mines. Warlords are getting rich on and on. So, so that was the genesis of the book, right?
- [08:36]
Robert Llewellyn
And then, I mean, what I love about it is, you know, I've read about, you know, lithium salt, salt pans and what's going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I've not been there. I've not been to any of the, where people recycle stuff. So coming. Can we go through that, that journey you went on. And, and I think also the thing that's becoming more and more pertinent is the, that sort of, in a sense the history since World War II of who gets materials, who digs them up, who refines them, who. How that has changed, you know, I would say after, well, you know, in the sort of 40s and 50s, the USA and maybe and a few European countries, that was what we did. You know, we refined materials, we made stuff that has really changed. So that the fascinating story you tell about Japan and China and what happened between them is, you know, about rare earths and about critical minerals. I mean, it's just, yeah, yeah, it's.
- [09:35]
Vince Baszer
It'S really an amazing story. I mean, so basically, as you say, in a NutShell, you know, 100 years ago, even 70, 80 years ago, the United States, right next door to me in Canada, provided most of the world's metals of these, of these so called critical metals that we're taught here, you know, nickel, lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earths. The US produced the lion's share of all of them and also did the refining for them.
- [10:02]
Robert Llewellyn
Right.
- [10:02]
Vince Baszer
It's not enough to just dig this stuff out of the ground, you also have to process it into metals that you can use. But basically starting in around the 80s, Americans, you know, got really tired. Like mining is very dirty, right? It's an incredibly polluting and very, you know, destructive industry. And the environmental movement got into gear and the Environmental Protection Agency got started. Americans basically said like we, we don't want this stuff in our backyard. Let's just move it somewhere else. Right. So all over the world, but more than anywhere else in China, they said, great, we'll do it. Basically we want the money. So as a result, most of these metals are now dug up all over the world. But where there. But almost all of their supply chains at some point run through China. Every single metal that we're talking about, the supply chain is really dominated by China. From, you know, the mining to the production to the actual manufacture of the, of the, you know, the actual machines that we're using, the actual car batteries and solar panels and wind turbines. Almost all of that happens in China. And this is another really big downside to the whole energy transition. In addition to all the environmental damage, in addition to all the human suffering that it's causing, it's also given we've handed China this enormous geopolitical leverage.
- [11:33]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [11:34]
Vince Baszer
That they can use at any time. And you know, that what you mentioned, this business between China and Japan, it's, it's already happened. So China and Japan got into a kind of a diplomatic scuffle in 2010. China shut off the supply of what are called rare earth metals. These are a bunch of obscure metals that are absolutely critical for electronics manufacturing. Japan, you know, panicked, like the whole world was set on edge because they suddenly realized that China really had us by the throat. So. And that's still where we are. People are, you know, in the West, Western Europe and the United States, they're working very hard to set up supply chains that aren't so dependent on China. But man, we've got a long ways to go.
- [12:21]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah. I mean, what we've just had literally announced in the last couple of days in Europe is an enormous increase on tariffs of Chinese built electric cars coming into Europe. And it just kind of, I've always said, actually right from when I first drove an electric car in 2009, this is disruptive technology in a way. It is like smartphones. It messes up. There was loads of really good, stable long term industries that existed before smartphones arrived, you know, fax machines, copper wires, telephones, all that, telephone exchanges, that's all gone. And in the same similar way, I think electric cars mess stuff up because they operate in a different way and they're not, I've always said they're not the answer. They're not going to make the world perfect. You know, that's a, that's a, they're still cars and they require a lot of stuff in them. But the exact. What I've learned more recently is the kind of international or the geopolitical aspects of that, of how because of decisions made by an autocratic government in China 20 years ago to say, well, let's, we can't compete with Mercedes Benz making petrol cars, let's make electric ones. And that's what they've done. And they've, you know, there's no denying it now. They're, they're better than anything made in North America or Europe.
- [13:42]
Vince Baszer
They're so far ahead of us on. Yeah, really on, on all the industries that are going to matter the most in the future. Electric cars, renewable energy. They're miles ahead of us in solar manufacturing, wind manufacturing.
- [13:55]
Robert Llewellyn
Batteries.
- [13:56]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, batteries, yeah, it's. It's destroyed.
- [14:02]
Robert Llewellyn
But then I just kind of, I want to, I'm going to read a couple of quotes, so let's move on to the. Because I have actually got the list of rare earths, which I'm not going to read out because I wouldn't know how to pronounce them. And I've heard of maybe five of them. I mean, there's some really weird ones and they've all got uses then they would. But this is probably in microelectronics as well as batteries and electric cars and renewables. This is stuff that we've all got. The equipment you and I are speaking on will have a lot of those materials in them.
- [14:31]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, no, absolutely. So rare earths are a really fascinating subcategory of these critical metals.
- [14:37]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [14:38]
Vince Baszer
Sometimes people mix up those terms, but rare earths is a set of 17 specific metals that are, that, that are all used in really niche applications but are incredibly important. They, they just use them in very small amounts, but they make a huge difference. So one of them, europium, for instance, is the thing that makes the color red on your screens. Right. Like I can see that red lightning bolt behind you. That's thanks to europium, tiny bits of europium on my screen. Right. And terbium helps make the magnets that make your cell phone vibrate when it, when it gets a call.
- [15:18]
Robert Llewellyn
Yes.
