Angry Planet - Ore Is the New Oil

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Oil makes the world go ‘round, for now. But rare earth minerals such as lithium are increasingly in demand and, as a result, the source of conflict. With us on the show today is Reuters journalist Ernest Scheyder. His new book The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives explores the new resource war that’s sucking in community activists, titans of industry, and global superpowers.Scheyder’s work at ReutersThe War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our LivesWe took questions from subscribers this week for the show. If you want in on the discussions and memes, and want to get an idea of what’s coming up click the link below.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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We don't want anyone to see this. So, well, you mentioned a book. Tell us what the book is. Tell us who you are. Awesome. Well, great to be with you, Jason and Matthew. My name's Ernest Scheider. My day job is at Reuters, where I read about the critical mineral sector.

And I've written a book called The War Below, Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. Now, it sounds like it might be a book about mining specifically, but it's not really. It's a book about choice broadly. It's a book about the choices our world needs to make if we want a clean energy transition, if we want cell phones and other. battery power devices that are increasingly underpinning every single part of our everyday lives. All of those electronics are built with lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt, and rare earths, and many other minerals and metals, and they all come from somewhere. But most of those production of those necessary materials are not in the United States right now. And so it brings up a whole host

of questions about where, how, and why we should be producing these building blocks if we want to go green and if we want all of these electronics. I mean, right now the United States produces hardly any of them. And so I was really wanted to explore in this book, what are the attention points, especially in the United States, around whether some of these proposed mines should be opened or whether we should export the production to other places in the world. So there's the tension point right there in the book. That's really interesting. I guess I'm thinking we used to have much more mining in this country or this country mining was much more important. important. At least I'm thinking about coal.

Yes. So why did we not do this in the first place? Why are we looking to overseas now? Sure. Yeah, that's a great point, Jason. I mean, the U.S. did have a pretty strong mining industry, especially in the 19th century and going right up to World War II. Just think about all the metals and minerals that were needed to not only build ships and tanks, but provide other sort of armaments and other equipment. for military exercises. So World War II especially saw a huge import to mining. You know, slowly the industry, like many things, went global and globalization, brought about a huge change in the mining industry, just like it did with the manufacturing industry. So you started to see production of a lot of these critical minerals and metals go elsewhere.

You also have to remember that we didn't have this energy transition when that took place. So the huge demand for lithium, for instance, has been a recent phenomenon. We did not really have a huge need for lithium 30, 40, 50 years ago. You know, it was primarily a niche product used in greases or for pharmacologics. But now that the lithium ion battery is basically underpinning so much of our society, we as a United States collective, you know, are starting to grapple with should we be producing more lithium here? Countries like Chile and Australia have during that time frame begun to tap their huge supplies of lithium. but China really has cornered the market on the midstream or the refining of that lithium into the specialized type that goes into a battery.

So there's a sort of a, the quick and dirty encapsulation as to sort of why the U.S. sort of let this go elsewhere. But you can see that it's a very complex supply chain, but it has a direct effect on everyone's lives. I guess I was thinking about when you say dirty. That's one of the things that's fascinating to me about this book is, I mean, mining has got such. a terrible reputation. You know, I mean, strip mining taking apart whole mountains, you know, black lung. I mean, I'm just saying, you know, the things that you think of, oh, and trap miners. That's always a good one. Yeah. Yeah, there's no way around it. I mean, mining is just a really, really, really intrusive industry. I mean, you dig a giant hole in the ground. You produce a lot of

waste there you need a lot of water. I mean, more than 60% of all the water in Chile, for instance, world's largest copper producer, second largest lithium producer, more than 60% of all of its water just goes to its mining industry alone. I mean, think about that. That's crazy. And for every, you know, I mean, the metrics are a little bit different depending on the mine, but the average copper mine grade is sort of right around 1% or less. That means for every 100 pounds of rock you take out of the ground, less than one pound is actually copper. So that means there's 99 pounds of waste that you have to store somewhere. And just think about that.

