Ideas - 'There's no such thing as clean energy'

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

If journalist Vince Beiser had his way the term 'clean energy' wouldn't exist — it's a misnomer. He argues green energy comes with cost. Sure, solar power or wind power are both better than power from fossil fuels but Beiser points out they are still harmful to the planet and people. "There's no magic solution." Beiser tells IDEAS we need to shift to renewable energy but we also need to recognize it's not a "magic solution" — there is a downside with consequences.Vince Beiser's book is called Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that Will Shape the Future.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. The list of things to worry about is much too long and full of nasty surprises. But the one that never seems to go away is climate change. And a toll that our way of life and use of fossil fuels is taking on the planet. Such a vast problem on a planetary scale can feel overwhelming. But there is hope. Solutions to climate change are taking root all around us. Millions of people are getting rid of their gas-powered cars and buying electric vehicles.

Solar power and wind power are booming around the world, producing emissions-free electricity. And in our homes, many of us are replacing our appliances with smart energy-efficient ones and monitoring and optimizing energy usage through smartphone apps. all ways to reduce our environmental footprint and live more sustainably. Well, how best to put this. The good news is it's going to lower your carbon footprint, but your environmental footprint, you are still doing a whole lot of damage, just basically in different kinds of ways.

So all those things that you mentioned, electric vehicles, your cell phones, your appliances, all of these things are made with a basket of what's called of critical metals. It's things like the lithium, cobalt, and nickel that go into all the batteries that we use. The battery in your electric vehicle, the battery in your cell phone, the battery in your laptop, the battery in your cordless drill. That's one set of critical metals. Also, the motor in your electric vehicle is made out of rare earths. You've got a rare earth magnet in your cell phone. There's probably rare earth magnets in your home appliances.

So if you trade in your car for an EV, that's good on the car. emissions front, so you're helping to avoid climate change, which is good. However, to build that electric vehicle, it uses thousands of pounds of metals to get the billions of tons of copper and nickel and lithium and cobalt and rare earths that we need to build all this stuff. We are bulldozing rainforests to the ground, putting children to work in mines, rivers are being poisoned, warlords are getting rich. It's a whole depressing litany of damage that's being caused. by our shift to renewable energy and our love of digital technology. Oh.

Sorry. But listen, the thing is, we need to shift over to renewable energy, right? I don't think that I'm saying, oh, my gosh, solar powers a waste of time, wind powers a waste of time. Not at all. Climate change is the biggest environmental catastrophe that we face. So we've got to shift over to electric vehicles and renewable energy. But we've got to understand that doing that is not. not cost-free. That shift also has its own downsides. And then we have to figure out ways that we can

reduce that damage down to a minimum. There is a sentence that recurs throughout Vince Biser's writing, everything has a cost. There's no magical solutions that just fix everything. That's why I don't, I don't use the term clean energy, because really there's no such thing as clean energy. Solar power, wind power, they are better than power that we get from fossil fuels because they don't emit carbon, they don't make climate change worse. They create less damage, different kinds of damage, but still damage nonetheless. Vince Beiser is a journalist and author in Vancouver. His latest book, Power Metal, The Race for the Resources that Will Shape the Future, won the 2025 Balsili Prize for Public Policy. It's the story of the twin revolutions of renewable energy and digital

technology and a fiendish paradox. To prevent the worst of climate change, we're doing incalculable harm to the planet and to countless people. That's because it all hinges on critical metals, so-called because they are the heart and nervous system of the digital age, renewable energy, and electrification, and increasingly at the heart of geopolitics and economics. Critical metals include the copper essential for generating and transmitting electricity, and the lithium, cobalt, and nickel essential for batteries in, well, pretty much everything. Then there's Rare Earths, which have been in the news a whole lot. Rare Earths are this collection of 17 weird, obscure metals with names like Yitrium and Prasiodimium.

Most of us have never heard of them, but all of us use them every single day. When you tap the screen of your cell phone, the reason that it responds to that touch is because of a metal called indium. There are a little flex of indium in your cell phone screen that makes it sensitive to the touch of your finger. There's another metal called Europium that puts the color red into your screens. Yeah. I don't understand it either. But bottom line, no Europium, no red in your cell phone screen. So these are metals that have all these super-neutral.

niche, but very, very important properties. And they're also used in all kinds of medical technologies, medical imaging tech, and military technologies. The F-35 fighter jet uses a lot of rare earths, things like night vision goggles. And then there's copper, which is another really key one that people don't often think about. But if we're going to live in a world that's powered mostly by electricity, well, that electricity has to be carried somehow from wherever it's generated, be that a wind farm or a solar farm or even if it's a nuclear plant, wherever, it's got to get transported from that place to your house, right? That electricity is carried in copper power cable. So we are going to need thousands and thousands of miles of new copper electric cable in the future. You know,

we're an increasingly complex technology dependent world now. You can't run a modern society without these really basic natural resources that most of us never even think about, right? It's one of humanity's oldest industries is digging metal out of the ground, and it turns out it's more necessary than ever in our super high-tech present and future. Even after all the research that you did for this book, it still was kind of hard to get a handle on where all these materials in a smartphone or some of these other technologies are sourced from and processed and the impact. of that mining and processing.

