Will widespread electrification of the US personal-vehicle sector inevitably be accompanied by a huge rise in environmentally destructive lithium mining? Not necessarily, says a new report. In this episode, lead author Thea Riofrancos discusses options for reducing future lithium demand through density, infrastructure, and smart transportation choices.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
The transportation sector is the leading carbon emitter in the US economy, and unlike some other sources, it is on the rise. Decarbonizing it is inevitably going to involve wholesale electrification of personal vehicles. We're going to need lots and lots of EVs.
That’s going to mean more demand for minerals like lithium, which is mined in environmentally destructive ways and almost everywhere opposed by local and indigenous groups.
But lithium can be mined in more or less harmful ways, depending on where and how it’s done and how well it’s governed. And the number of EVs needed in the future — and the consequent demand for lithium — is not fixed. The US transportation sector could decarbonize in more or less car-intensive ways. If US cities densified and built better public transportation and more walking and cycling infrastructure, fewer people would need cars and the cars could get by with smaller batteries. That would mean less demand for lithium, less mining, and less destruction.
But how much less? That brings us to a new report: “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining,” from the Climate and Community Project and UC Davis. It models the lithium intensity of several different pathways to decarbonization for the US personal-vehicle market to determine how much lithium demand could be reduced in different zero-carbon scenarios.
It’s a novel line of research (hopefully a sign of more to come) and an important step toward deepening and complicating the discussion of US transportation decarbonization. I was thrilled to talk to its lead author, Thea Riofrancos, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and associate professor of political science at Providence College, about the reality of lithium mining, the coming demand for more lithium, and the ways that demand can be reduced through smart transportation choices.
Alright. Thea Riofrancos, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Thea Riofrancos
Thanks for inviting me.
David Roberts
I've been meeting to get you on forever and waiting for the right occasion, and this is just a humdinger of an occasion here, this report. It's right at the nexus of, like, a lot of things I cover a lot, and a lot of things I feel like I should cover more, bringing them together. So before we jump into the details, I just want to take a step back and summarize the report, the framing of the report as I see it, because I've seen and heard some media coverage of the report, and I'm always just a little frustrated by how other journalists cover things.
Thea Riofrancos
Understandably.
David Roberts
It's just this weird oblique... they don't take the time to sort of say, "what is the main thing?" Before getting on into weird little side questions. So I'll just say, as I understand it, the premise of the report here is we need to decarbonize transportation, yes. And electrifying vehicles is a huge and unavoidable part of that and extracting a lot of lithium is an unavoidable part of that. However, and here I will quote the report, "The volume of extraction is not a given. Neither is it a given where that extraction takes place, under what circumstances, the degree of the environmental and social impacts, or how mining is governed."
So the idea here is: yes, we have to decarbonize, we have to electrify, we have to electrify transportation. We need electric vehicles, but there are better and worse ways of doing that, more and less just ways of doing that, more and less lithium-intensive ways of doing that, and we should do it the best way we can. Is that fair?
Thea Riofrancos
That is fair. And you've also quoted one of actually my personal favorite lines of the report, because I agree with you that it really gets at the heart of what our goals are, the kind of questions that we're asking, and also this desire to align goals that might seem in tension with one another, right? Which is rapid decarbonization on the one hand, and on the other hand, protecting biodiversity, Indigenous' rights, respecting other land uses, and those can feel—and to an extent, materially are—in tension with one another in specific instances. But our goal was to say, "Is there a way to have it all from a climate justice perspective?"
What's the win win? Or what's the way to get away from at least a sort of zero-sum framing?
David Roberts
Right. Or just a north star, a way to look, a goal to pursue rather than just sort of this binary notion of we're going to electrify transportation or not. There's just a ton of room within that to do it in different ways. So that's the main thing here. We're thinking about how to decarbonize transportation in the best possible way, where it's both rapid decarbonization and as just as possible and as light on the Earth as possible. So within that, you sort of take as your primary metric: lithium. You compare scenarios based on their lithium intensity. So maybe let's just start there and you can just explain to listeners why choose lithium as your sort of central metric?
Thea Riofrancos
Great question. Because one could imagine this report being replicated across a whole host of transition minerals, and I actually hope that it is, right? I do see this as a kind of opening to a research agenda that we hope is malleable in other sectors as well. Why lithium? Maybe let's zoom out a little bit and just say how urgent it is to decarbonize the US Transportation sector, right? And so that's why transportation which we can talk about more later, of course.
David Roberts
Yeah, I think in the latter half we're going to get into transportation and US Transportation all the stuff.