It's sort of mind-boggling when you do all the math on the back of a napkin. And so you can see why nobody really wants to live next to a mine. But the copper has to come from somewhere. Can I ask a really stupid question? No stupid questions. Why don't you just put the rock? Like you've got two shafts. Why don't you put the rock back in the like the opposite shaft when you've been,

when you've got the copper out of shaft two. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, completely. So that actually is, depending on the geology of a deposit, I mean, you can do that. I mean, different mines have different ways of, shall we say, being developed. And so you have to do something with the mine. I mean, in chapter two of the book, I explore the proposed Resolution Copper Project, which would be an underground mine, about an hour east of Phoenix in Arizona.

and this would be a project that would slowly create a giant hole. The industry term for it is actually a glory hole. That's the name of it. It is an unfortunate name, yes. But because basically you're taking the rock from underneath the deposit, or we rephrase, you're taking the rock out from underground and it'll slowly cause this crater. So you can't necessarily put the rock back in in that situation. You need to create what's called a tailings dam.

so you have to have a location on the surface to put that rock. So it really all depends on the geology, but yes, Matthew, yeah, definitely in some places that can be done. Okay. Can you explain, I think people know about lithium. And are the, can you talk a little bit about other minerals and where they might be and why we need them? Sure. A great example I love to give is your cell phone. It vibrates.

And the reason that it vibrates is because of these concentrations of what's known as rare earths inside of a little device in that cell phone that makes it vibrate. And rare earths are not as rare as the name implies. What is rare is to find them in large quantities. And there's a huge deposit in China. There's also a huge deposit in California and other parts of the world. But China really has cornered this industry. And so these rare earths are used to make. magnets that turn power into motion. So you think of vibration, obviously, as a motion. Think of

also in electric vehicles. The thing that takes the power from a battery and actually turns the wheel is a rare earth magnet that's made with rare earths. And so these things, while rather niche, are extremely important. And the United States basically helped invent this rare earth industry out of the offsets of the Manhattan Project after World War II. And you started to see this huge growth in the 50s and the 60s and the U.S. had a huge research center in Iowa that really focused on a lot of the sort of nitty gritty. The U.S. military helped invent a key part, a key type, excuse me, of rare earth magnet that was used in fighter jets and other weaponry. But then slowly in the 80s and the 90s in the early 2000s, we started to see the industry moved to China, which recognized

the strategic importance of rare earths. And now it controls the words, rare earth mine within its own borders. It's a huge processor of the strategic metals, and it uses this as an economic weapon when it is interacting with some of its neighbors. Famously in 2010, China had a diplomatic spat with Japan over a fishing vessel incident, and Beijing cut off supplies rare earths to Japan for some time. And, you know, Japan obviously huge manufacturing country. Toyota and other manufacturers are there. So that was dead. definitely something that raised alarm bells, not only in Tokyo, but in Washington as well. Rare earth is extremely important, as you can see, sort of by that picture, not just the things that

make your phone vibrate, but also in electric cars. And I mentioned a bunch of other weapons. And part of the book does go into the Mountain Pass Mine in California, which is this huge supply of rare earths that, for various reasons, went bankrupt and the previous ownership and was resurrected by a consortium that actually included a Chinese minority investment. So very interesting backstory there and excited for people to read it and learn more about it. So I'm reading Chip War right now. Oh, great book. And it sounds like this is this kind of a similar story where we had this kind of industry and then I hate to use this buzzword.

It has connotations that I don't like now. But like globalization happens throughout the 80s and 90s, it just becomes cheaper to push this stuff for, for things to be manufactured outside of the United States. Our supply chains become interdependent on each other. And a country like China can do it cheaper, do it faster. And the economic incentives are such that that's just the way it's going to happen. That's a pretty good analog right there for sure. I would link it, especially to manufacturing, as you say,

I mean, China's realized that if you have lower price raw materials for manufacturers within its borders, that can also be an appeal. So not only with the initial argument that you have lower labor costs and other costs, you also then could get lower costs related to rare earths and sort of other metals and minerals. So China used that as a way to sort of further entice manufacturing to come within its borders. Part of also is ESG standards. To make rare earths, for example, is a pretty dirty process, even dirtier than a typical mining process. You get a lot of waste, in some cases you have radioactive waste.

You got to do something with that. can't just sort of like dump it for obvious reasons. But the ESG standards in China are different than in the United States. And part of the book I explore this, the largest rarest mine in the world is in China. And it's got a waste pond larger than Central Park in New York City. That would never fly in the United States. So you can sort of just think about the different ESG standards there. Explain what a waste pond is.

Yeah. So we were talking about tailings earlier. it's basically just like sort of that muddy, gooey detrius that's sort of left over. Think about when you were a kid, when you like made mud pies in your backyard with like water and dirt and you mix it together. I mean, that's not an accurate approximation of what a tailings pond can be. And if it sounds sort of unstable, I mean, they can be. I mean, one collapsed just a few years ago in Brazil and kill 300 people.