Just give me a sense of just how hard it was to get a handle and all that. Well, I mean, the supply chain of metals is really worldwide, right? I mean, we're digging up these metals in many, many places all over the world. And then they're also shipped to other places to be purified, to be processed, and then to be made into the products that we actually use. And, of course, that's changing all the time because there's this exploding demand for all these critical metals. So people are exploring and opening new minds all over the world, including here in Canada, right?

British Columbia has just greenlit something like half a dozen, big mines. And also Canadian companies are really at the forefront of this. Canadian companies are busy all over the world, all over Africa, all over Asia, prospecting for, trying to find new sources of these metals and then digging them out of the ground when they come. What does it take to produce a single smartphone? You would not believe how much labor and expense and energy goes into producing a single cell phone. So in the average iPhone, there's something like 60 different metals. Yeah.

And every single one of them has to be dug up somewhere in the world, unearthed. And imagine what goes into mining, right? So mining is extremely energy intensive. It involves, you know, ripping up. the topsoil, blasting apart the rock underneath with explosives, and then sending enormous machines to work, digging up that ore, crushing down that ore, smashing it apart, and then separating out the metal that you're actually going after. So you add it all up. I mean, all the machinery that's involved, mining is one of the biggest contributors to global climate change. And also there's just

unimaginable amounts of waste that's created in the process. So for instance, a typical copper ore grade is maybe half of one percent, which means to get a half a ton of copper, you need to dig up 100 tons of rock and ore. Incredible. Yeah, it's just mind-blowing. So it's many, many orders of magnitude, the amount of what actually goes into that phone and the amount of waste rock that was created. And of course, that waste rock isn't just inert rock.

Like a lot of it, often it contains toxins that can then leach into the ground. water and into the earth can create a lot of problems. So imagine that, you know, multiplied out 60-fold because there are all these different things in there. There's copper in your cell phone. It's got a battery made of lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The cobalt almost certainly comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The nickel probably comes from Indonesia. The lithium may come from as far away as Chile, right? Then there's the rare earths, the thing that makes your phone vibrate when you get a call. Those rare earths probably come from China. All of these things are pulled in from literally all over the world just to create that phone that sits in your hand.

You visited some enormous mines in researching your books. Can you describe one or two of them and give us a sense of their scale and impacts? Sure. I went to sort of the outskirts of the Chuky Kamada copper mine in Chile, which is one of the biggest in the world. I mean, it's sort of like going to the Grand Canyon, the scale of this thing, it's an enormous, enormous hole in the ground, basically the size of the island of Manhattan. And it's not only the hole itself that's so impressive, but all around it, for miles around it, all the surrounding area has basically been turned into sort of moonscape because of all the waste rock, right? They say when they dig the step up out of the ground, you've got to put it somewhere. So for miles around, you see what,

what look like these very strange hills that are sort of very regularly shaped and flat topped. And as you get closer, you realize those are not hills at all. Those are piles of waste rock that are literally, you know, the size of small mountains. And then there's this enormous, what looks like a lake, but is actually all full of wastewater. It's this huge, huge expanse of water that's really a giant artificial pit. The bottom of it is all lined with plastic. And that's where they dump all the wastewater. What color is it?

Kind of a murky, ugly gray. Like, you wouldn't be tempted to go swimming in it. Let me put it that way. Could you speak to who tends to bear the social and environmental costs of critical metals mining? So this is the big problem, right? Is where are we getting all of these metals from? A huge amount of it comes from the developing world, from poorer countries where, you know, to say the least, environmental regulations are not what they should be, labor regulations, all the rest of it. So

70% of all the world's cobalt comes from one country. There's a little bit of cobalt sitting in your pocket almost certainly right now in your cell phone. It is. 70% of all that cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is one of the poorest, most corrupt, most chaotic countries in the world. Conditions that some of those minds are absolutely horrific. You know, I mean, we're talking about, you know, people literally working in flip-flops, no safety equipment whatsoever, digging tunnels that often collapse on them because they're just, you know, being literally dug by hand. And there are also thousands of children working in those minds. That's one example. Also, again, that battery has also got nickel in it. About little over half the world's nickel comes

from, again, one country, Indonesia, in this case. You know, the Indonesian government, they're smart. They saw this boom coming, you know, back 20 years ago and said, you know what? The world's going to need lots of nickel for all these batteries. We have lots of nickel. Let's open up. Let's start digging it up and selling it to the world. They've built this huge nickel industry just in the last 20 years. But to do it, they have bulldozed hundreds of miles of rainforest to get at the nickel that's underground.

And then to process that nickel, they've built an enormous amount of industries, of processors, smelters, refineries, to get that nickel out of that waste rock. And the pollution coming off of that is, you know, it's just smoke stacks belching all kinds of toxic smoke into the air. And there's waste that gets discharged into the local rivers. I think some of it goes straight into the ocean. You know, the cost of that, of course, are being carried by the Indonesian folks who live nearby there. It's put, you know, fissures out of business because fish are being killed in the rivers. it's really damaging crops, it's damaging the health of people who live around there.