- [15:20]
Vince Baszer
But probably the, the, one of the most important ones is neodymium, which is the main ingredient in the. In motors, electric motors, motors that actually drive your car have a lot of. Are based on neodymium, which is another rare earth. And it's those rare earths that China really like, controls, you know, 80, 90% of the whole world's supply.
- [15:45]
Robert Llewellyn
So the actual raw material may be anywhere else around the world, but it's basically if you want to get the particular rare earth out of that material, it's got to go to China. That's where, that's where it gets refined.
- [15:57]
Vince Baszer
That's exactly right. So, for instance, here in the United States, we used to produce almost all the rare earths in the world, and almost all of it came from one mine in Southern California.
- [16:07]
Robert Llewellyn
Wow.
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Vince Baszer
That mine closed down and we shipped all the money off to China. So now, because there's so much effort to, to get those supply chains built back up in the US the, the government has given a lot of subsidies to the, to, to a company that's real. They've reopened that mine and they're getting a lot of money from the government to help them do that. So they're actually producing, they're digging rare earths out of the ground very successfully. But then once they've got them out of the ground, what do they do with them?
- [16:38]
Robert Llewellyn
Wow. Wow.
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Vince Baszer
Because there's nowhere, there's nowhere else that has the processing capacity.
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Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
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Vince Baszer
So.
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Robert Llewellyn
And I mean, the other thing, I guess, you know, when I've certainly talked about this for a long time, you know, in the 80s and 90s, we basically shipped all our heavy industry and manufacturing, really we did, to China. I mean, and now, and when I say we, I'm talking Europe and North America, United States.
- [17:01]
Vince Baszer
Yeah.
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Robert Llewellyn
But we also shipped all our pollution and waste going into rivers. And you know, our rivers are lovely. Well, they're not actually in this country because we have leaking sewage going to them. But, you know, I remember seeing the Ruhr river in the, in the Ruhr Valley in Germany when I was 12. And it was a yellow, it looked like mustard. It was a yellow stinking. It was unimaginably vile and you could see fumes coming off it and it would occasionally catch fire. I mean, it was off the scale levels of pollution. You go there now, it's crystal clear. It's beautiful blue water going through all these old industrial towns that are no longer industrial because they've, you know, but, you know, but where I can imagine you could find a river in China now which is of a similar level of pollution. I mean, that's.
- [17:50]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. I mean, we just figured, you know, let them, let them deal with all the costs and when, and we'll just buy the stuff from them and then we can have the best of both worlds.
- [18:01]
Robert Llewellyn
But I mean, that curse of, you know, I remember reading about this many Years ago. The curse of oil, what oil does to a nation state. You know, if they find oil, and there's examples of this all over the world, then the government can survive without taxing the people, which in turn means they don't need to represent the people, they can just represent the oil companies. And anyone who counters that, you just kill them. You know, I mean, that's what. It's a really corrupting influence and that, you know, and there's very legitimate arguments about the oil industry's behavior around the world, and their history is not exactly benign. But when you then think of mineral extraction, what one would hope is that we've learned from that and we would do it differently. And I think there's some efforts to do that. But I can't argue with you. Your, you know, reporting on what's happening in the DRC in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is so appalling and has been so appalling. I mean, I don't know if it's got any better. There's some reports I've read where it's kind of improved a tiny bit, but it still sounds.
- [19:05]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, my sense is that it's improved a bit, but the basic issues are still the same. I mean, there's still forced labor there. There's still children working in those mines. And, you know, even under the best of circumstances, like, it's, you know, it's really hard, grueling work. And in a lot of, A lot of places it's done, you know, without protective equipment, without, you know, with no protections for the miners and. And so on. But I, I really, I, I want to say, too, I'm actually just writing about this for, for my newsletter that, that I'm kicking out in sort of in conjunction with the book. It's also called Power Metal. We've heard it like the, the, the child miners in, in Congo have gotten a lot of attention, which they should.
- [19:46]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
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Vince Baszer
It's not the only place where you have child labor in the supply chain of renewable energy. Not at all. Also in. There are lithium mines in Zimbabwe using kids. There's in Bolivia. Bolivia supplies most of the world's silver, and silver is a component in solar panels. There's kids working in those mines, too, in the nickel mines in Indonesia. So it's, you know, there's at least half a dozen other places around the world that they get much less attention.
- [20:16]
Robert Llewellyn
Excuse me. Yeah. I mean, that is so. That's just so depressing because I think, you know, if I, I've always quite enjoyed being critical of the oil industry ever since I understood more about what they do. But I haven't really come across a lot of accusations of child labor in the, in the white oil industry. Not a given that. Yeah, yeah, we've got there, we've got to give them that much. But I mean the fact that, what is it? So, so it's 70% of the world's cobalt is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Which should mean what it, you know, if we lived in a perfect world, that should mean finally they've got an income and they can improve the lives of the people in the Democratic Republic of Congo and they don't have to, you know, that's what should be happening. And I get the feeling that is definitely not what's happening.
- [21:04]
Vince Baszer
It's really not. I mean it's, you know, they, they, they supply this, you know, like you said, 70% of the world's cobalt. They're also a huge supplier of copper, which is another critical metal for this era. But it's still one of the poorest countries on earth. I mean most of the people there, the majority of the people there are living on, on less than $2 a day. And the wealth is, you know, it's a tiny layer of a local elites that are profiting and then overseas companies. Right. Again, Chinese companies own a lot of these mines or own parts of these mines. It's Chinese middlemen that buy the cobalt, raw cobalt from the small scale artisanal miners and then they sell it to Chinese exp who take it over to China to be refined. It's not only China, but China really dominates that place. And, and yeah, very little of the money is actually staying in Congo.