Thea Riofrancos
It helps us sort of understand why the battery and the battery helps us understand why lithium. So I'll just treat it in that order briefly, which is transportation sector number one, and main steel sort of rising emissions sector in the US, right. In order to decarbonize that sector, there's lots of forms of transportation. We're focusing on ground transportation here. And the prevailing technology for decarbonizing ground transportation is the lithium ion battery. That may change in the future, and I'm happy to sort of entertain that. We can talk about it if we want. But right now, in terms of commercial viability, scale, and just the actual material production that's going on in the world, it's the lithium ion battery.
When we sort of dig into those batteries, and I know you've covered batteries on prior shows, there's a whole set of different minerals and metals used in the cathodes, the anodes, the separators, et cetera. Lithium is central, though. Lithium is the kind of non-substitutable element in that recipe. You can go to different cathode chemistries that do or don't use nickel, that do or don't use cobalt, et cetera, right. The iron phosphate versus the NMC. And those have different benefits or drawbacks in terms of energy density, power density, et cetera. But lithium is in all of them right now.
And so lithium felt like a good first cut, a good sort of catch-all. I'll also say that we expect that if we overall focus on reducing the raw material needs of the energy transition, those benefits carry on beyond lithium, right? A lot of our suggestions would also reduce mining of other materials, including those outside of the battery, right. Like copper, if we look at the broader car. So we chose lithium for those reasons. One other thing to sort of note is that lithium has also been a particular target of a range of public policy and corporate strategies over the past couple of years, right.
I hate to kind of use imperialist language, but I'll just use it because it's how the media frames it. Right, there's like a scramble for lithium, a rush for lithium, a lithium boom. It's considered essential and strategic by public and private sectors in ways that are also making it sort of a laboratory of new corporate and public policies. And so that's another reason to focus on lithium.
David Roberts
Yeah. Kind of an early indicator of how these institutions will approach decarbonization more broadly or materials more broadly.
Thea Riofrancos
Absolutely. And playing into that and also kind of a result of that at the same time is like the crazy price volatility with lithium over the past few years. And maybe volatility is not the best way to put it, because it's been just consistently rising. Over the past decade it's been super volatile, big crashes, big booms, and busts. But in the past few years, we've just seen steady increases, getting to the point of historic highs last year. So lithium is now a huge factor in the price and affordability of batteries, which are in turn, the main and most expensive component of an EV. So from a totally different angle, we care about how much are batteries an EV is going to cost, and why? What is their cost structure? Lithium is like a good place to look as well.
David Roberts
Let's talk about lithium, then. Let's just start with... because it's funny, prior to EVs, the lithium market was looking from the perspective of what it's going to be in a fully electrified world, pretty sleepy, kind of backwater market. And it's one of many things in the energy transition world that is sort of quite suddenly being expected to 10x itself. So let's just start with the lithium market as it exists now. Where does it come from? You say there are four main countries where lithium is mined. We should say—most listeners probably get this—but we should just say lithium, the raw material is spread pretty evenly all over the world, but it's mined in very specific places.
So talk about where those are.
Thea Riofrancos
Yeah, with a lot of extractive industries, but really very much so with lithium, the map of deposits or of underlying existing lithium in the Earth's crusts or oceans is totally distinct from the map of production, right. The map of production is a really small subset, so that's important to keep in mind. But where it's currently mined is Australia, Chile, China and Argentina. Those are the top four. Those have been the top four. They've actually jockeyed and sort of changed positions at different moments over the past few years. But those have been the top four. They are the top four, and they will sort of be the top four for at least the next few years, right. Mines take a long time to build, which we can talk about if we want, so that's not going to instantly change. But I foresee that in the next decade thereabouts, we're going to have some different players on that top, and it'll be more like a top ten list rather than a top four list, right. But that's where it's mined now.
And one other interesting thing about lithium—we don't have to get too nerdy about lithium per se—but it's a weird element because it's a very reactive metal. So you don't find it as a metal in nature. You find it in all these heterogenous compounds, right. So there's lithium-bearing clays, there's lithium in geothermal brines, there's lithium and non-geothermal brines, there's lithium in the spagamine, there's lithium and other types of hardrock deposits that haven't actually been mined so much yet, but will be on the horizon. There's really low concentrations of lithium in the ocean. I don't see that as per se the next frontier, but it's there. So there's lithium comes in all forms, really, and each of those has, like, different extractive techniques, different environmental impacts, x, y and z, but it's really variable.