So a lot of the costs of our digitally enabled lifestyle and of the electric vehicles that we want to feel good about, those costs are really being carried by folks in other countries. I just want to make the point that it's not only foreign countries where these costs are happening. I mean, here in Canada, we also do a lot of mining, which has a lot of downsides. And also we do a lot of that refining. So I just did a little story for my newsletter about a gigantic copper smelter in Quebec, a couple of hundred miles north of Montreal. And that copper smelter produces so much toxic pollution that a whole neighborhood of the nearest city, which is called Ruin Noranda, is having to move. There's a couple of hundred people that are literally having to leave their homes and move somewhere else because the air is so toxic.

I just want to back up and just get a sense from you whether there's, you know, mining is an old business and it's always been a dirty business. Whether with the proliferation of interest in mining for these critical metals, whether there's any improvement in the environment for indigenous people or the poor who are bearing the brunt of these impacts. I mean, if you really take a historic perspective in many places, things are much better than they used to be. you know, a hundred years ago, the United States was the world's mining power and huge amounts of the world's metals came from the Western United States from places like Idaho and Utah and Arizona. And also here in British Columbia, we also had a huge mining industry. Ontario had a huge mining industry. You know, back in those days, nobody cared about whatever indigenous people were living there, you know, or whatever local communities you just could just shove them aside,

dig your hole in the ground, pull the metals out, dump your waste wherever was easiest, then close up the mine and move on. And we are still dealing with the fallout from those days. I mean, still to this day, something like half of the watersheds in the western United States are still polluted with mining waste. You know, there's still piles of tailings and all kinds of crap all over BC. So things have gotten much better, like environmental regulations, of course, are much strong. longer. And indigenous people, at least in Canada, to a lesser extent in the U.S., but still,

you know, to some extent, have much more of a say in whether or not, you know, mining can happen on their lands. And they're also getting cut in on some of the benefits. And yet in your book, you say when it comes to mining, the choice is never between bad and good, but only bad and less bad. So, I mean, the thing about mining is it's inherently and inevitably destructive, right? That's kind of the whole object of mining, right, is to dig a giant hole in the earth and pull out what lies within it. I mean, and the whole process is like rip up whatever's on top of the land, whether that's forest or prairie, whatever it is, tear that stuff out of the way, blast a hole in the earth and start gouging stuff out of it. That's what mining is. Now, we need mining. We have to

have the things that mining gets us. And so we've got to recognize that that is always going to entail a certain amount of damage. That said, we can do it less badly, right? We can do it in ways that cause less harm. And we are getting better at that in some ways in places where we do have stronger environmental regulations, better inclusion of indigenous people, better protections for local communities, all that kind of stuff. So, I mean, here in Canada, mining is less harmful than it used to be. But part of the result of that is that much more mining has been pushed into developing countries where regulations aren't as strict. Why? Because it's cheaper to do it over there, right? To do mining to a high standard, it costs more, right? If you're going to treat your waste, if you're going to share some of the

profits with indigenous communities, all those things add costs. And mining corporations don't like that. So they would rather do business in a place like, you know, Indonesia or the Philippines or somewhere like that. You mentioned copper earlier, and I just want to get another way in which the search for critical metals is so costly when it comes to the effect on human beings. You talk about the shocking extent to which copper theft is something people have to deal with, that people are literally willing to kill or risk death to steal copper. What are the human costs of copper theft? Yeah, this is a crazy one.

I mean, we're just building up so much electric infrastructure. That's driving the demand for copper through the roof, which drives the price up. And, you know, whenever there's money to be made, people are going to start stealing and figuring out ways to commit crimes to get at it. So there's been this just surge in copper theft all over the world. And it ranges from everything from people right here in Vancouver stealing wires out of streetlights to places like South Africa where you have organized gangs that are literally tearing up whole like kilometers of electric cabling and tearing apart. It's amazing. It's also really scary because these are like well-armed gangs that are killing each other, fighting over turf, killing, you know, security guards and police officers that try to stop them. And sometimes they're the ones who are getting killed. I mean, there's a few places. And like in some of the impoverished townships outside of the cities, people are sick and tired of losing power because when you rip up all this cable, it creates blackouts. So the city of Johannesburg has like regular blackouts. it's thanks to copper theft. And in some places where local folks see copper thieves or think they see copper thieves,

they lynch them. There's been a raft of lynchings of suspected copper thieves. Horrific. But because, as you pointed out in the book, copper is considered the new oil. Yeah, well, copper is the thing that we need the most of just in terms of sheer tonnage for the energy transition. If we're building all this electricity generating capacity, all of that electricity travels on copper.

Inside your house, it's copper wiring that takes the energy from the plug to your light switch. Electric vehicles have something like 100 pounds of copper, every single one of them, and we're building millions and millions of EVs. So we are going to need to mine more copper in the next 20 years than we have mined in all of human history. And we've been mining copper for thousands of years.

