One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour: One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining

Release Date: January 14, 2025
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Vince Beiser, author of Power Metal; Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, host David Remnick engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Vince Beiser, the author of Power Metal, and Elizabeth Kolbert, a renowned environmental journalist. The discussion delves into the intricate world of rare earth metals, their pivotal role in modern technology and renewable energy, and the environmental and geopolitical challenges associated with their extraction and processing.

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Rare Earth Metals and Their Significance

Vince Beiser opens the discussion by highlighting the often-overlooked importance of rare earth metals in everyday devices. He states, “One of my favorite super obscure metals in your phone is probably europium. There are tiny, tiny amounts of europium in your cell phone screen that make it capable of showing the color red” (01:44).

Beiser emphasizes that rare earth metals, comprising 17 elements in total, are crucial for renewable energy technologies, electric vehicles, and a vast array of consumer electronics. He points out, “Almost all of them, one way or another, come through China. China overwhelmingly dominates the supply chain of these rare earth metals” (02:30).

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Environmental Impact of Mining

The conversation shifts to the environmental toll of mining activities. Beiser explains that mining is inherently destructive and polluting, citing the example of the Mountain Pass mine in California. He describes the site as “just nothing but empty, silent desert all around you... an enormous pit in the ground” (07:06).

Elizabeth Kolbert adds depth to the discussion by sharing her experiences reporting on environmental degradation, such as the melting ice sheets in Greenland. The dialogue underscores the urgent need to balance technological advancement with environmental stewardship.

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Geopolitical Implications of Mining Dominance

Beiser discusses the geopolitical leverage China gains by controlling the rare earth supply chain. He remarks, “China, too, is getting kind of fed up with this... They're now outsourcing some of their production to other places” (04:54). This dominance poses challenges for Western countries striving for energy independence and technological advancement.

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Reshoring Mining in the U.S. and Canada

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the potential benefits of reshoring mining operations to the United States and Canada. Beiser advocates for this shift, arguing, “We have higher environmental standards... What I would argue it can be done with less overall damage to the planet if it's done in the United States” (05:11).

He highlights the strategic importance of controlling critical industries and reducing dependence on China. The conversation touches upon legislative efforts like the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to support domestic mining activities.

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Innovative and Sustainable Mining Practices

Beiser introduces innovative ideas aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of mining. He is particularly enthusiastic about phytomining, a process where plants are used to extract metals from the soil. He describes it as, “basically using plants to mine... you could plant a bunch of these plants and basically clean the earth” (12:38).

While promising, Beiser notes that phytomining is still in the research phase and not yet commercially viable. However, he remains hopeful about its potential to revolutionize sustainable mining practices.

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Looking Ahead: Policy and Personal Responsibility

The episode concludes with a discussion on future policies under different U.S. administrations. Beiser speculates on the Trump administration's potential impact, suggesting it might “make it easier... for people to open up these critical metal mines” (14:08). However, he also expresses uncertainty about the administration's stance on renewable energy incentives.

Beiser offers a personal perspective on reducing environmental impact, sharing his experience of downsizing his family's vehicle fleet in Vancouver to embrace sustainable living. He asserts, “The most impact that we as individuals can have on all these issues... is don’t buy a car, not even an electric one” (16:33).

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Notable Quotes

• Vince Beiser: “We need mining. We have absolutely got to get our hands on more of these metals in order to pull off the energy transition” (05:11).

• Vince Beiser: “Phytomining... you can use it not only for mining, but also to clean up polluted areas” (12:38).

• Vince Beiser: “There is no one single silver bullet that's going to save us all. It's going to take lots and lots and lots of different solutions” (16:33).

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Conclusion

This episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour offers a nuanced exploration of the critical role rare earth metals play in our modern world and the complex interplay between environmental sustainability and technological progress. Vince Beiser and Elizabeth Kolbert provide insightful perspectives on how the United States can navigate the challenges of mining, aiming for a balance that fosters both innovation and ecological responsibility. Listeners are left with a deeper understanding of the implications of mining practices and the collective actions needed to achieve a sustainable future.