David Roberts
One of the things that follows from that, from it being reactive and thus not found in pure form, is that whatever it is you're digging or hauling up, you then have to do a lot of processing to it to get the lithium out, which is tends to be the gross part. So let's get nerdy a little bit. There are two main mining techniques you talk about in the report, hardrock and brine. Let's just briefly go through those. So, like, hardrock is in, as I understand it, Australia. Tell us what hardrock lithium mining looks like. Just like, what's the process?
Thea Riofrancos
The nice thing about this form of mining from a listener's perspective is it's much more like every other form of mining that we're familiar with, right? So we're removing large quantities of hard rock. This is in Western Australia. That's where the lithium assets are there. And then there's a basic level of processing that happens in Australia which separates out what is considered waste rock, right, from where the lithium is in higher concentration. And then pretty immediately, the vast majority, like 95% of still relatively unprocessed lithium is then sent over to China for further processing and refining. And then that enters rather directly into, of course, their battery production.
David Roberts
And then there's the brine technique, which is grosser, I think, fair to say. Maybe just briefly describe what it means to have lithium and brine and what it involves getting it out.
Thea Riofrancos
I had the opportunity to see some of the brine operations in Nevada. I got a very cool mountain view of them when I was actually looking at the Rylight Ridge Project. And that... if you sort of hike around a bit, you can look at the Silver Peak brine production in Nevada, which is the one lithium mine in the US now in production. So we have brine in the US We also have Brine in Chile and Argentina and elsewhere in the world. So, Chile is a place that I've done a lot of research, but the processes are quite similar in Chile and Argentina, and actually also in Nevada.
In fact, the way that brine is removed and evaporated—which I'll get into in a moment—in Chile, was first developed in Nevada and kind of exported to Chile. So there's kind of an interesting whole story of, like, US Chile mining relations in both lithium and copper, where there's been a lot of back and forth knowledge and technical expertise and that sort of thing. So, anyway, in Chile, you have the oldest and driest desert on Earth, in a way that driest place on Earth, except for some subregions of Antarctica. So it's extremely dry. But the oldness is important because there's a huge amount of scientific value in the kind of evolutionary processes and the origins of this desert that are worth thinking about while all this mining is happening and sort of destroying some of those landscapes.
So, right now, mining for lithium happens in the Atacama Salt Flat, which is in the Atacama Desert. That really old, dry desert I just mentioned. And the salt flat is enormous. I live in Rhode Island, the state of Rhode Island, which is a very small state, but the Atacama Desert is like two-thirds the size of the state of Rhode Island, right? It's very big, and it is like just breathtakingly beautiful and strange and with a very rich, both natural and indigenous history. And so when you're standing on it, you are in this very unusual landscape that's gray and white and those kinds of shades ringed with these towering Andean mountains.
So I don't know if you've been had the privilege of going to the Andes, but these huge...very tall mountains, right, very dramatic, some of them are volcanic, right? So that's the kind of landscape the surface is a very crusty kind of surface, but it's not barren. So when you're walking around, especially in, like, ecological preserves and places where there's been good conservation, there are these surface lagoons and there are beautiful flamingo species that are endemic to the region that are just chilling out in the lagoons because they, with their filtered gills, kind of just suck up little species that live in the salty hunter water there. And that's how they survive.
And so there's a whole ecosystem that relates to the salt flat, and there's a lot of migratory birds, as well as other animals. Underneath the salt flat at various depths, right, there is subsurface brine deposits. So these are deposits of extremely salty water—much saltier than the oceans—that within them have various kind of valuable minerals suspended. And one of those is lithium. And so the basics of the way this works is that the subsurface brine is pumped to the surface. You can think of like a giant straw or whatever, just kind of any well-pumping system pumped to the surface and then it is arrayed in these enormous evaporation ponds. And it is moved from pond to pond with different chemicals being added, removed such that to reach maximum lithium concentration. But what's most important is actually the work of just solar radiation, because in addition to being the oldest and driest desert on Earth, in general, this desert is considered like a poly-extreme environment. That means it's super dry, but it's also super sunny, and it's super windy, right? It's just like the super high altitude. It's everything. And all of those conditions are very auspicious for the evaporation of brine, right. If you're going to put water out in a desert like that, it's going to be thrown up into the air very quickly.
David Roberts
It's funny, I was reading about this and I got to the part where, you know, I knew that the brine was down there with these elements in it, and I was thinking like, "Well, how do they, you know, reduce it down to the elements?" And it's like they throw it in a big pool and let it sit there for a while and come back to it. It's weirdly...low tech, but also weirdly like space inefficient just like big, sprawling, all that fluid sitting out in the sun. You just need giant swaths of land for this.