We're talking about a lot of copper. You mentioned lithium, which of course, many of us are familiar with as something that's used in batteries in just about everything we use. You visited a huge source of lithium in the Atacama Desert in Chile. How was lithium extracted there? It's interesting because it is a kind of mining, but it involves water. The Atacama Desert and the area around it is probably the world's biggest reservoir of lithium. but it's dissolved in water in these brines, these deep underground, there's these lakes of brines that have all this dissolved lithium in them.

So the way they mine it is they drill a hole, they bring the brine up to the surface, and then just basically spread it out in these enormous, enormous pools. And basically all that's happening is they're letting that water evaporate under the desert sun and you get left with this thick sludge that's full of lithium that you can then extract. So on the one hand, it's kind of nice because you're not using a lot of machinery to extract that lithium. It's literally solar power. It's the sun that's evaporating the water out. The problem is all of that water, right?

Yes. It uses, they're taking huge amounts of water up from underground. And the fear is that in doing that, they're literally drying out the whole desert ecosystem. So, yeah, it's a desert, but there's a lot of things that live there. There's lots of vegetation. There are rare flamingos, other kinds of birds, not to mention indigenous communities that have been there for thousands and thousands of years. And the concern is that the mines are tapping out so much water that they might literally dry out all of the freshwater and put all those indigenous communities, those rare flamingos, everything else that lives in that desert might be being put in danger. Back to that idea, everything has a cost.

Everything has a cost. And there are no easy solutions. Vince Beiser is the author of Power Metal, the race for the resources that will shape the future, the winner of the 2025 Ball Silly Prize for Public Policy, presented by the Writers Trust of Canada. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad.

Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, and I host the Daily News podcast, Front Burner, and lately I'll see a story about, I don't know, political corruption or something and think during a normal time, we'd be talking about this for weeks. But then it's almost immediately overwhelmed by something else. On Front Burner, we are trying to pull lots of story threads together so that you don't lose the plot. So you can learn how all these threads fit together. Follow Front Burner wherever you get your podcasts. Critical metals live up to their name in many ways. They're critical to our technology-dependent

way of life, they're critical to the fight against climate change, and they're increasingly critical and disruptive in economics and geopolitics. There is intense competition among nations to secure access to critical metals amid soaring demand and a global gold rush. And gold, by the way, is generally not considered a critical medal, just a very expensive one. Critical medals are top of mind for U.S. President Donald Trump as he surveys the globe, and for Prime Minister Mark Carney and most other political and industry leaders. Vancouver journalist Vince Beiser is the author of Power Medal, and he says there's plenty

of critical metals under the ground. The problem is how much damage we're going to do to people and the planet by tearing them out of the earth and processing them. Then there are the ethical and political tradeoffs involved in getting them from countries, whose democratic, environmental, and human rights records leave much to be desired. And there is one country with unchallenged supremacy in critical metals. China is overwhelmingly dominant. So this is the big geopolitical issue with critical metals. So every single one of these metals we've been talking about,

China dominates the entire supply chain of it. So China mines a lot of these metals within their own borders, where they don't have their own domestic supplies, they buy mines or mining companies overseas all over the world. There are Chinese mining companies or there's Chinese investment in other companies, including here in Canada, including many Canadian mining companies that operate overseas, a lot of them. But no matter where that stuff comes out of the ground, whether it's dug up by a Chinese company or not, most of it then goes to one place to be processed and refined, right? that raw ore has to be melted down, crushed, treated with chemicals, etc.

Most of that happens in China. And that's not an accident. Oh, no. How did it leapfrog the rest of the world to become so dominant? Well, basically, they kind of saw this coming. So around about the 1970s, two things kind of happened at the same time. One is that the environmental movement really gained strength in the Western world. And people really started saying mining and a lot of other.

of heavy industries, this is really bad for the environment. And we don't want it in our backyard anymore. We don't want these gigantic, you know, copper mines and smelters and everything else. China at the almost the same time was opening up, right? They were really starting to embrace a market economy and opening up for foreign investment. And they said, you guys don't want to do that dirty, heavy industry anymore? We'll do it. Come on over here. Not only with mining, but with so many of our heavy polluting industries, China was perfectly happy. to absorb the environmental cost, and they had all kinds of people who would work for much cheaper

and in much worse conditions. And so a lot of this industry shifted over there, and they've been building it up ever since. They were also far-sighted enough to see that fossil fuels were not going to last forever and that we were going to move into a world of solar power and wind power and electric vehicles, and they've been building up those industries for decades.