And so that to sort of further underscore sort of the, um, the day. danger of modern mining. I mean, you're moving billions and tons of rock. Like, it's, a pretty intensive industry. That actually, so it's actually all of a piece that there was an economic incentive to move this stuff off to China or everywhere else. But there was also an environmental incentive as, right, as well. Yeah, I would say that, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to say that one company decided to purposely, you know, flout environmental, where's not out there. I mean, what I would say is that China's willingness to do it gave it a leg up, perhaps over others that perhaps were not on the same page in terms of ESG standards there,

and recognizing also that there are no substitutes for Earths. And so that was used by China for its advantage. So who were the good guys, who are the bad guys in the story? Or is that just totally not the way to look at it? Well, one of the things that I really strived hard for here is to tell the human story of this. I didn't want to sort of sit in an ivory tower and sort of just tell the academic side of, you know, this is how you make a battery and this is how you produce copper. What I wanted to do is show the people behind these issues. And so you get to meet a lot of folks throughout the book that are for or against projects or that sort of sit in the middle as policymakers or politicians or conservationists or third-party NGOs.

And so I really wanted to bring that to the reader and to say, hey, like, you need to be making this choice for yourself. It's not up to me to be saying what is the right way or the wrong way to be producing these metals or minerals. It's up to you as the audience to think through to this because we didn't do this 100 years ago when the petroleum-based economy took off. And what did we get? We got climate change. We got a global oil cartel. We got multiple conflicts around it. So if we as a world are not thinking through these issues, are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes?

Many people have said that potentially we could have a war over copper, which sounds sort of mind-bogglingly crazy right now. But that's been something that several consultancies have warned that could take place this century if we don't have a deeper appreciation and think about where we want to get just this one metal and mineral. Can technology also upend this? I mean, so there's the best planning. and companies have to plan ahead. If you're going to dig a mine, I'm going to guess it takes a little while to set it all up. Takes a long time, yeah. At least a decade or longer.

At least a decade for any new mine? For the average mine, especially in the United States, it's at least a decade or longer, yes. Okay, that's really impressive. So how do you plan ahead for technology in that case? I mean, I'm just wondering, like, you know, you read about the solid state batteries that are supposed to come along and they're going to be a different technology. Anyway, I'm just wondering, like a 10-year lead time. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, right?

And if you're a mining CEO, how do you navigate that uncertainty there? I think there's a few things that can serve as guideposts. Copper, huge cornerstone of any electronic. It has been for more than a century, and it most likely will continue to be. Nickel can have various uses depending on a battery, excuse me, in a battery's chemistry, but also has other uses as well. including the stainless steel industry. Cobalt has been a huge focus on using less cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo

because there tends to be some child labor concerns. But it tends to be such a wonderful way to put it. Yeah, I mean, we can dive into that, certainly. I do not need to lessen certainly this horrendous issue. I know. I know you don't. But it's atrocious. And the desire to use less cobalt because of that is running up against the reintroduce.

reality that more lithium ion batteries are being produced with cobalts, which is the sheer number of batteries being produced will necessitate an increase in volume. You mentioned lithium in solid state. We don't know where solid state is going to go. There's a lot of emerging interest in, you know, I know MIT and other institutions are pushing hard into that. But solid state batteries, at least in their current duration, are going to use a lot more lithium than lithium ion batteries.

Oh, no kidding. Okay. Yeah, it's a lot more lithium. So when we just sort of look at across the, of a quick run across the spectrum here, when we look at 10, 20 years, you know, the forecast for a lot of these critical mineral and metals demand is just sky high. And that's before we even get to a position called sort of the tipping point for like a truly circular economy when we can recycle old batteries and do away with mine. So we can just completely recycle old batteries and get the metals and minerals to make new batteries. We're not even anywhere near that point yet. So when we look across the demand spectrum, it's just, it's extremely strong, even with the possibility that there could be different battery chemistries down the line.

How possible is a circular economy? It's like a lot of the recycling stuff is also pretty brutal, right? Kind of like have the system where a lot of these things end up getting shipped to, is it like Western Africa and end up in kind of these pits are kind of torn apart. It's also not a great, like, it's not a great system there either, right? So recycling definitely a nascent industry, especially for lithium ion batteries. And in the book, I look at Redwood Materials and Lysicle, at two North American-based companies that are working to prop up various parts of the recycling supply chain. And they each have their own different strategies and histories that I unpack in the book.

One of the main problems right now with the recycling industry is transportation. It takes a lot of money to transport batteries. They are obviously charged, literally, in various states have charged. And so you'd have to deal with that. I explore in the book this one story about a giant shipment on a rail car just exploding. All these lithium ion batteries just exploding unexpectedly. And that's just one rail car. And this was a few years ago.