Thea Riofrancos
Absolutely. You need a lot of land. And then there's a question of, well, we're throwing water into the air in one of the driest desert or in the driest desert on Earth. What is the implication of that? Of course, what mining companies will say is, "It's brine, not water." But what scientists that I've spoken to and read have will say is, "Well, the water and the brine are actually connected in ways that we don't even fully understand because there hasn't been quite enough research on it." But the subsurface water system, they are porous boundaries. How porous they are is a subject of scientific debate between underground freshwater, which is absolutely essential to human life, to animal life, to other industries, right. Porous interfaces between that and then the subsurface brine.
And so the question is—and this is the real point of scientific debate—is whether pulling out that brine is actually pulling down the freshwater through the forces of gravity and nature of pores, a vacuum and the whole thing. But also because the downward pressure in the nucleus of the salt flat creates a depression, which further pushes down the brine and also potentially further pulls down the water at the edge, the freshwater. So there's a whole complex kind of desert hydrology.
David Roberts
And in terms of environmental impacts, let's just talk about what's nasty about it. I mean, I think people can get sort of a picture when you're digging up big pieces of land, you're using lots of land for these evaporation pools. Presumably, when the water evaporates, it's not just lithium left behind, right? There's all sorts of other stuff. What happens to all that other stuff? What is the sort of environmental risk here?
Thea Riofrancos
Right, so there is like, piled up waste salts that are left behind. The companies will say those aren't toxic, but physical waste being removed from underground and piled around in a place that nature did not intend it. I think the most important thing, though, is what I was just talking about, which is the watershed, because this watershed is already exhausted. And that's a technical definition, not just me being an environmentalist. Like it's called exhausted by the Chilean water agency. And there are multiple reasons for that. There are multiple compounding factors. I will definitely call out the copper industry as being the worst.
The copper industry uses so much fresh water that they've had to switch to desalination plants because there's not enough fresh water. And they have built the largest desalination plant in the world, I'm pretty sure, to serve one enormous copper mine in Chile.
David Roberts
Wild.
Thea Riofrancos
And that desalination plant is on the coast, obviously, the water is desalinated there from the seawater, then—where very energy intensive process—polluting. And then that water is shipped to the highlands where the copper mines are. So that's the number one impact on freshwater is how it's been exhausted, a lot of it because of the copper industry, which is in the same location.
David Roberts
And copper, we should also maybe just say, as a side note, also expected to rise considerably...
Thea Riofrancos
Dramatically.
David Roberts
...under clean energy.
Thea Riofrancos
Right. Because of the copper wiring in the cars, the copper wiring and the transmission lines, the charging stations, our whole, "electrify everything" is very copper-dependent under current technologies. So there's that. There's climate change, which is further desert-ifying—I don't even know how to pronounce that—the desert, right? Like it's making it drier. So there's that issue, and then there's agriculture, there's human consumption, and there's lithium, right? So there's a variety of stressors on the same water system, and as a result, it's been called exhausted. And they say that they're not going to give out more freshwater permits x, y, and z, right?
So that's just like the context that it's in. And where the debate is with lithium is how much removing vast quantities of brine—we're talking about like thousands of liters a second, I believe, if I don't have that wrong—vast quantities of brine by these two major mining companies, SQM and Albemarle, is further playing into this watershed exhaustion. Another thing that's interesting to note, to go to sort of a totally different type of environmental impact that we humans may not think about very much, which is microorganisms.
So what's fascinating about the brine is that it's actually an ecosystem. It's not just dead salt water, whatever that would mean, right? Microorganisms live in the brine, both in the surface salty lagoons, but also in the subsurface brine deposits. There are microorganisms, and those are important for a variety of reasons, but including they hold clues to evolution and the origins of life on Earth because of how old this desert is and also how poly-extreme the environment is, replicates earlier Earth conditions, but also like Mars conditions. So if we want to understand, could there be life on other planets, scientists say we need to understand how these microorganisms can survive.
And not only this super extreme in all the ways I listed, but also, like, some of the saltiest environments. And saline is really hard on organisms, right? And so it's amazing that they can survive in this hypersaline context. But we're basically just sucking them out. We're killing...they're not going to survive the process of lithium extraction. And that, again, may not depends on the listener, how much that matters, but there's a lot of science that says these microorganisms are important for a variety of reasons and we should think about conserving them.