So China's got a strong hand in digging the stuff the metals out of the ground. They've got an even stronger hand when it comes to processing that mined ore and turning it into pure metal. And then it's Chinese factories that take those purified metals and turn them into the majority of the world's solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. So at every step along that supply chain, China's got a dominant hand. And one can only imagine, and maybe we don't have to imagine, how China could wield that kind of dominance. Yeah. Well, we just saw it last year with Trump's trade war. I mean, this is, this is many crazy news cycles ago by now. It's sort of hard to keep track. But, you know,

one of the first things that Trump did when he became president was to slap these trade tariffs like on basically everybody. So China controls something like 90% of the world's rare earth. They've got a serious stranglehold on these metals that let's remember aren't just important for you know, consumer items, but are also really important for military technology. So they said, you want to tariff us? Fine. We'll stop selling you rare earths. I mean, as soon as China said that, car factories literally had to close down. There was shockwaves all through the world. The Pentagon realized it had a serious problem on its hands. And the U.S. almost immediately backed down and lowered those tariffs because China pulled out this weapon

that it's had in its back pocket for a long time. Literally a Trump card. There you go. Are we in the sort of the beginning stages of a new arms race or a new great game, you know, with powerful countries competing to snap up as many of these critical medals as possible and using them as kind of leverage against each other? Well, definitely they're really important geopolitical weapons, yeah, because, you know, the Americans and really the rest of the Western world,

like kind of has woken up belatedly and realized like how dependent we are on China for these metals that are so well critical right so the European Union the United States Canada as well there's billions of dollars going into finding new sources uh building up our domestic industries you know so that we're not so dependent on China and this is part of why you know like when Prime Minister Carney announced his big nation building projects a few months ago Several of them are mining projects, specifically aimed at getting more of these critical metals. So it's having a big impact on politics. And this is a big part of why Donald Trump keeps talking about wanting to take over Greenland. Why does the U.S. care about Greenland? It has lots of critical metals. It has lots of rare earths.

And that's also why he keeps talking about making Canada, the 51st state. Yeah. So staying in the geopolitical realm, I had no idea that Russia was so dominant in. producing high-grade nickel. What is the effect of that? So when Russia invaded Ukraine, you'll remember the Western world said, oh my God, this is terrible. We're slapping sanctions on Russia. We're going to do everything we can to cripple Russia and shut down the oligarchs. But very quietly, they left off a few things from the list of sanctions. And one of them was nickel because the world needs Russian nickel. So actually, right up until very recently, Russia was allowed to continue, you know, selling billions of dollars worth of nickel into the world market.

And, I mean, in a real way, the cell phone in your pocket, the EV you're driving, it may have helped fund the invasion of Ukraine. How well is Canada positioned where critical metals are concerned? Yeah, so Canada is, you know, we're a real mining powerhouse. I was glad when Prime Minister Carney, you know, really highlighted some of these critical metal projects. and earmark them to be fast-tracked to get some of these mines online faster, not because I think mining is great. Again, mining always causes harm. It always causes damage.

But my feeling is we absolutely need some mining. And if there's going to be mining, let's have some of it happen here in Canada. Again, not because I want to see, you know, the wilderness destroyed. I don't. But I really do believe we do things to a higher standard within Canada itself, not talking about the actions of Canadian companies abroad, but if you're going to open a mine here in Canada, the bar is pretty high in terms of environmental regs, in terms of consulting with indigenous people. So it's going to be less bad than a mine in the Philippines or wherever. And also, we need to strengthen our hand vis-a-vis the United States. You know, like I said, look what China was able to pull off. They were able to get the U.S. to back down because the U.S. depends on them for rare earths. Well, guess what? The U.S. also depends on Canada for a lot of these critical metals.

So we have some kind of leverage? We have some kind of leverage, and I would like to see us have more because we need to strengthen our hand. And we've got some pretty good cards to play, and I think we should be picking more of them up. Here's a great little fact. Potash. It's not a metal. It's a mineral that's really important as a fertilizer.

I think of Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan supplies 100% of the United States is potash. All of it comes from Saskatchewan. That's a strong card to play. You know, at the height of the, you know, the tariff back and forth between the U.S. and Canada, American farmers started complaining and saying, hey, Donald Trump, we love you, but we need Canadian potash. So please don't tariff Canadian potash. And we sell America a lot of metals.

It's a strong hand that we could make even stronger. We've got all of it. We've got copper. We've got cobalt. We've got rare earths. And we know the demand for those things is growing. And right now we get a lot of it from China, and that's not good. So Carney has said that critical metals is one area where Canada can and should be focusing,

both from a national security standpoint and from an economic development standpoint and even from an energy transition standpoint, right? the more of that supply chain that we can bring in-house, the better. How do we do that in a more kind of sustainable, responsible way? Yeah, well, it's hard. And really, you sort of have to look kind of project by project, right? Look at each individual mine, because these metals are found in lots of different places, and you can extract them in some places more easily or less harmfully than in others. You know, there's the proposed Ring of Fire project in Northern Ontario, for example.

Like, what are the risks that these kinds of projects become unsustainable or can't be done responsibly in those areas? Yes. I'm not a major expert on the Ring of Fire, but what I do know about it kind of makes me skeptical about it. There's lots of metal there. Everybody agrees on that. But it's in this really, really remote part of Ontario. They're going to need to build hundreds of miles of roads just to be able to get trucks out to. to the places where they want to dig at. That's road building through a lot of wilderness.