So you can imagine if everything's electric in, say, 10, 15, 20 years, how are you going to transport these batteries to a central location? to then break them apart and extract the lithium and other critical minerals inside. So it's a huge logistical challenge. And so I would say that's the big thing for the industry to deal with right now, as well as the technical challenge around the specific way in which they break down the batteries. And not to get too nerdy on you, but so there's sort of like two main ways, hierometallurgical and hydrometallurgical that batteries are sort of broken down as part of that

recycling process. it's anyone's guess what we're going to get to that point when we have critical mass where every single battery in the world can be turned in, we get the critical minerals to be used again and then put in new devices. Some people say 2050, some people say maybe longer, maybe less. I think it's anyone's guess as to when we get there, but we do know when we get there. We won't need any more minds. And so that'll be a huge benefit, perhaps. But it's going to be a question mark as to when we get there. there. And there's by nature, at least one industry that's not thrilled about the idea of this

circular economy, right? You know, you would think that miners are not interested in it, but we're actually starting to see miners dip their toes into it because a lot of the similarities are there in terms of processing. You know, miners are used to heavy processing in addition to digging rock out of the ground. So companies like Albemarle, the world's largest lithium company, are planning facilities that are designed to within five, ten years also expand into the recycling facilities. Freeport MacMoran, a giant copper producer, and it's one of the chapters in the book. We visit the Morency mine in Arizona, which is the largest mine in North America. They also are moving into copper recycling, a pretty fast clip because it just makes sense, right?

I mean, crude oil, natural gas, you use it to heat your home or power your car and it's burned off forever. But copper and lithium and nickel and cobal, all of these metals can be recycled and reused again and again and again. I mean, copper's ability to transmit electricity does not decrease the more that you use it. So that's a huge benefit. So you can see why getting to that circular economy point, that tipping point is of huge interest for a lot of conservationists and environmentalists because you can just reuse this stuff again and again and again. But when we get there, is anyone's guess. I have a different question, which is simply all of this huge investment. I'm going to guess we've got to be talking not just about billions, but dare I say it,

a trillion dollars or more, right? At least, yeah. We're talking gargantuan amounts of money here. What do you think or the people you've talked to think about whether this is going to work in terms of the goal of helping? to limit global warming? So I would sort of put it in in sort of two buckets this transition. I mean, we've got the huge focus on abating climate change and really taking a climate-first approach.

And then that's going to require a lot of collective focus and attention by people across the world. Then you've also got something that's sort of happening at a much faster clip, but I would say the electrification trend. So, I mean, we're talking electronically right now. All of us have cell phones. We have laptops, scores of other electronic devices, all of which are just filled with critical minerals. And the number of these devices are only going to grow in the coming years. So we've got these sort of two tracks going here.

And I would say that's partly why the huge demand forecasts are just continuing to get huger, if you allow the phrase there. because the demand is not slowing down. You know, I think your climate change question is a little harder to answer because we see United Nations, we see the EIA, the IEA, many other organizations sort of really underscore the need for action on climate and climate abatement and the focus on how do we produce devices like solar panels and wind turbines that can help us generate electricity cleaner and faster. that's obviously going to require a lot more metals. And we're not having the discussions, though, collectively about where we want to procure those. And if we're not having those discussions, are we comfortable with relying on places that don't necessarily share Western ESG standards, especially if it's something as important as saving the planet?

I don't mean to be circuitous in the answer to you, but I just, I really see it as sort of clear cut as that. Like, these are the things we have to be thinking through if we want an electric economy. and if we want to seriously address climate change. Well, there are some people that are having these conversations. There are certainly, yeah. Some of them are some of America's coochiest citizens. One that comes to mind is Eric Prince, right? Talked about, had a scheme where they were going to make, he was going to make Afghanistan,

a kingdom in mine rare earth minerals, right? I know that that's like a fringe weird thing, but like how much of that stuff have you encountered? Do you see a lot of that and you're reporting around the people that are actually talking about this? Like, what is the conversation like? You mentioned Afghanistan. So, I mean, part of the book, we do explore how after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, we saw several weeks later some Chinese mining companies go into Kabul and to the new leadership there in that country and talk about producing, I think it was lithium and other critical minerals in the hills of Afghanistan. obviously very mountainous country,

the logistics that would be needed to be involved there would be pretty sky high, but that being said, there's huge demand for a lot of these. So, I mean, we'll see. It's not been accomplished before en masse in Afghanistan. And so I would sort of say,

let's track that and see where it goes. More broadly, to your question, I would say the folks that want to produce these metals and minerals, you know, do it for a whole whole, of factors. You know, one of the main characters in the book is a former oil executive who lives in Houston, you know, oil capital of the world, and decided several years ago,