David Roberts
There's a lot more detail in the report, but let's just consider it settled. Lithium...lithium mining, everywhere that it exists is pretty environmentally nasty. And another thing you point out in your report is that almost everywhere it exists, there is opposition to it, local opposition to it. Indigenous and other groups organizing to protect landscapes, organizing to protest the fact that they're not consulted, they're informed consent was not gained. Sort of all the capitalist evils that spring to mind when people think about mining are on the loose in lithium mining, and it's opposed almost everywhere it is happening.
And that is kind of just the important background here for everybody who's thinking about decarbonisation in this way, which is that, like we said, yes, it's going to be better to do this than to continue pulling gazillions of tons of fossil fuels out of the Earth every second of every day. It's going to be better. But every step you take towards more lithium, there are tangible harms being done to vulnerable people. That's something we can't ever forget as we're tossing these things around.
Right now, it's relatively small. There's four countries involved. There's a lot of talk about vast expansions coming. There's a supposed supply crunch over the next five to ten years as, like, demand is rising much faster than supply. But there are also, as the report points out, these huge discrepancies in projections, depending on who you believe, how much lithium is going to be needed. So just give a sense, like, how fast and big the lithium mining sector is going to expand. How big is the pressure to expand here? And what do we mean? Are we talking about twice the size, ten times the size?
Thea Riofrancos
It depends who you ask, as you already noted, right. And everyone agrees: big increase. But beyond that general consensus, there are differences. And I know you recently had a conversation about modeling, right? And like how much goes into modeling. And I have never been more convinced of this than I am now, both in diving into the existing models and what their assumptions are, but also in seeing some of the contrast with our report, which we'll get into later, and how different the findings can be if you change some of those assumptions or play around with them in some way, right.
Models are not, like, written in stone or laws of nature. There are a lot of human decisions made sometimes with political and economic interests at play, right? So everyone agrees big increase, right. As you noted earlier, like, lithium was, and actually could still be considered a rather small market. For a long time, it's mainly been about personal electronics, but also it's used in some construction glass materials as a coolant. It's used in lithium as a psychiatric medication. But it's really like the EV market that has been a game changer, right? And what's been the case for the past couple of years, and will be the case even more so going forward, is that batteries for passenger EVs, specifically, are the number one driver of demand for new lithium, right? So that's also important to sort of keep in mind. They vastly outweigh any other end use in terms of why there's so much talk about lithium demand.
So, a couple of ways to cut the cake. And I'm drawing on a mix of our report and other existing forecasters out there. One way to think about it, and this comes from our report, is that if we just look at today's demand for EVs and then project outward to the future, taking into account growth, et cetera, to 2050, the US market alone would need triple the amount of current global production.
That's one way, because it's hard to wrap our heads. I mean, there's many ways to say the same thing, right? That's one way to say it, right? The US in 2050 would need three times what the whole world needs now.
David Roberts
Yes.
Thea Riofrancos
And that's, again, not thinking about all the other countries that have their needs, right. So that's one way to think about it. Another that I can find a little more concrete because it talks about individual mines, and here we're drawing on Benchmark—they're a big forecaster, which people have opinions about, right, so I'm not waiting into that. But they are a big forecaster and they influence government a lot, particularly. So Benchmark mineral forecasting says we'd need a 200% increase in the number of lithium mines, the just number of discrete mines by 2035. So a closer time frame to meet expected demand for EVs. That's globally, not US-specific. So we need a lot more lithium mines as discrete entities.
David Roberts
But this is what breaks my brain about all this. You say it can take up to 16 years to get a mine going. These are not pop up operations. So 200% more mines in the next twelve years just...
Thea Riofrancos
It seems hard to meet that. Now, what will happen, and this we could talk about the implications of this, and there's a lot of debate in the climate, environmental, et cetera, community, but some of those time frames might get shortened because there's a huge pressure in the US, in Europe, and in some other jurisdictions, to fast track mines. Like right now, yes, it takes a decade...We say 16.5 years. It could be shorter, can be a decade in some cases. But we're talking about at least a decade, right, to develop a mine, to go through financing, getting your financial back errors, the permits to get the quote unquote "social license," which is like an industry term for communities, like, giving you bare minimum sort of agreement or something.
David Roberts
The thought of all that happening lots, lots faster does not calm my heart.