That's going to cause a lot of damage and destruction as well. And also, it's really important peat lands, a lot of that ring of fire area. It's this kind of peat bog that is a really important carbon sink, right? It draws down a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere, which could obviously be really disrupted if you start digging enormous mines there. And you'd have to just think of what's involved in bringing all the power that you would need to operate a mine out there. You've got to build camps for the workers, like the amount of damage that you would have to do, the environmental costs that you would have to do, and everything that you'd

have to do to address the concerns of all the indigenous communities that are along the way. There's several indigenous nations that are sort of on the path that you would have to clear to get there. That one seems like kind of a long shot to me, I have to say. It seems to me like there are places where we could get at metals without doing so much damage. One of the projects that Carney earmarked is here in BC. It's a copper mine that already exists, and they're talking about expanding it. So for my money, I think that's a lower impact way to go, right? If you've already dug the hole, you've already built the roads, you've already built the tailings dams. Right. Expand the mine. That's still going to create some damage, expanding the mine, but it's going to be

easier on the planet than building a whole new mine from scratch. Is it actually a form of greenwashing to think of renewable energy as green or clean? Yeah, if you're calling it clean energy or green energy, I think that's a total misnomer. I think that's false advertising. I don't use those terms in my book because they're not clean, right? Solar and wind, they are better than fossil fuel energy because they don't produce carbon or they produce much, much less carbon, but they also do harm to the planet and to people. So I think on balance, they are much less harmful, but but they're certainly not clean. They're not helping the planet.

They're just doing less damage to the planet. So there's that moral quandary. And then there's this, you know, how much do you think, quote unquote, Western values of democracy, rights, justice, territorial, sovereignty, et cetera, are being compromised by rich nations that are, you know, driving

to get their hands on critical metals. Wow. You're really going big picture on me. I like it. Ideas. I guess I should expect that from ideas. Yeah. Absolutely.

Well, I think quite a lot, you know, because as we've been saying, I mean, landscapes are being destroyed. People's livelihoods are being ruined. People are being killed in many cases to get these metals that we want. And we need to reckon with that. So it all comes back to my main idea, which is that we're human beings. We live in a technology-based consumer society. we are going to do some harm. We cannot like this idea, you know, that some people have that like, oh, if I just, you know,

recycle enough, if I drive an electric vehicle, if I use a compostable rice straw, then I'm not doing any harm. That's just a myth. Got to understand, man. We all cause harm. Our lives cause damage to other people and to the planet. But there's a lot that we can do to reduce that damage. And of course we want to talk about solutions to the,

this conundrum that you've presented us. We've talked a lot about the massive scale and the impacts of mining, but can you just explain the idea of urban mining and what that is? Sure. So this is one of the ways we can reduce harm. Urban mining is basically recycling. It's the idea of taking, you know, all these products that have already been built, our laptops, our cell phones, digital gadgets, and really anything with a plug, you know, a toaster, a microwave, whatever, and pulling the metals out of those things and reusing them. So in principle, it makes all kinds of sense because if you think about how much we all throw away every day, it's an enormous amount, right?

And all the metal that's in those things, that's metal that's already been mined, right? So if you can extract the metal from all that electronic waste, it's much cheaper. It's much more efficient and causes much less damage than digging that stuff up fresh. Yes. Right? The problem there is we do a terrible job of it right now. So something like in the U.S., at least, and I'm sure the number is similar in Canada, only about one out of every six cell phones gets recycled.

The rest of them just get tossed in a landfill. Same goes for all of our e-waste, which is basically, like I said, anything with a plug, only about 22% of that stuff worldwide gets properly recycled, and most of the rest of it just gets thrown away. Is this what you're talking about when you talk about a reverse supply chain? Yes, exactly. So the idea of the reverse supply chain is the supply chain is the one we're familiar with, right? You start with raw materials, whether that's wood or metal or whatever,

and it gets moved along this chain to some factory where it's processed and turned into metal, and then it goes to another factory where it's turned into a product, and then it goes to a store somewhere where you finally buy it. Right? And then what happens? Well, usually we throw that stuff out. Much better if we could get the reverse supply chain into gear, which is basically where we, the end users of those things,

put that stuff back onto a chain where it gets collected and consolidated and aggregated so you've got a big pile of old electronic waste that can then get taken to a facility somewhere where it can get melted, it down and the metal can get extracted and that metal can then get sold back to a manufacturer and then that manufacturer can put it to use in a new product, right? So it's like it's another chain that's almost as complicated as the chain that produced that toaster or that cell phone in the first place, but it's moving in reverse, right? We're getting the raw materials back out of the finished product. And there's a man by the name of Steve Nelson who's part of the story.

Tell me about him. Oh, I'm so glad you brought up Steve Nelson. and he's really one of one of the heroes of this book. Geez, Steve, I hope you're listening to this somewhere. So Steve Nelson is, he's a scrapper, which is to say he's one of the thousands and thousands of people that most of us never see, who are doing the hard work of metal recycling by literally going through the back alleys of Vancouver, trawling through dumpsters and pulling out electronic waste, anything that's made of metal that he then resell. So he does everything from like grabbing bits of old scrap copper or aluminum to old appliances. And he'll take them apart.