really, that he had to get out of the oil industry and he really wanted to focus on lithium because his reason for his career had shifted. He wanted to leave the planet cleaner than he found it. So he's going into this altruistically. And he wants to develop this lithium mine in Arizona. The tension point there, though, is this lithium deposit sits below this habitat for a rare flower that's found no place else on the planet. And therein lies the rub. So a conservation group starts fighting him. And you explored over the course of the book. And the narrative talks about his big focus on leaving the planet cleaner than the one he found versus this conservationist who says, okay, well, we're going to start just destroying rare flowers? I mean, what's next? Is it,

is it animals? Is it, you know, whole ecosystems? You know, where does the biodiversity issue not become important anymore? And so there's an example, and I really try to explore the human side of both of these individuals throughout the book, of people that are perhaps coming at this in their own head with entirely honorable and altruistic reasons, not necessarily nefarious aims, but only one of them can win. And it brings deep-seated questions for the entire audience of what matters more. It, and, The irony, of course, is that if nothing is done to address climate change, this flower may go extinct. So is it worth it to just sacrifice the flower knowing that we would get the lithium to help fight climate change?

So I don't think there's any easy answers, and I don't know if there's necessarily any villains or heroes. There can be in some instances, and there's both in the book. But I think by and large, this issue is a lot of earnest people grappling with what is the best way to save our planet. Give me a villain. I mean, I mean, I think, you know, I think, you know, I mean, when we think about, when we're, when we don't think about these issues as a collective species, you know, we're hurting ourselves. And so I would say that that's something that I really want to bring to folks here with with this book is to say that if we do nothing, we're putting our heads in the sand like an ostrich. And so I really would sort of encourage people to see this. And also to see that there's average people on both sides of this issue that really help, that really want to help.

But we can't just put our heads in the sand anymore. And I think the coronavirus pandemic taught us all of that. You remember about four years ago, we all were shocked that no masks were made in the United States. And the reason there were no masks made in the United States is because we just collectively said, we don't want to be producing sort of low value items like clop masks here anymore. The margins aren't high enough. So we exported them. Well, then crap, we decided.

that we all needed to wear masks and we needed to wear masks, but we just didn't produce any here. And so it was sort of that short-sightedness that I think definitely was underscored by the pandemic. And so the more that we are thinking through the complexities of this new supply chain, the better. But if we don't do that, it's just not going to work out well. Yeah, it was a huge shock. And then I would think that problems like a potential war between China and Taiwan. Taiwan. That could be an issue as well. Huge issue, yeah.

So tell us a little bit about, yeah, I mean, the actual defense and security issues that are around this. Yeah, I mean, you just sort of take it right from the beginning on the manufacturing side. I mean, China's control of a lot of the midstream processing for these critical minerals. Take lithium, for example. I mentioned Albumarle earlier, a world's largest lithium company, headquartered in North Carolina, but has huge projects in China, for obvious reasons. It's got the world's largest EV market. So it's got a lot of lithium processing facilities there. Many other countries as well have midstream processing facilities there.

China is a huge buyer of copper from Chile, world's largest copper producer. Those are just sort of two examples there. So you could imagine sort of any conflict with a regional or wider than that would have a huge impact on those supply chains. And the technology transfer that many are hoping happens coming back from China to Western nations, you know, is not happening sort of fast enough. And different moves in commodity prices can have huge impacts on the economics of projects in the West. The United States and others, obviously sort of free market economies, but a lot of the metals are priced on global prices like the London Metal Exchange. So, and they respond to supply and demand. So if there's too much cobalt on the global market, for instance, that means the prices drop, and that hurts the economics.

And we saw this most recently in Idaho where a cobalt project under development basically was mothballed because the price dropped too low. So its developer just said, we're not going to do that. And that's an economic situation. Just imagine if there was sort of a military situation having that control of a lot of those vital industries. Lockheed Martin uses rare earths for its F-13, for its fighter jets. You know, if you can't import rare earths anymore, can you build fighter jets? The answer is no. And so you start to see when you add up a lot of these pieces of equipment,

how it tends to be an overlooked or not appreciated enough strategic law for the United States. It's funny because you can really see in all of the supply chain, And it's not just capitalism, raw capitalism. It seems like there was an idealism from when the Cold War ended that you could let this happen. You know, that the world was not a zero-sum game. We could all grow together. And it just feels like, you know, the rules have gone back to the way they used to be and we're not preparing. The rules have gone back to the way they always were.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you could argue that. Sure. I mean, a lot of these industries were, I don't want to say invented, but really propped up by the United States after World War II. And so it was a choice, really, to sort of let these industries grow elsewhere and not be developed here in the United States. Some people point to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s as something that really clamped down. I don't know if it's that black and white, but, you know, I will say to our countries that are willing to have lower ESG standards than the United States. in order to help their own economies. We mentioned that Democratic Republic of the Congo earlier where we've got a lot of