Thea Riofrancos
Me neither. And I think there's a whole separate conversation. I know you've dealt with this in other writing and on the show, but like this permitting conversation, I think speed gets equated with outcomes in a wrong way. I mean, saying we're going to do everything faster doesn't actually always make it faster, because what that means is there's various corners being cut, which just turns into lawsuits. So actually making the timeline for NEPA faster in the US case does not actually per se mean we're going to get the lithium faster. So that's a separate conversation, but I just want to throw that in there.
Okay, so a lot more lithium. I'll throw out one other statistic because it's the one that alarms me the most when I try to grapple with it. It's the international energy agencies from 2020 or 2021, from a report a couple of years ago where they said compared to a 2020 baseline, we need 42 times as much lithium in 2040. That's like an enormous increase. I think that means 4200%, if I understand math. I don't know. Or 4300 percent. Whatever it is, it's really big. It's a large increase, right. It was larger than any other mineral they tracked.
David Roberts
Yeah. And this is wild. I don't even know that we have to spell it out, but just like, let listeners just imagine what is a global rapid herding toward more mining? How is that going to play out? The idea that it's going to be done more sensitively or with more consultation with indigenous groups, et cetera, et cetera, when everyone is basically panicking and trying to do it as fast as possible, it's just not a great recipe.
Thea Riofrancos
Right.
David Roberts
As the last comment on lithium, let's talk a little bit about the coming supply crunch and where... one of the big things the report talks about is these four countries are the main lithium mining countries now. But obviously with this sort of global stampede on, there's going to be a lot more mines in other countries. So where can we expect mining to branch out? And what is the timeline of that versus the timeline of this crunch?
Thea Riofrancos
One thing to note at the top is that there already is a lithium supply crunch, right. We're already in that domain, so to speak. And the way that we know that is that the prices for lithium have been historically high, right? Because supply, demand, price, et cetera, right. Supply is not keeping up with demand. And that is important to our renewable energy kind of wonk and industry folks on the show that are listening to the show, because that, is in turn, changing something about battery pricing for decades and for sure since 2010, which is when Bloomberg started tracking this, but you can go back to earlier data from other sources.
For decades, lithium ion batteries have been decreasing in price in a sort of secular trend based on R&D, economies of scale, innovation, manufacturing efficiencies, all the things that make things cheaper under capitalism when that occurs, and that is priced in kilowatt hour. And this sort of, like, the idea was we're going to one day get to $100 per kilowatt hour, and that will get us to price parity without taking into account subsidies with ICE vehicles, right? So that was the sort of golden target. In 2021, they plateaued, they stopped that decrease, and we didn't know what was going to happen in 2022, but now we do.
So in 2022, they rose for the first time, and we went from like 130-something, 135, I think, to like 151 per kilowatt hour. I'm not trying to be like a doomsday or I'm not saying they'll increase now from here on out. I don't actually think that. But I do think it's important because the reason battery prices, for the first time since Bloomberg started tracking this, have increased in price is because of raw materials. So, in an interesting way, because we've done all this manufacturing efficiency in R&D, and we really cut costs on all other parts of the process, the raw material components are logically a larger component of the cost structure.
At the same time, coincidentally, those raw materials have increased in price in their cost, right. So that is why batteries are now more expensive. I'm sure things will settle in whatever way, especially as we build up a lot more battery-manufacturing capacity around the world, which will depress prices. But it is true that this is starting to call into question, further question the affordability of EVs, because these are the main and most expensive component of an EV.
David Roberts
Right, which in turn sort of complicates these long term projections of EVs, which in turn complicates the long-term projections of lithium demand. Like the whole...
Thea Riofrancos
It's all circularly interrelated. But we can definitely say that there's been a huge rush to mine lithium in the US Which is just another reason for people in the US to think about this. It's not just about stuff that happens far away. This is happening here. We have 50-odd projects with some level of financial backing or permitting in Nevada alone in one state.
David Roberts
Wow.
Thea Riofrancos
That's tracked by the Center for Biological Diversity by Patrick Donnelly. Shout out to him because he's been tracking that. It's really hard to compile those statistics. And the US government is throwing money, $700 million at Ioneers mine in Rayte Ridge. That's the Department of Energy just gave them a huge loan.
The auto industry is throwing money. GM just gave $650 million in equity stakes to Lithium Americas for their Thacker Pass mine—which is, by the way, in federal court right now, over fast tracking concerns raised by environmentalists, so, the whole thing.
David Roberts
All of these are facing opposition. Like, almost everywhere a lithium mine exists, it seems like there's some opposition. It's funny that's one of the things I've been sort of joked about with the Inflation Reduction Act is everyone loves the idea of onshoring the whole supply chain as a slogan. Everybody's super into that. But there are lots of links in the supply chain that are pretty nasty. I'm curious what their political valence will be once people get a little closer look at, like, what mining and processing of lithium really looks like, whether they'll be so excited about onshoring it.