He's been doing this for years and years. So he knows exactly like what the aluminum in that thing is worth, what the copper in that thing is worth. He knows where to take each one of those things. And he makes his living literally pulling out trash, right? Things that other people have thrown away, extracting the valuable metal from it and then reselling it to scrapyards and metal yards. And are there many steves? Like he can't be alone in doing this. He is definitely not alone.

There are many, many others like him. Every city, every town in North America, really pretty much everywhere in the world. Somebody somewhere or many people are doing this kind of work. These folks are going around doing all of us, the service of collecting our trash, gathering it up. And that's step one on the reverse supply chain. And we're all kind of participants in this. maybe not as an extreme case as Steve Nelson. We all recycle, and we tend to think of it as kind of a pillar of sustainability and environmental

stewardship. But even that you say in your book is not as clean or green as we think it may be, especially where electronics or batteries or critical metals are concerned. Yeah, this was one of the really depressing eye-openers for me. Well, recycling is good, okay? I mean, it's easier on the planet and people than digging up fresh metals. and making something from scratch. But it turns out recycling is also very dirty, very dangerous,

and often done on the backs of some of the poorest people in the world, especially, like you said, when it comes to this kind of e-waste. So, for instance, if you've taken your old cell phone or whatever and dropped it off in a Best Buy recycling bin, if you're trying to recycle those things, you toss it, you take it to maybe your church has an e-waste recycling drive, whatever. You felt good about yourself. but the reality is almost certainly that old electronic gadget of yours is not going to be recycled in this country or in the United States.

Where does it go? What's probably going to happen is it's going to get loaded on a truck and truck to the nearest port and shipped off overseas somewhere, spewing out diesel fumes the whole way. And it's going to end up somewhere like Lagos, Nigeria, which is one of the places that I reported from. What they're doing is it's thousands of people sitting around cracking open. old cell phones like walnuts with hammers and screwdrivers and pulling out the little bits of valuable metal that are inside of them that they can resell phones, laptops, you name it. This is where it's going on. Now, in some ways, this is good.

These folks are pulling out these bits of metal that are going to get resold and are going to get reused. They're not going to go into a landfill. That's good. Also good. This kind of recycling creates a lot of jobs. It's pretty ugly and dirty and low-paid work. but it is jobs. However, there's always a cost, right? And in this case, on top of all the carbon

that was emitted getting those cell phones all the way from Vancouver to Nigeria or wherever is what happens to the rest of the stuff, right? So after they've pulled out the easy to get bits of metal, what happens to all the rest to the plastic casings and the cables and the other bits and pieces that are left over? Well, a lot of that gets dumped in landfills or burned. So you have have these big open-air fires where they're just burning plastic and rubber and all this other, you know, unwanted junk. The smoke from those fires is the nastiest, just reeking, toxin-filled stuff you can imagine. And that's being breathed in, not only by the guys doing the burning, but also everybody who's living nearby. And by the way, this isn't only happening

in Lagos where I saw it, but really in every city in the developing world, in Delhi, in Mexico City, Jakarta, you name it. So, Vince, the bottom line here is this question. You know, if you're going to participate in the digital world and the transition away from fossil fuels, is there any way we can avoid being implicated in all these negative effects of critical metals mining and processing and recycling that you've outlined? Is there any way to be a conscientious, ethical, environmentally responsible without it having a cost?

Sorry to say the short answer is no. We live in a modern, industrialized, technology-dependent, energy-dependent society, and that entails taking stuff from the earth and using it for our benefit. And often the taking involves, you know, exploiting and oppressing other people. So we're all guilty to some extent. That said, like I keep saying, there are ways that we're We can reduce our impact. And can I tell you the way that we as individuals can have the most impact? At this stage, I'm desperate to hear it. Okay. It is this. Don't buy a car, not even an electric one. And I am not saying that nobody should own a car.

I'm not saying you're a terrible person. If you own a car, I myself own a car. Maybe I'm a terrible person, but, you know, that's not the reason. And the reason I say that is because cars are. are by far the most energy-intensive, most material-intensive thing that any of us own, except your house, if you happen to own a house. Right now, there's something on the order of 1.2 billion cars on the world's roads, gasoline-deasel-powered cars. If we switch all those cars to electric vehicles, we're just going to end up swapping one set of problems for another,

right? Yeah, we won't be emitting so much carbon, but, you know, all the problems that I've just been talking about with electric vehicles. So much better is if we can figure out ways to build our cities and live our lives in ways where you have the freedom to choose whether or not to own a car. Because the big problem right now is, you know, in most parts of Canada and the U.S. and lots of other places in the world, you don't have a choice, right?

If you don't have a car, you just can't get around. That is a result of conscious choices. We have built our cities and our society to depend on the automobile. It doesn't have to be that way. This is not pie in the sky stuff. These are changes that are happening already that can be made to happen in many, many places.

So I used to live in Los Angeles for many, many years with my wife and our two kids. And of course, in Los Angeles, we had two cars. To get around L.A., you don't have a choice. You've got to have a car. We moved back to Vancouver, my hometown, about five years ago, and immediately we got rid of one of those cars.