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Listen to the full episode here or subscribe to The New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

[Vince Beiser]

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[WNYC Studios]

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[David Remnick]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Given how much Donald Trump says he loves mining, you would think the blood of every environmentalist in the world is now running cold. One possible exception may be the journalist Vince Beisser. Beisser's recent book is called Power Metal, and it's about what's called rare earth metals. Elements you've possibly never heard of, but that power every device you own. Vince Beiser spoke with the New Yorker's Elizabeth Colbert, herself an environmental journalist of great renown and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

[Vince Beiser]

Vince, you've written that to make that iPhone in your pocket, £75 of ore had to be pulled up, crushed and smelted, which is kind of an astonishing figure. And you also note that a cell phone can contain as many as 2/3 of the elements on the periodic table. Can you pick maybe one of the more obscure elements in there and trace its journey for us?

Sure. One of my favorite super obscure metals in your phone is probably europium. There are tiny, tiny amounts of europium in your cell phone screen that make it capable of showing the color red. So what in the world is europium? Europium is one of 17 metals. This basket of metals that are called rare earth metals, there's 17 of them. They're all like, down in this corner in the periodic table, they've all got weird names and all of them are incredibly important for renewable energy across the board, for electric vehicles, in addition to our cell phones and pretty much all of our consumer electronics. The thing to know about ra earths, about europium and these other rare earths, is that almost all of them, one way or another, come through China. China overwhelmingly dominates the supply chain of these rare earth metals. So China mines a lot of them within its own borders. They have one of the biggest rare earth mines on the planet, which is also, by the way, one of the most polluted places on the planet. They also own pieces of rare earth mines all over the world, including in the United States. We have one rare earth mine in the United States in Southern California, and a Chinese company owns a chunk of it. But no matter where those rare earth metals are dug up anywhere on the planet, almost all of them end up going to China to be refined, to be processed into the pure metals that we can actually use.

So one of the key points of your book is that, you know, mining is a dirty business. And as a result, countries that tighten their own environmental regulations, like the US Tend to get those elements from somewhere else. Are we just outsourcing the damage?

Yeah, I mean, the United States used to be, you know, probably the biggest mining power in the world not too long ago. And all of the metals we're talking about, everything that we need for the energy transition and for digital tech. What I call the electro digital age, came from the United States until pretty recently, until about 50, 60 years ago, when basically Americans got tired of all the mess, right? Mining's incredibly destructive. It's incredibly polluting. I mean, still today, something like half of the waterways in the American west, the rivers and streams, are still polluted from all the metal mining that's happened there. So we got tired of it and we decided, you know what, like, let it happen somewhere else. Just like with our heavy industries, with, you know, car making and steel making and all the rest of it, we basically decided, you know what, let somewhere like China do all the dirty work, let them do the mining and deal with all the mess, and we'll just buy the products. At the end of the day, that's now coming back to bite us because it's given China this enormous geopolitical leverage in that they really control the supply chain for all these metals. So China, too, is getting kind of fed up with this, right? There's, you know, the environmental devastation in China is just massive. So they also are starting to raise the environmental bar. And basically they're now outsourcing some of their production to other places.

So there is, you know, a big push beginning in the Biden administration and certainly a lot of Trump's rhetoric around reshoring heavy industry. Should we be reshoring mining? I mean, you mentioned that we have a lot of these metals still on the ground. Do we want to reopen these mines?

If you ask me? You know, a lot of people really hate it when I say this. A lot of environmentally minded folks. But I do believe we should be open to allowing more mining to happen in the United States and also in Canada, by the way, where I live. Why? Not because it's nice. Not because I think mining is great. It's not mining is inherently destructive. There's no getting around it. But we need mining. We have absolutely got to get our hands on more of these metals in order to pull off the energy transition. There's just no way to build all the EVs and solar panels and all the rest of it without some amount of mining. And in the United States, number one, we do have higher environmental standards than places like Indonesia or Myanmar, where we're currently getting a lot of these metals. We have higher labor standards. Right. Workers are going to get treated better. You know, in the big picture, I would argue it can be done with less overall damage to the planet if it's done in the United States. Number two is that returns control of some of these really critical industries to us, to the west, takes it out of the hands of China and puts it back under our control. So there's a solid environmental argument and definitely a, you know, a national security argument for it. And this is something that the Biden administration was pushing. There's, there's a lot of money in the Inflation Reduction act, which is their giant piece of renewable energy promoting legislation that was going to support mining in the United States. And there's some movement for that to start happening. Like that rare earth mine that I mentioned in Southern California.