In the report mentions in the brine area, there are new techniques of mining lithium from brine that are less impactful than the traditional sort of, "leave it out in an open pit while the sun bakes it" technique. So it's not that lithium mining is a fixed quantity of environmental destruction. There are better and worse ways to do it, could be better or worse, governed, regulated, all these kind of things. But we got to move on to the second half of your report. So the report focuses on, it says, "Okay, we need to electrify, but we'd like to do it in the least lithium-intensive way possible."
And so you focus on the US Transportation sector because, as you note, that's a huge, huge driver of lithium demand, and you focus on personal vehicles, which are the bulk of US transportation emissions, and therefore they're going to be the bulk of lithium demand in the future. And so the whole question here is: how could we decarbonize the US personal vehicle sector in the least lithium intensive way, otherwise known as increasing lithium efficiency, "Getting more mobility," I think this is the title of the report. "More mobility out of less lithium" is the idea here.
This is, I think, a great part of the report because in some sense, once you see it on paper, it seems obvious, like, yeah, if lithium is bad, we should think about how to use less of it. It just seems sort of obvious, but it is wild how much total auto domination in the US is just taken for granted and invisible in most projections of car demand and for lithium demand, it's just an unspoken assumption that the current pattern of auto insanity in the US is going to continue. So in a sense, it's, I think, a great advance in the state of things just to say, "Maybe we could do it differently." There's other ways, other ways to do it. Yeah, it's not, as you say in that first quote, "It's not a fixed thing."
We have choices here. There are different ways things could go. So you lay out four scenarios. The first scenario is just: assume electrification of the existing number of cars on the US and otherwise everything stays the same. The car, the auto intensity, the land use, the amount of car use stays the same, and we just try to electrify all the vehicles. In a sense, I think it's tempting to sort of take that as the default scenario, but one of the points you make in the report, which I think is important, is it's not obvious that that's the easiest way to go.
It's not even obvious that that's possible. So let's first just talk about that, because it seems like kind of what we're stumbling toward, which is just take the cars for granted and try to electrify as many of them as possible. So just tell us maybe what's wrong with that, the sort of status quo we're stumbling toward.
Thea Riofrancos
Right. Well, first of all, it assumes an enormous quantity of EVs are going to be bought by people, which is, in a way, an assumption of all of our scenarios to be fair. All of them involve what we could call the mass deployment of electric vehicles. None of them eliminate electric vehicles entirely. They just change their relative predominance within the transportation mix in various ways, right? But in scenario one, the most need to be purchased, right? And so first and foremost, it's a question of millions of individual consumer decisions going as planned.
And it's a question of how much our policy environment and especially financial incentives will need to change pretty rapidly in order to make that a reality. Because I don't know that IRA is going to cut it. Putting aside all the debates over the specific mechanisms IRA uses, it gives rebates, you know, at a below a certain income threshold that can get up to, I think, $7,500, you know, not nothing. And so that's the approach in the IRA, but I already noted and we've talked about how these vehicles might be getting more costly over time. I mean, there's different trends at the same time, on the one hand, the batteries are getting more expensive, which will make the cars more expensive. On the other hand, now, all the car companies are saying we're going to out compete one another on price and we're willing to forsake a little bit of profit. These are uncertainties. I don't know which will, on the balance, which will be the prevailing trend.
David Roberts
Well, also in the key dynamic you point out in the report, which is if lithium demand is as high as it would be—looking at the US car fleet—that exacerbates the crunch, exacerbates the high price.
Thea Riofrancos
Yes, right.
David Roberts
So in a sense, trying to sell more is almost self-limiting.
Thea Riofrancos
Yes, that's an excellent point. And so that is one problem with scenario one. Like will we have to increase subsidy? I'm not anti-subsidy. I'm not like anti-government spending. I'm, like, in favor of government spending. So it's not like I'm trying to do some taxpayer-efficiency thing or like star of the beast thing. It's not about that I mind spending public money. It's like on what, right, because all of this involves public money. Whether it's EV subsidies, whether it's those might be more invisible forms of public spending, but the more visible forms are the transportation authorities and then of course, highways.