- [21:59]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah. And then, I mean the stuff you did about lithium, because that was the kind of area I was haziest about. I kind of knew that, you know, the Atacama Desert was an enormous supply of lithium. And in fact, since I read that chapter, there's been a report about an enormous lithium deposit in the United States. I can't remember. Have you heard about that? I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah, they just.
- [22:26]
Vince Baszer
Yeah. The thing about lithium is there's, there's quite a lot of it in a lot of places. I mean, like you said, they, they just discovered what they think is a gargantuan amount of lithium in Arkansas. There's a huge lithium mine that's just about to open up in, in Nevada. Two of them actually, they just approved one and there's another one at a place called Thacker Pass. That's going to come online pretty soon. The problem is like, you know, it's one thing to find these things like this, this discovery in Arkansas. Yeah, there's probably a lot of lithium down there under the ground somewhere. But can you get it out profitably? You know, can you, is it like, is the, is the ore rich enough? Is it close enough to transportation networks, to power, to infrastructure? Is the price high enough? So just because they've, they've found a whole bunch of lithium somewhere doesn't necessarily mean they're going to start producing that lithium.
- [23:21]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah. And I mean the mining industry is the whole, you know, it's enormous and it affects places all over the world. I mean I'm familiar with some of the practices in Australia as I'm married to an Australian, but I've been to British Columbia a few times recently and you know, I know there's, you've got a couple of mines there knocking about and in Canada in general there's a lot of, a lot of metals extraction. Yeah, but I mean that, what is again, you know, that is all presumably exported. If something, someone digs up copper in, I don't know in northern Canada it's put on a train, goes to a ship and probably goes to China.
- [24:00]
Vince Baszer
Most of it. I think most of it. I don't actually often, don't quote me on what's the Canada figures, but definitely a lot of it we do have, there's some, some refining here here in Canada, but not a lot. It's not a huge thing again because I mean it's just part of that, that offshoring of heavy industry. Right. Metal processing. You need big, you know, gigantic blast furnaces that use a lot of energy and belch out a lot of pollution. It's not a popular thing. Nobody wants that in their backyard.
- [24:30]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah, but I mean it does. It is that kind of in a sense there's a similarity to the metals that we all rely on, we buy, we use, we live with. And not knowing anything about where they come from is in a similar way too. I always think that, you know, in the argument about vegetarians or vegans and meat eaters, if a meat eater saw a cow going into a room and being shot in the head and cut up, they'd be a vegan pretty quickly. A lot of people would, you know.
- [25:01]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, no, I totally agree, I totally agree. I mean, you know, most of us have no idea where, how our food gets to the supermarket. We just, yeah, we just show up and there it is, you know, nice shrink wrapped bits of meat and, you know, beautiful tomatoes and whatnot and. Exactly. It's the same with our, with all of our manufactured products, really.
- [25:21]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah. But the other one I definitely didn't know is that lithium is just, I'm just. These are all from my notes, right. As I was reading, I went. I didn't know that lithium may be the oldest metal in the universe because I was thinking about.
- [25:33]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, yeah, I had no idea about that either. But yeah, they think, they believe it was created in the Big Bang. It was one of three or four elements that were created literally at the beginning of the universe.
- [25:44]
Robert Llewellyn
Wow.
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Vince Baszer
Very.
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Robert Llewellyn
Lithium.
- [25:46]
Vince Baszer
Don't ask me how scientists figured that out. That I have no idea.
- [25:51]
Robert Llewellyn
It's quite a good one though. I like that. But then, so I've written down Moly Corp. Minerals. So they're. Oh, they're Rare earth mining in Nevada. That was the, that was. Yeah, okay. Yeah. But then the one which was the most depressing, which I kind of had some understanding of, is the, is the kind of the valuable metals that people will essentially kill for. So killing for copper. You know, the copper, that whole. Can you tell, can you do a brief synopsis of that chapter? Because that was devastating because I mean we, most people who are listening will not know about this.
- [26:26]
Vince Baszer
But yeah, that one really blew my mind. I had no idea until I started looking into it. But the nutshell is hundreds of people are being, are dying and being killed in trying to get copper all over the world, and especially in South Africa where you have literal gangs of people shooting, you know, all out warfare, attacking each other over copper, basically. Why? Because thanks to the, what I call the electrodigital age, right, this era of renewable energy and digital electronics, we need way more copper than we've ever needed before. More than in all of human history, demand for copper is going through the roof. That means the price of copper is going through the roof. That means there's huge, there's a spike in copper theft, right? People stealing, you know, copper wire and wherever you can find copper, they're stealing it. And this is happening on such a huge scale. In South Africa, copper thieves are causing regular blackouts. They're bringing trains to a standstill. Hospitals have to be shut down because basically all their electrical wiring gets stripped out and stolen on a regular basis. And you know, it's become such a big business that there's, there are criminal gangs involved within it who are, you know, killing security guards that try to stop them, killing rival gangsters that try to get in their way. And also Hundreds and hundreds of people in the United States, probably in the United Kingdom too, die every year because they go and try to steal some live electric cable. So it's incredible. I mean, the body count is, you know, gotta be in the hundreds of people every year.