what's called artisanal miners who basically are average families, average citizens, who dig sometimes under their house or will break into mine sites at night and just dig rock out and sell it to third-party middleman that will then sell it into a supply chain. And it could end up in an electronic that you own. But there you have a government that's not policing that area. enough. And so unfortunately you have, in some cases, minor children that are maimed or even killed because of this. And something like that happening in the United States is sort of unconscionable or would be for a lot of people that buy a lot of electronics. But the cobalt has to come from

somewhere. So should it be produced in the Idaho example that I mentioned earlier so that we can sort of decrease that import reliance? I mean, these are the things that I hope people think through and we're not thinking through them now. Artisanal mine is now my new favorite euphemism. Thank you. It is. An unfortunate industry euphemism, yes. That is pretty fantastic.

I just ordered an artisanal loaf of bread. Should clearly have ordered a little coltan. I did talk to a lot of individuals to pull together this story. Was there one that you found that you think might be the most compelling? Not favorite, not, you know, least favorite, not good guy, not bad guy, but just something that really caught your eye as being compelling. Yeah, I especially as a journalist, I think we often fall into the trap of saying one side versus another. And I think they can be often multiple facets to the same story. And we got to spend a lot of time, or I got to spend a lot of time for the book in parts of Eastern Arizona looking at the Resolution Copper Project.

which I mentioned earlier. And there you've got the company, Rio Tinto, that wants to develop this mine. And you've got the Senkhaler's Apache, which are opposed to this mine for religious and cultural reasons. And so it would seem at the surface that you've got these two opposing forces. And you do. And of course, you've got President Biden and Vice President Harris, sort of as actors in that saga. One story that I found particularly compelling, though, as part of that was a third facet. And that would be the mayor of the small town next to the mindset. Her name is Mela. Bissich. She's been the mayor for multiple years. And her main focus, and it's come through loud and clear, and then, as a now, is to bring jobs back to the town. This is a town where the average income is less than $30,000 U.S. dollars a year. It's extremely economically disadvantaged town. It has been trying to pick itself up by its bootstraps, so to speak. And so you've got this multi-billion dollar corporation come through the town and promised jobs. And you would think, given that economic reality that she would sort of bend over backwards for the town and sort of accept whatever they, excuse me, bend over backwards for the company. But she actually, and this comes

through in the reporting in the book, she holds their feet to the fire. So she's a huge defender of her town and also a huge defender of this mine project. And ironically, she's a huge defender and supporter of President Biden, as is the San Carlos Apache people. There's a lot of overlaying and shifting alliances that I just found really, really interesting. And Mayor Beas his determination and advocacy for her town was something I found really interesting. And it took us outside of this sort of polarization, one side versus another. And it gave sort of a third ideation for the reader to consider. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break.

We'll be right back after this. Welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. All right, I have a couple of things here. Sure. So Angry Planet has a Discord server, by the way. We've got a lot of fine people in there. and I had a random thought as we were sitting here

having the conversation that I would tell them right now that we were talking to you and see if they had any questions. Sure. So I've got a couple listener questions that I've pulled out that I want to see

if you have responses to. We've already kind of talked about what rare earth minerals may end up in military machines or are already being used in military machines. To follow up to that, will we see battlefield salvage

of drones, missiles, bombs, etc., by people desperate to salvage a crash? That's actually a really good question. I would say probably yes. I mean, not only for the metals and minerals, but probably for, you know, technological adaptation. You could sort of see a way where people would want to see how that device was built and can it be reverse engineered. But I think increasingly you would see people trying to get at them for the metals and minerals.

I mean, drones don't tend to be too big. So I don't know how too successful or a salvaging operation it would be. But, yeah, I mean, a great story, I guess, connected to that. It would be, I grew up in Maine and a pretty rural part of the state. And, you know, if you were building a house or doing home construction, you made sure to lock down your whole house because people would break in in the middle of the night sometimes and steal your copper pipes. And if the price of copper was really high, you could get, you know, in some cases, a thousand bucks for copper pipes. And so I sort of put that in the same sphere. You wouldn't think that you would get that much money, but it can all depend on market prices.