And it wasn't because we were like, oh, you know, we're such environmental angels now that we live in Canada. No, it was just because we didn't need it anymore. And the reason for that is because Vancouver has really done a lot in the last 20-odd years to build up bicycling networks so that it's safe and easy to get around on bicycle. It's much easier to get around on foot because they've done a lot to make neighborhoods much more pedestrian-friendly and to force cars to slow down. they've built a sky train, a subway system, bus system, public transit. All those things make it a lot easier to get around without a car. And as a result, me and many other people I know, we just don't need that second car. Or even in a lot of cases, you don't need a car at all.

Montreal's really out front, lots of cities in Europe, even in places like New York, they're doing lots of things to basically make it easier to live life without a car. That's what we should be supporting. Because if we can reduce the number of cars that are out there, that will do more than anything else to reduce the amount of critical metals that we need, to reduce the amount of energy that we need. It's just a huge savings for the planet and for people. Let's say you were made the Prime Minister's critical metals are, and you were charged with drafting a national critical metal strategy for Canada. What would you advise that Canada should do to get it right on renewable energy and electrification? and critical metals.

Oh my God. That's like my nightmare scenario, having to go work with the government. Well, I guess a few things. Again, I do think Canada can and should be doing better mining and to some extent more mining and also more manufacturing

of these kind of things, right? Like processing and purifying of metals, it's an ugly business, but it's got to happen somewhere. And I would rather see it done here than in China, frankly. I'd rather see Canada reaping the benefits of it and figuring out ways to do it properly. We're much better at it than a lot of other places. I really don't think that we're going to get to where we need to go without the government stepping in. So for instance, increasing the

uptake of renewable energy, I don't think that's going to happen in the short term without some kind of government encouragement. You know, let's have subsidies, tax breaks, other kinds of things to encourage people to put solar panels on their roofs. I mean, here in BC, for instance, for a little while there, the province was giving big rebates for people who bought electric bikes. And they ran out of money almost immediately because so many people wanted electric bikes. And electric bikes are great. I mean, of course, to build an electric bike, you still need critical metals, but you need far, far less of them, right? And if you've got an electric bicycle, you can take your kid to school on that. You can carry groceries on an electric bike.

that's an example of a way where government subsidies really encouraged people to switch to a much lower damage alternative. And also to do things like support public transit and walkable neighborhoods. I mean, because again, why do we need critical metals? We need critical metals first and foremost for cars. If we don't need so many cars, we don't need so many critical metals. We don't need to have so many kids working in cobalt mines in Democratic Republic of Congo. Right. But I'm wondering about the shift in thinking that's necessary.

You talk in your book about how our lives in this modern era depend on products that have no physicality to them, that we don't think about their presence. How would you want us to think about these things differently? Well, I think the first thing is just for people to realize that, what you just said, that, you know, the internet that's such a part of all of our lives that seems like it's this invisible immaterial thing, right? It's the cloud. You tap your cell phone and an Uber comes or somebody. brings you a burrito or whatever, that is all made possible by physical machinery. You don't see it, you don't interact with it, but all of that is made possible not only by the manufacturing of your phone, and then also the internet itself runs on physical machinery, right? When you tap that Uber icon or

whatever, it sends a signal to what, to a data center somewhere where that signal is processed and then sent to the Uber driver. Those data centers use your. enormous amounts of energy. They use enormous amounts of water. They are literally like millions and millions of computer servers that, again, are made with all these critical metals that we're talking about. That's what's happening every time you tap your phone. I hope that there will be kind of a growth in consciousness around that. The same way that there is kind of around food, you go to the grocery store and there's, you know, some chicken breasts, you know, shrink wrapped for you, ready to go. Up until very recently, most people just never even gave it a thought. But

there's been more and more attention paid to like, oh, where does that chicken actually come from? How did it get here? Oh, my God, my vegetables come all the way from Mexico? How did that happen? You know, it's the exact same thing with pretty much everything that we use. And I think that awareness, that kind of mental habit of just asking yourself, where did this thing come from and what price was really paid for it? I think that's a really important skill that we should all be developing. And that everything has a cost. And everything has a cost. But I hope people don't walk away from this conversation, feeling all bummed out and just feeling like,

ah, no matter what I do, it's terrible. There are ways that we can really reduce those costs a lot. And I really do believe we can find our way to a kind of a balance that really will make a sustainable future, meaning a future that can continue indefinitely, still providing us all a good standard of living. I do believe that's possible. That's very encouraging. Vince, thank you very much for writing for this book and for talking to me. Thanks so much for having me on. This was really a great conversation.

It was. Thank you. Vince Beiser is a Vancouver-based journalist and the author of PowerMetal, the race for the resources that will shape the future. It won the 2025 Balsuli Prize for Public Policy. He also has a substack called PowerMetle. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our website is cbcbc.ca. and you can find us on the CBC News app

or wherever you get your podcasts. Technical production, Emily Kiervasio and Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.