- [28:07]
Robert Llewellyn
So I knew, I knew it had happened here, particularly on the railways. That's where I've not heard about it recently, but certainly in the last 10 years you would hear of trains having to be canceled because a gang has stripped all the copper wires out of the, you know, that run all the communication systems that the railways rely on. And that's. Yeah, that's been. That's definitely happened here, but that is. Yeah, I mean, there's not, there's nothing, there's not really anything you can do about it. I mean, it is such a, you know, those things are just. It just seems to be human nature that if there's an opportunity to really stuff things up and try and make a quick buck, someone's going to do it. You know, it's going to. It's going to happen. Which is.
- [28:50]
Vince Baszer
Well, they've tried, you know, there are ways they've tried to crack down on it here in the States by things like. Because a lot of the stuff gets sold to recycling yards who then sell it on to refiners. So, you know, there are schemes to, like, you know, force recycling yards to, you know, to collect ID from people and, you know, these sort of measures to try to make sure that it's not stolen, but you can't really stop it. I mean, there's so much copper lying around all over the place and it's so easy to steal. Right. You can't put security guards on every, you know, 10 yards of electric manhole cover or every air conditioner. So, yeah, that's, that's what we're kind of stuck with.
- [29:33]
Robert Llewellyn
Because, I mean, it was one of the things that I did a TV show in this country and we made it for the United States. It was called Scrap Heap Challenge in this country and Junkyard wars in. In the usa, which was a kind of team challenge show. This will make sense in a moment. A team challenge show where two teams had to build a machine out of. Out of trash on a. On a scrap yard or a scrappy or whatever. And, and it was, you know, very successful show. It ran for 10 years and very. But one of the side issues that was nothing to do with the actual show was our knowledge of the price of scrap because we would, you know, in the first few series, we did Each year we would build a wall of busted cars, you know, 10 meters high. So we had a backdrop so that we hid the rest of the scrapyard, which was still a working yard with cranes and crushing machines and all that, so we could fence it off. Because there were so many cars, it was easy. And you just get one of those big cranes, it lifts about just like a kid building a wall of blocks. And then like the third or fourth year, so early 2000s, we couldn't get any cars. They were too. They were all being crushed and sent to China as fast as it was possible to do so. There were shiploads of crushed European cars going to China. And in those few years, even before that happened, I remember driving near where I live, which is in a rural area. It's very, not very heavily populated. You would just see a car like on the corner of the lane, maybe with a flat top. It's just left there because where can you take it? It's just worth nothing. It was just get rid of it. So people would drive it out to the country, leave it, you know, get in another car and drive home. I don't know. That was quite a common sight after this happened. You'd never see a car lying around. They were too valuable. But that, the kind of reprocessing of that material, I mean, that's what I want to. Sorry, I'm trying to get to the point where we've been looking at like extracting raw materials and refining them and all those issues. But actually there's such a big part of your. Basically half your book is about the other half of that, which is we've got all these materials we've already dug up. We really shouldn't leave them lying around. I mean, that was a good example of that. But I just wanted to go just before. I'm not a professional. You would, if you were interviewing someone, you'd do this much better than I am. I feel very bad, but I just want to get to know nickel, the Russian stuff, because I've never thought about that. I didn't even know that existed. That is the most extraordinary story. Can you please give us the thumbnail of nickel in Russia in a nutshell?
- [32:11]
Vince Baszer
So nickel again is a crucial ingredient for batteries in our electric cars and our phones, all our digital gadgets. And the world's top supplier, or until very recently, the world's top supplier of the high grade nickel that's best for batteries was Russia in particular, this one specific company, Norris Nickel, that's owned by a billionaire oligarch a buddy of Vladimir Putin's. And the amazing thing to me was, so when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, immediately the west, you know, responded with all these economic sanctions. Oh, we're cutting off, you know, imports of Russian commodities. This, that, the other. They did not cut off Russian nickel. This nickel was so important that we just very quietly increase in fact our imports of it that year. Yeah, that's finally changed. Just a few months ago the US finally did sanction Russian nickel. But for a good two years there we were just quietly going ahead and paying out, you know, billions of dollars to this Russian oligarch. So in a very real way, the electric car revolution helps to fund the invasion of the Ukraine.
- [33:24]
Robert Llewellyn
That is so depressing. That is very, very depressing. But I just think it is worth mentioning because it's. And also, I mean, yes, this. And that was also a brilliant example of offshoring our pollution and the impacts that we have on. Because there was an incredible story of the fuel tanks collapsing in 2020. Was that, that was.
- [33:47]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, that was also Norals. Yeah. So that, I mean the Russian nickel industry actually has, has been there for, it's been around for quite a long time.
- [33:54]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [33:54]
Vince Baszer
So that's, that's less of one that we handed to them. But it, yeah, they've had this, this huge nickel and other and copper industry up in the north and sort of Siberia for decades and it's turned that, it's just devastated that area. It's made it one of the most polluted on earth. In fact, the sulfur dioxide, this one particular toxin that comes out of their smokestacks, the amount that they're producing was more than all the rest of the sulfur dioxide produced in the rest of the world put together.
- [34:24]
Robert Llewellyn
Wow.
- [34:24]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, wow.
- [34:25]
Robert Llewellyn
That's just. Yeah. And I mean, you know, and we all know how obsessively tree hugging vegan and environmentalist the Russian government are.
- [34:36]
Vince Baszer
Yes, absolutely.