Yeah, let's talk about that. You visit the Mountain Pass mine in California where they mine for rare earth elements. And so can you, first off, just describe what that place looks like? And also can you talk about, you know, the dangers that mining for rare earths poses?

Yeah, it used to be the main rare earth mine on the planet. It supplied most of the world's rare earths for a long time. Not that anybody really cared that much about rare earths until, you know, the last couple, three decades and it was shut down because they were spilling accidentally all kinds of toxic waste into the desert. It's out in the middle of the desert, halfway more or less between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. And you're just driving along and it's just nothing but empty, silent desert all around you. And then all of a sudden, up on this ridge, there's just this explosion of industry. It looks like some giant desert fortress of industrialization. It's like these big holding tanks and warehous and beltways and connectors. And in the middle of it is an enormous pit in the ground. You can stand on the edge of it and you look hundreds and hundreds of feet down and there are these giant trucks the size of a small house. They look like bugs down on the bottom of this hole that's how big it is. And they're only going deeper and deeper and deeper. That hole is just going to get bigger and bigger for the next 10, 20, 30 years. So it's not pretty. All that said, you know, as environmentally destructive industries go, it's not that bad, right? Again, mining always causes a certain amount of damage, but this particular one, number one, it's way out in the desert, so there's nobody really living nearby. So that's a plus. Number two, what they got in trouble for before was dumping polluted water into the desert. So the latest company that owns the place that bought it about five, six years ago, by now they've got a new process to deal with that wastewater. Now they have an on site system where they evaporate out a lot of the water and sort of separate out the, the chemicals and waste, compress it, consolidate it down into something much smaller which they can then bury in lined impoundments, basically like a huge box in the ground. So it's, it appears to be quite a bit safer and quite a bit cleaner than what was happening there before.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

Vince Beiser speaking with the New Yorker's Elizabeth Colbert. More in a moment.

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[Vince Beiser]

Are there any, you know, ideas that you ran into that are sort of really game changing or paradigm shifting in terms of how we get metals to just mine more cleanly and efficiently that people have tossed up, even if they're sort of blue sky ideas?

There's one that I absolutely love. It's called phytomining, and it's basically using plants to mine. So in a nutshell, there's a bunch of different plants around the world that literally suck metal out of the ground. They suck it up through their roots and like bring it up into their stalks and their leaves. Weird plants, but there are lots of them. So in theory, you can plant a bunch of these plants, you know, in an area that's full of cobalt nickel, whatever, have the plants pull all the metal out of the ground and then extract, like burn the plants and extract that somehow, like get the metal out of the plants. So this is doable. These plants exist. The technology does exist to get the metal out of the plants. I absolutely love this idea, you know, because you can use it not only for mining, but also to clean up polluted areas. Right. You could plant a bunch of these plants and basically clean the earth. At this point, though, it's really just at the research phase. There's a few different research projects around the world that are looking into it. The US Government is actually putting a few million bucks into supporting some of them. It's a long way from being something that we can deploy on a big scale, let alone that anybody can make money off of yet. But man, I hope so. I'm pulling for the plant miners.

So I wonder if you have any expectations for the Trump administration. Do you think there is going to be more land Opened up for mining, maybe even federal land. I don't know.