Yeah, it had a similar problem in a couple places I've lived. as well. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. It's not ideal. If the minerals are mined at sea, what does that mean for navies in terms of protecting such sites? What are the ways sea mining is a vulnerable disruption or attack?

Yeah, great question. Deep sea mining is one of the big frontiers, I think, of this issue. And we touch at it a little bit towards the end of the war below. But the United Nations is hotly debating right now. The rules around it, so it's still very, very nascent.

But it does tend to be a bit of a wild west. This law that the United Nations, or I should say the standards that they're going to formalize, will actually only affect international waters. It won't affect the territorial waters off the coast of various countries. So right now, any country can do it. And the Cook Islands is one that's considering doing it, or allowing it, I should say, in its territorial waters. But, yeah, I mean, you're right.

I mean, there'll be huge questions around enforcement. and if some companies, there's one in particular, it's publicly traded, it obviously would want to adhere to the laws for many reasons, not the least of which is its shareholder base. But there could be others that just don't. And so does that mean various navies have to patrol the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean to make sure that people are not breaking the law two miles under the surface of the water? And you can see how complex this gets. And impossible too, right? I mean, the ocean is enormous. It is completely impossible, right?

I mean, remember that Malaysian Airlines plane that crashed a few years ago, it was never found, and there was a pretty devout search effort to try to find it. And I think they just gave up somewhere in the Indian Ocean. And so, yeah, that's just one part of one ocean. You can think about the entire ocean and how complex it could be. But I'm fascinated by it, and I think we're all going to be learning more about it in the years ahead. Jason, I've got more unless you've got more questions. No, well, first of all, I just want to compliment the listeners.

Yeah, bring them on. This is great. Seriously, we've got some, you know, really smart people out there, and it's wonderful to hear from them. So, yeah, I mean, Ernie, do you have time for a little more? Sure. Okay, so. Stephanie, please. So do we have any idea about the scarcity of these resources?

Are these rare earth minerals going to run out anytime soon? and who is following up on that question, who is looking to the stars? Scarcity. So one of the things we know, not to be like Don Rumsfeld, but there is known unknowns. And so part of the recent legislation passed,

at least here in the United States, around the bipartisan infrastructure law, as well as the IRA is more funding for USGS, the US Geological Survey, and others to do more detail. studies as to where in the country, at least, there could be more deposits. And that's just in the United States. And then I would sort of broaden it out from there, like there, you know, huge parts of the world that aren't fully understood from a geological

perspective yet, including the ocean, which we just mentioned. So there's been nobody talking about sort of peak minerals yet, as it were. And I think that would require a lot more geological studies to discover where and how these could be produced across the planet. When we look sort of outside the planet, there's been a lot of focus on asteroids, and there are several actually private companies that want to mine asteroids. They're out there right now trying to think of plans to do this. It's not as like Captain Kirk as it sounds. I mean, there are people that have pretty well-formed business plans for actually going to an asteroid,

mining it, processing it on the asteroid, and then bringing the processed metal back on a spacecraft. We'll see how that goes the next few years. And then we've all seen what's been going on with NASA and the moon and SpaceX and mining hydrogen or other minerals there to then use that as a springboard to go onto Mars. So there's a lot of focus there. But, you know, a few years ago, I was actually interviewing a CEO of a pretty prominent copper mining company. And I asked him about the moon. And he just sort of chuckled.

And he said, I have got enough on my hands here on Earth. I'm not looking at the moon just yet. So we'll see. I mean, it creates a whole host of new problems because you're dealing with, you know, space. But it solves a bunch of your environmental concerns if you're not pulling it all out of the Earth. Yeah, indeed it does. Indeed, it does. There's just the tiny problem of transportation.

Oh, we'll figure that out. Maybe. Hope I'm just crossed. This one's a little silly. Did you ever get to drive one of those chubby trucks? Oh, no, yeah. No, you got to get trained for that. No, they wouldn't trust me behind the wheel of one of those.

And I will say those jobs are going away. Increasingly, those trucks are automated, which just kind of sounds crazy when you think about it, but that's where the whole industry is going. The proposed mine in Nevada that I mentioned that has this tension with the rare wildflower, you know, the company signed this contract with Caterpillar, and it's going to be, if built,

the first new mine in North America, completely autonomous. Other mines are already deploying autonomous trucks. So, you know, AI will be driving around mining pits pretty soon. Well, imagine they don't have to go very far, right? They've got pretty set routes. So it's a lot different than trying to get somebody up and down the highway, right? Correct. Yeah, it's actually sort of the ideal place to test a lot of that equipment because you know exactly the routes and you would just need to perhaps move it depending on how the pit grows. But for the most part, a lot of these trucks do tend to do the same routes back and forth,

back and forth. You know where the truck is at the end of the night, so you can charge it. Same goes for an underground mine. So there's a whole host of reasons why the mining industry is a good guinea pig for autonomous vehicles. I just want to say that with more and more jobs going away, I'm a little worried that everybody's just going to start yet another podcast and that'll drive us out of business. but no, not or not, not a worry for you guys at all. I mean, I am.