- [34:38]
Robert Llewellyn
So, but the other one which is interesting that you mentioned him because I've, I've interviewed him on the Fully Charged show podcast is Gerard Barron, who's the CEO of the metals company. So this is. And we also work with the amazing woman, Dr. Helen Chersky, who is a marine, a proper marine scientist who studies the effects that we're having on the oceans, who's quite, he's not that keen on deep sea mining, think it's fair to say. But that is so extraordinary that it's.
- [35:08]
Vince Baszer
Hard to find any real scientists that are keen on deep sea mining. Yeah, I looked, I looked. I couldn't really find any.
- [35:14]
Robert Llewellyn
Right. Because it is such a. I mean I've got, I actually have one of the nodules here. He sent me a nodule, so I have one of them as well. Yeah, you got. We should have, we should have, we should get together everyone who's been given a nodule. So we're in the nodule club, right.
- [35:33]
Vince Baszer
Or maybe we could put them all together, tell them.
- [35:36]
Robert Llewellyn
But I mean, I understand why they're so. Can you, can you describe why they're, why it could possibly be worth sending machine down to four miles deep in the ocean to dig up nodules. I mean they are extraordinary things.
- [35:49]
Vince Baszer
They really are. So they're, their nodules are these little, they're just rocks basically. They're like the size of your fist. They're these sort of black sort of potato shaped rocks that just happen to be packed with all kinds of critical metals that we need. There's copper, cobalt, nickel and a couple of manganese. So it's this incredible resource and there are literally billions of them down there. So it is an enormous potential source of these metals that we really do need. So what Gerard Barron and several other companies and national governments want to do is mine them, basically strip mine the ocean floor to bring these nodules, to get these nodules and bring them up to the surface. So obviously there's a lot of potential money to be made, but my God, the risk that we pose, the damage that could be done to the world's oceans is just, is incalculable.
- [36:44]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [36:45]
Vince Baszer
And you know, not forgetting that the oceans are already terribly stressed by climate change, by political pollution, by overfishing. So to add on the extra stress of literally tearing up the ocean floor, I mean, you know, basically like, like I said, pretty much any scientist that's looked at it says at, you know, at best we, we really need to wait and do more research. And at worst, we should never ever do this. Hundreds and hundreds of scientists have signed a petition saying we shouldn't do this. Even some of the companies that are in the business of needing these materials, ocean materials. Nonetheless, the metals company, which is Gerard Barron's company, is still pushing really hard to get permission to start as soon as next year. Right.
- [37:37]
Robert Llewellyn
I mean it can sort of understand it in his argument, just to give him his due, is that in order to get the equivalent amount of metals as they can extract, where there's, there's, I mean, his argument, there's no waste in the nodule, you would use every single bit of it because it's all it's just made of all those critical elements. But. And in order to get those, you'd have to dig away half a mountain in Malaysia or a huge pit in Siberia or, you know, massive quarry and whatever, you know, huge amount of disruption to get the same amount of metal. And this is, you know, I mean that his argument was. I mean, his argument, the one thing that I always remember him saying is by 2050, we've got to stop digging shit up. Which was, you know, very, very Australian terminology used to that. But I mean that's. I think that is a. Well, in a sense that leads us on to the, the next step. So I've been very followed very closely the work of J.B. straubel of the. Of redwood materials, of the notion that you can. And we definitely should recycle everything that we use and we should use it again. That's pretty obvious. And it's the kind of biggest argument about fossil fuels because I've never seen a fluid ounce of recycled diesel that's already been used. That's a tall ask, I think, to do that. But basically it's been incredibly sobering reading your book because those things are possible. And he. I mean, redwood materials are operating and they are recycling and they are producing materials that can be used again. But it's incredibly hard work and very energy demanding. You know, it uses a lot of energy.
- [39:26]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, absolutely. I mean this was really, it was disappointing to me too, to find out that, you know, recycling, which is everybody's favorite solution.
- [39:33]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [39:34]
Vince Baszer
I mean it helps, don't get me wrong, it's better than digging up virgin materials, but it's also very energy intensive. It's very dirty, very polluting and it's often done on the backs of the poorest people in the world.
- [39:46]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [39:46]
Vince Baszer
So there's a lot to be cleaned up in the whole recycling industry. And even in the best case, again, it's not a silver bullet. It's not going to solve all our problems. It'll help. It's part of the solution. But recycling comes with its own really serious costs and we have to recognize that.
- [40:04]
Robert Llewellyn
And I mean, it is the kind of the E Waste stories from Nigeria. I mean, I did know that that was happening, but not to the detail that you went into. But I mean, that is. And that was also an image I remember from a documentary I saw about the early stages of redwood materials. And Straubel was these huge containers that were, you know, delivered by big forklift trucks, massive sort of boxes full of flip phones and an old Old fashioned cell phones, I mean they're not that old but you know in, in terms of technology, they just, just throw them out like that. They've all been thrown and it wasn't a hundred or two and it was millions of them. Of course there were millions of them and of course they do contain valuable materials but they've got to be broken up. And the stuff, the way you describe the way that those people busting up plastic phones and ripping out the cards and trying to get. Just incredible. But I think it's the amount of it that is the, you know, if you bust up one little phone in your front room, you've got some bits of plastic and I've forgotten the name for the little green thing with all the bits on it. What's that called?
- [41:14]
Vince Baszer
The printed circuit board.