Yeah, it's a great question. What's going to happen once Trump comes in? So on the mining front, obviously he doesn't care at all about environmental rules. He wants to blow them all up and drill, baby, drill. Right. He loves oil and gas. So on the plus side, it'll probably be good for domestic mining. It'll, he'll make it easier, one imagines, for people to open up these critical metal mines because again, there's lots of it here. There are lots of projects in the works. I mean, everything is sort of ready to go. And one of the things that's slowing it down is regulations. So he may, it may be good for the mining industry, which, you know, to some extent is indirectly good for the planet and for the rest of us. On the other hand, Trump has no interest in renewable energy per se, especially hates offshore wind turbines, apparently because they block the view from one of his Scottish golf courses. He said many times that he really has no use for electric vehicles. Loves gasoline. On the other other hand, now, Elon Musk is his best buddy. And Elon Musk is still the boss of the world's number one electric vehicle maker. So presumably that's going to change his views. On the other other, other hand. So one of the things, a lot of hands. I don't even know how I got so many hands. So one of the things the Biden administration did to promote electric vehicle use was to give rebates. Right. If you buy an EV right now in the U.S. i think you get something like $7,500 in federal rebates back. Something like that. Trump wants to kill those. And Elon Musk actually also might be in favor of killing those. Why? Because Teslas are already profitable. The people who are going to suffer are his competitors. Right. It's like these guys who, whose EVs are not yet profitable. So how's that going to affect EV adoption across the board? Hard to say.

Yeah. When you look at the damage, sometimes one can get the feeling that we're just shuffling around the problem from trying to transition to clean energy to save the climate, but in the process cutting down the rainforest so that we're just in this endless cycle of just moving the problem around. What do you say to that dire thought?

I say you're right and I have hope. And here is my hope. I think that the most important piece of the many solutions is indeed stop moving the problem around and reduce it at its source. And the source is Us, the source is demand. The most impact that we as individuals can have on all these issues that we're talking about is don't buy a car, not even an electric one. If you must buy a car, make it an electric one. But we're all way better off if we can reduce the number of cars that are on the world's roads. Cars are far and away the biggest consumers of all the metals that we're talking about and also of energy. That's the biggest energy and resource hog of anything that any of us own, except for our houses. If you own a house. There's about something like 1.2 billion automobiles on the world's roads right now. Almost all of them, you know, gas powered. And if we swap those 1.2 billion gas cars for 1.2 billion electric cars, then we're just going to swap one set of problems for another. But if we can Instead turn that 1.2 billion gas cars into half a billion electric cars, we'll all be way better off. And by the way, I really believe we'll also see an improvement in our quality of life. Quick example from my own life. I used to live in Los Angeles with my wife, our two kids, pretty typical setup. And of course, we had two cars. Well, a few years ago we moved back to my hometown of Vancouver, Canada, and immediately we got rid of one of those cars. Why? Because we just didn't need it. Because the city, Vancouver, has put a lot of energy and effort just in the last 10, 20 years into building up a great network of bicycle paths so you can bicycle around safely and easily all over the place. There's a pretty decent public transit network. They've done a lot to promote walkable neighborhoods so it's easier to get around on foot. It's a way more pleasant way to live. And P.S. it's also a huge savings. That's one less car that I don't have to insure and park and do maintenance on and register. Losing a car has been a big quality of life upgrade for me. And again, that's not going to solve climate change all by itself. And it doesn't mean that Vancouver is carbon zero. It's not, but it helps. You know, that's the only way we're going to get to a sustainable future. There is no one single silver bullet that's going to save us all. It's going to take lots and lots and lots of different solutions, you know, each of which is going to help a bit. A little bit, A little bit. That will hopefully all add up to enough to get us to where we need to go, but I'm hopeful, I gotta tell you.

Vince, thanks so much. This is really fascinating.

Well, thanks so much for having me on, Elizabeth. It was really a treat.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

Vince Spizer's recent book is called Power Metal and he spoke with Elizabeth Kolberg, who's the author of Under a White sky and many other books. Betsy recently reported from Greenland about the melting of the ice sheet there. It's a riveting piece and you can find it along with all of her [e-mail] and you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. New yorker.com I'm David Remnick. That's our program for this week. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

[David Remnick]

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