It's been a grim six months in this industry, you know, but that's a whole other podcast conversation. Sequel, follow up. Well, that does it for, I think somebody's typing, but I don't know what's going on. I'll get it in. If we get it in, Jason, did you have anything else? I, no, I mean, this is really,

I don't know. I guess I'm still concerned that this is not going to actually save the Earth. I have. Of course not. Yeah, that's the rub, right? I mean, it's, I mean, people think you buy an electric vehicle. You're saving the planet. Yeah. That's what I did. You're moving, you're just moving your waste to a different part of the supply, like the supply chain, right? I know, I know. The beginning of it. Like, you still got to dig all the stuff out of the earth. still has to be manufactured and put together. Yeah, you're not, and you get to sit at Walmart for two hours and talk to the lovely people while your car charges. Yeah, well, that's a whole host of, you know, a whole host of things there.

And, you know, electric vehicle is obviously a huge, huge part of this. But, you know, I have a whole chapter in the book that looks at leaf blowers. And it might sound sort of silly or innocuous. But I picked that on purpose to show the reader that so many things in our lives are battery-powered. now. So it's not just electric vehicles. I bought a house a few years ago, and I decided to go all electric on the lawn care. So I got an electric lawnmower, an electric weed wacker, and yes, an electric leaf blower. And I went down this deep dive. Okay, where do the metals come from that built that battery? And I couldn't figure it out after multiple tries to say, okay, where did all this metal come from?

And that's just to this one lowly device. So then you magnify it across the millions and billions of devices, like laptops and cell phones. and cameras and other things that really anchor our everyday jobs and lives. And you start to see that the sourcing of this stuff matters, you know, and the ESG standards matters. Otherwise, to your point, Jason, you're not really helping the planet if it's just produced with crappy standards. Well, that to me, I mean, I would end the whole podcast on crappy standards, but I got another good one, though. Oh, okay. We are a podcast, right? I'm allowed to swear.

Oh, yeah, yes. I should have swear. are. I know, but it's just the kind of downnote we love. That's the, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's good. Um, uh, the Antarctic treaty is up soon. So are people making some far out there plans to the last frontier?

It's a lot easier to get to and extract from than an asteroid or the ocean floor. Ooh, that's a good question. Um, it's still pretty cold in Antarctica, even with climate change. Um, so I would be curious to see what my companies would be willing to take on the added cost of producing there. If the value of the metal gets high enough, I would say there'd be a lot more interest. I would just draw people to northern Russia and northern Canada right now, where it's extremely dangerous and extremely hard to produce because you've got increased heating costs, you think about the equipment that you need to mine into cold hard rock and earth,

and just the sheer remoteness. We got a stark reminder of the danger of that earlier this week when Rio Tinto was flying some of its staff to a diamond mine in northern Canada, a pretty frigid cold area. And there was a crash and some workers died. And so it's pretty hard to operate on a really cold climate. And so I would think you would need to have extremely high metals prices to financially justify exploring Antarctica. and even if that were to legally become an option. So if we are mining from Antarctica, perhaps bad things have already happened elsewhere. Potentially, or the prices as so high, the demand is so high.

But, you know, I think I'll leave the international politics to the folks that write the international policy books. But from what I know about the Antarctic Treaty, I don't see it remarkably changing in the near future. Well, even when I was at Rotter Reuters, the, you know, commodity. at his desk, it started, was really expanding just to get into every aspect of how things were extracted and how to protect them. Oh, my God. It's a fun area to cover. It's really fascinating. And you really start to see the many moving parts and then how they affect the entire supply chain. And so one leads to another leads to another. And so I thoroughly enjoy sort of taking really complex topics and helping people to understand how it affects their everyday lives.

I'm really proud of this book for doing that. The War Below, lithium, copper, and the global battle to power our lives. And it's out when and where can people find it? Yeah. So the book is out Tuesday, January 30th, everywhere, and people can find it in any bookseller. I encourage you to look at your local bookseller or online retailer. Ernie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys for having me. Appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Angrycom. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us on substack.angriplanet.com, it means the world to us. The show, which we've been doing for more than seven years now, means the world to us, and we hope it means a lot to you.

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