- [41:15]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah, the circuit board. Sorry, that's what I was searching for, that term but you know, you, it's not a big deal. But if you have 2 million of those in a pile, that's a big.
- [41:24]
Vince Baszer
Exactly, exactly.
- [41:27]
Robert Llewellyn
Quite a big industry in Nigeria. I mean that employs a lot of people working in.
- [41:31]
Vince Baszer
It employs a lot of people. And it's not just Nigeria. I mean you can find you know, e waste recyclers like that all over the developing world. Right, all over the place. You know, because there's, there's little, the amount of value inside of each one of our gadgets, each phone or laptop or whatever, it's small, it's only, you know, it's 10, 20, 50 cents. And nobody in the western world is going to pay you to do that. But if you're living in a country where the average wage is $2 a day, if you can make $0.50 off of an hour's work, that's great.
- [42:06]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah. The one tiny light that we have seen in this otherwise quite dark world is a machine that Apple have developed specifically for their phones. So they, and when you, when they gave us the stats, so we, we did a program about it and it's got a name and I can't remember, there's an app, we've done an episode about it and it's a machine that literally tears the phone to bits, punches out the circuit boards, then breaks down and separates each individual part into again vast boxes of like 12 million lenses from iPhone cameras. It's just like when you see it you just go, I can't believe it. But obviously they've all got a value but they know what's gone into it. They've only do iPhones. They know what's gone into it and they're already using an enormous amount of that material in their new iPhones, which is, you know, that's their kind of marketing shtick. But we need to do that with everything. I mean, and they're talking about 1.4 billion iPhones. That's the kind of numbers. So it's tons of gold and tons of nickel and, you know, it's extraordinary.
- [43:15]
Vince Baszer
Exactly, exactly. And even though it's, you know, it's expensive and it's hard to do, but it's much easier than getting that gold out of rock.
- [43:24]
Robert Llewellyn
Right.
- [43:24]
Vince Baszer
You know.
- [43:24]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [43:25]
Vince Baszer
So, yeah, I mean, you know, we can be doing a lot better. One of the things we need is a lot more, you know, research and development into ways to recycle more effectively, more efficiently.
- [43:38]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [43:38]
Vince Baszer
All the rest of it.
- [43:39]
Robert Llewellyn
And that's another. Another thing is the transportation, which I must admit, I'd never even considered that. You know, if you've got 10, 100,000 phones here and you send them to anywhere you're shipping them, you know, that's weight and it's got mass and it's got to be moved.
- [43:55]
Vince Baszer
That ship burning up diesel to transport them back and forth. Yeah. And the thing that blew my mind the most was how these people, you know, these entrepreneurs in places like Nigeria are making money selling our own trash back to us.
- [44:09]
Robert Llewellyn
Back.
- [44:11]
Vince Baszer
You know, we send them, you know, container loads of old cell phones, they smash them apart, separate out all the, you know, the circuit boards and then they sell the circuit boards right back to us.
- [44:22]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah. That is extraordinary, that. Yeah. And it is. So. Yeah. What it was one of. Yeah. Your statistics around that 1 in 6 dead cell phones are recycled. Which means, you know, every landfill site that you ever looked at, there's hundreds of thousands of bits of electronic.
- [44:39]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, yeah.
- [44:40]
Robert Llewellyn
Which is not good. I mean, I've got. We've all got it. I've got a special shelf in my cupboard which is old, you know, now like probably 25, 30 year old laptops and phones and things. And I do, I mean, I have recycled them to be fair to myself or no, I have taken them to a place where they are recycled. I hope the copper, that one there was a description of, I think that was in Nigeria, of people burning off the coating on copper wire at night so that nobody complained about the smell because they were asleep. Oh my God. That's just.
- [45:20]
Vince Baszer
It's horrifying. Yeah. I mean that's. That's another one of the big downsides. Right, Is there's tons of burning Right, these. Yes, these scrappers in Nigeria and other places. Yeah, they just burn all this wire to get the plastic or the rubber off of it and it creates incredibly toxic smoke. And of course, nobody's got any kind of protective masks. Nobody's, you know, doing any sort of anything to. To mitigate all the, you know, the pollution that this creates.
- [45:49]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah, yeah, that is. I mean, because it's also that thing where in a sense, like in, you know, Democratic Republic of Congo, there are actual legitimate minds that employ people in safe conditions with big diggers and big trucks and they are extracting huge amounts of material in what we would accept would be a traditional mining environment. And then around that there is the sort of the artisanal mining and the. And in a similar way there's kind of proper big companies that have learning, are learning and starting to develop technologies to recycle car batteries because there's a lot of value in them. But one of the things we saw last year was, was disposable vape batteries that had been stripped out of tens of thousands. And it wasn't like five batteries, it was tens of thousands of tiny. They're actually rechargeable batteries that look recognizably like batteries that people literally throw away. There's always a sort of extra bit that you kind of haven't thought about, you know.
- [46:50]
Vince Baszer
Right, right, right, yeah. When you stop and think about how many batteries are in so many things. Right. We always think about phones and laptops, but it's also like any power tool that you have, you know, if you've got a cordless drill or a cordless screwdriver, you know, or weed whacker. Like, there's so many devices in our world that have the same battery. They're all lithium ion batteries or they're almost all lithium ion battery batteries. E bikes and vapes. I hadn't really thought about vapes, but.
- [47:22]
Robert Llewellyn
You know, I never had before I saw this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it was a. It was an artistic project that was using e waste to build. It was an artist that was doing it. That's. So the other one is then you sort of, towards the end of your book, you talk about how, you know, and I think, I'm sure I'm older than you, but we both have an age where we would remember that going into a store, grocery store, or even a supermarket and not seeing the same level of single use plastics that we do now, that has just become normal. When that's happened in our lifetime. When I was a kid, milk Came in a glass bottle that you washed out and gave back to the man that brought the milk. You know, that was, I would think, 95% of milk consumed in the UK. That was where it came from. You know, it was not, it was never in a plastic. But so, but also that stuff was repaired. So my mother was of the wartime generation where everything was used again and repaired and looked after and you know, everything was patched and mended. And I just love this, that this. In 1966, according to research, 200,000Americans worked as home appliance repairers. And by 2023, that had dropped to about 40,000 in the whole of the United States. Yeah, because you don't mend stuff. You go, oh, the tumble dryer is broken, let's get another one, which is.
- [48:50]
Vince Baszer
Mind boggling and get a new one.
- [48:52]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah, and it's cheaper to get a new one.
- [48:55]
Vince Baszer
It's usually cheaper to get a new one, which is crazy. It is absolutely crazy. And it's only cheaper because we don't really factor in the real costs of manufacturing a new one.
- [49:07]
Robert Llewellyn
Right.
- [49:07]
Vince Baszer
The fact that we can get all, you know, get these things cheap because again, they're usually made in China, you know, but you know, that doesn't take into account all the damage that was done by getting the raw materials for them and the product, all the stuff we've been talking about. But the good news is there is a real push, you know, what's called the right to repair movement. A lot of people working hard to, to reverse that and to make things, to force manufacturers to make their products easier to repair. Because a lot of. One part of the reason that we don't fix stuff anymore is companies that make it deliberately, make them hard to repair, especially electronics, they do not supply the manuals that you need to know how to fix the thing they don't provide. You can't buy spare parts for them. Sometimes you can't even use. You need special tools like to open the laptop, the MacBook that I'm talking to you on. You can't use a regular screwdriver. You need a special star shaped screwdriver. Right. It's crazy. So, but there's actually the European Union I know just passed, has passed a couple of laws just in the last year or two to basically to force, like I said, to force corporations to make their products easier to repair. So hopefully that's going to make a difference because it just, it makes no sense whatsoever.
- [50:35]
Robert Llewellyn
And your final chapter, the road forward and how to travel it really resonated with me because it's what we say on the show all the time about how we continue. And I think you mentioned. I mean, I'm afraid I've become a Utrecht for fan, but I think you mentioned Utrecht as being sort of an example of that. And we spent a couple of days filming there. We've been there a few times. And I mean, it's just. It is a remarkable achievement and I think the Dutch are rightly proud of it. But, I mean, would you like to explain a bit of your. Your take on it? Because that's.
- [51:09]
Vince Baszer
Yeah. You know, it. Yeah. Well, I went to. My introduction was Amsterdam, which is similar. Like, I just. I, you know, I flew into Amsterdam, I took the train into the middle of the city, and you come out in the main train station in the middle of Amsterdam, and the first thing you walk by is this gigantic parking lot that's nothing but bicycles.
- [51:29]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [51:30]
Vince Baszer
Thousands and thousands of bicycles. I had never seen anything like it. And I'm a biking guy. I mean, I've been, you know, a big biker for. For decades here in North America. Never. Wow. It completely blew my mind. And then you go walking, walking around town and the whole. There are bicycles everywhere. Bicycles getting everyone to and fro and, you know, old people, young people out of shape, people in shape people, people in suits on their way to business meeting. It's just become so normalized. It's really incredible. It's really inspiring. And that's. That's not an accident, right? It's not. Because the Dutch just happened to love bicycles. No. In the 70s, they were like the rest of us, right there, you know, car. There were very few bikes and lots and lots of cars. But this. They. This movement got started by this man whose daughter was killed by a motorist.
- [52:25]
Robert Llewellyn
That's right.
- [52:25]
Vince Baszer
And he looked around and he said, you know, he started an organization called no More Child Murders, basically saying, let's make our streets safer for people again. And it really helped start this whole movement to just not to get rid of cars, but to make the streets more accessible, safer for pedestrians and for bicycles. And 40 years later, they're reaping these incredible benefits, you know?
- [52:49]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [52:50]
Vince Baszer
Where like something like half of all the trips that are taken in cities like Utrecht or Amsterdam are now by bicycle. Whereas here in the United states, it's like 5% tops.
- [53:01]
Robert Llewellyn
Yes.
- [53:01]
Vince Baszer
As a result, the cities are much safer. They're cleaner, they're quieter and way more pleasant. Right. It's way more. It's much nicer to just walk around streets where There aren't cars zooming by you all the time.
- [53:14]
Robert Llewellyn
There's a great. When we were there last time, which a few years ago, there was a great. We were on a street where there was a bike path. There were lots of cafes with seats outside trees. There was a bike path and a tram, a tram line, no cut. There was no cars at all. And then we suddenly saw this photograph that was on display. Big black and white photograph of that street in 1972. And it looked like any street in any city now with cars jammed in, like loads of cars, no trees, no people. You couldn't see any people. And that's what it was like. So it did show, you know, we did used to be like that, but we. We've. We've moved on. And it was such a delightful. We were just walking along, you know, walking along the street and it was. You just go, why can't we all. But I mean, it is that thing where that's in a sense, goes beyond the digital electrical age of, you know, electric cars. It is. The car has come to dominate our cities particularly. I mean, I think North America set the bar. Let's build huge cities with wide streets that have thousands of cars. And they're very much built around all the sub. The suburban expansion really, you know, was built around the.
- [54:21]
Vince Baszer
It was all built for cars and not for people.
- [54:23]
Robert Llewellyn
And yeah, that's a hard one to battle because, I mean, Utrecht, the middle of Utrecht, I think was probably built a thousand years ago. So, you know, some old streets that are very narrow, same as in this country. We've got a lot of that. But that. And the last bit that I really hadn't thought about, even though we talked about it a lot. My wife went to China to. Trained to be an acrobat in 1984. And there's amazing pictures of her. She's an Australian. And so there's this big lanky white woman in. In a street in China surrounded by, you know, a quarter of a million Chinese children all staring at this weird figure so very much back then. And everyone was on bikes. All the photographs she's got is just bicycles. There is. There's. I don't think that she's got a picture of any. Any cars. It's buses, trucks and bicycles and obviously that they've gone completely other way. They said they were really cool with bicycles. Now it's Carl city.
- [55:23]
Vince Baszer
Yeah. Yeah. It's really unfortunate. Yes. But. But, you know, it's. It's not too late. I mean, the moral that I take away from all this is that there's nothing permanent about the way we have our city set up. We've. We've set up our cities around cars, you know, deliberately and consciously and we can unmake those decisions.
- [55:47]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah.
- [55:48]
Vince Baszer
I mean, places like Los Angeles or Phoenix or Houston, I don't know, it might be too late for them, but certainly, you know, cities like London, Paris, even where I live, in Vancouver. Yeah, there can. We can. And we are in fact doing a lot to really bring city streets, give the streets back to people.
- [56:05]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:05]
Vince Baszer
It really is doable and it is being done in a lot of places.
- [56:09]
Robert Llewellyn
And I mean the other. I suppose the flip side of that is in a. If. If we did do things like they do a new Trek. Don't want to give you Trek too much. But. But they do amazing car sharing schemes. So they have. There's less cars and I've seen that in a couple of. Berlin is another place where it's very successful car sharing which end up. Ends up the people who live in the middle of the city, they don't want to own a car. It's pain in the ass, you know, so you, you share them and that. And therefore you have less.
- [56:37]
Vince Baszer
Vancouver, where I live, we have this, this service called Evo, where it's. There's just cars, you know, all over the place and you use an app and you find a car and then you drive the car wherever you need to go and you just leave it. It's great. You have to pay for. You don't have to pay for parking. You don't have to deal with your own garage, you know. Yeah, it's fantastic. So much easier than. Than owning your own car.
- [56:57]
Robert Llewellyn
I mean, it is. I think that's. That's what I hope. I sort of the hope. I. Because I was. I went. Definitely went through a. A mild depression about three quarters of the way through your book. Just because it's like, you know, you're not, you're not. You're not buttering it up. You're not saying this is okay. You're saying this is bad. We need to work this out. I mean, I really encourage. I want to encourage people to read it because it is. It just. It arms you with. With facts, I think, which are very useful. So when you hear stupid nonsense about materials and electric cars and recycling, you actually need to know. I mean it is that difficult thing we've all got to do is understand what's really going on rather than what we're occasionally told by.
- [57:39]
Vince Baszer
Yeah, well, thank. I really appreciate you saying that, but I really. I hope it didn't leave you too depressed by the end because really what I try to do in the second half of the book is point us to solutions. They're are things we can do that'll make things better and a lot of those things are already starting to happen.
- [57:56]
Robert Llewellyn
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's what I wanted to end on. It was. By the time I got to the end, I was a little bit more cheered up.
- [58:03]
Vince Baszer
Good.
- [58:06]
Robert Llewellyn
No, well, thank. Thank you so much, Vince. I mean, I really. I really appreciated reading it. I'm really glad that I got the chance to see it so it comes out. I think this is probably going to go out after your book comes out, but it comes out in early November. Is that when it.
- [58:19]
Vince Baszer
November 19th.
- [58:20]
Robert Llewellyn
November 19th. Oh, we'll. Hopefully we'll be. We'll set. This will certainly be close to that, which would be great. And is it. And it's. Is it published all over the. I mean, cool. Will people in the UK be able to get it?
- [58:32]
Vince Baszer
Yep, there's going to be. There's a British edition that's coming out and, you know, for listening anywhere else, you know, you can order it from Amazon, you can get it through anywhere, anywhere books are sold, as they say.
- [58:42]
Robert Llewellyn
Very good. Brilliant stuff. Oh, well, all straight to you and hopefully we might see you in Vancouver next year with a bit of luck. I think we're back there doing a show.
- [58:51]
Vince Baszer
Yeah. Give me a shout. Absolutely.
- [58:53]
Robert Llewellyn
Will do. I'll do. All right, thank you so much. And you take care.
- [58:57]
Vince Baszer
All right, thanks for having me.
- [59:00]
Robert Llewellyn
Really hope you enjoyed that. Not going to waffle on. Please do join us again next week. We've got another amazing guest, another amazing episode. Do tell your friends about it and please have a lovely week and we will see you all soon. As always, if you have been. Thank you for listening slash watching.