So all this involves public money, but this one involves trying to use public money to shape individual consumption decisions and that's not the most efficient way, right. And it would be more efficient and we'll go through this with scenarios two, three and four to actually use that to beef up mass transit. So that's one issue with scenario one, or a couple, I guess. Another, though, relies on peer research, not our own research, but other folks that we cite which say that we will get to zero emissions faster if we get people out of cars. And so we don't directly test that because all we're looking at are 2050 scenarios. So we're assuming zero emissions in 2050. And what we're playing with is like, how we're going to get there.
But other people that test: will we get to zero emissions? or how fast will we, show...and this stands to reason, right, like the fewer vehicles on the road, the more people are sharing the same vehicles, the easier it is to electrify more quickly, because if you electrify a bus, you deal with many people's transit at once. And also even before you electrify the bus, that's still like a net positive if you're getting people out of an ICE car into a bus, like you've dealt with some carbon emissions before you even make it an e-bus, right? And so there's a lot of...this is what I like to say to the carbon hawks among us, right? To people that really unilaterally focus on...which I, in some ways, count myself among, but I'm less unilateral, like, I'm also thinking about biodiversity and all these other issues, but for people that are like, "All I care about is the emissions trajectory." We will lower emissions faster if we don't do the super car-dependent one-to-one EV to ICE swap, right, or ICE to EV, excuse me.
And it's not even one-to-one. It's more we have to produce more EVs over time as the population grows.
David Roberts
Demand is rising. Yeah. Population is rising. Yeah. I mean, you point out that there's some doubt in a lot of scenarios and modeling whether we can even hit the 1.5, whether we can get on a 1.5 consonant scenario or even a two degrees consonant scenario with this sheer volume of cars that we have to electrify, right? It's an enormous amount and it's rising all the time. So lowering the amount of cars is lowering the target to more achievable levels. So that's important. So I just want to get I think people maybe think that this is kind of the default thing we're heading toward, which is just samesies with all the cars except they're electric now.
Whether or not you think that's the best way to go, there's real reason to doubt whether it's possible to do that. Certainly on the time frame we're talking about.
Especially as the cars get bigger, right? There's that other research that's not ours. We do a lot on battery size, so we'll talk about that. But there's a separate research academic article that just came out a few months ago showing that the e-Hummer, like when we get really large, like really gargantuan batteries, cancel out their climate benefits, meaning that the carbon-intensity of that supply chain to produce that vehicle adds to emissions rather than decreasing them, right? And so that's when we get at the real extremes of car size. I'm not saying every EV is an e-Hummer. It's just not right.
But unfortunately, our trend is trending upward in size. And so we also, back to our earlier analysis of supply chains, have to think about emissions across the supply chain. Right. And when we produce enormous vehicles that then are shipped on container ships like these just enormous production networks. And if those are not fully decarbonized as production networks, then we have to factor that in.
Yeah, embedded embodied emissions are huge here. So, you have four scenarios. The first one is just everything stays the same except it becomes electric. And then scenarios two, three, and four are, sort of, I guess, escalating versions of europeanizing American cities. I'll just say upfront, you summarize towards the end here relative to scenario one. With scenario two, you get an 18% reduction in lithium demand. Scenario three, it's 41%. And scenario four is 66% reduction in lithium demand, which is... that's not marginal, right? So these alternate scenarios you're talking about are real substantial reductions in lithium demand.
Thea Riofrancos
More than I expected. Like, honestly, as someone who's looked at this for a while but never read a study like this because...not existed. But my assumption was it was going to be a little lower, though still important, still significant, but it was higher. And it gets even higher over time. Like if we go all the way to 2050, we can get a bigger spread, partly because by that point we have more recycling feedstock to work with and other changes that are more cumulative, take place. And so, it gets really dramatic when we look at best and worst case in like the year 2050, for example.
David Roberts
But...and this is maybe an area where I need you in specific because I know you always have good things to say about thoughts like the ones I'm having, which are I'm looking at these scenarios. Just scenario two, the first level above one, it says, and I quote, "Levels of car dependence in US cities and suburbs are reduced to the equivalent of comparable EU cities." And to me, just that just getting US cities and suburbs on par with comparable EU cities is alone just mind-boggling in its scope and its political difficulty. And I just look at that and I feel daunted.
And I know you're always going on about we need to expand our imaginations, we need to push the window open, and we need to think more about what's possible and not feel locked in. But, in scenario three goes...
Thea Riofrancos
Much more ambitious.
David Roberts
...farther than that. And then scenario four is basically like: every US city becomes Vienna. Every US city becomes not just average EU city, but state of the art, progressive, cutting edge. And I just have a lot of trouble seeing that happening. So how do you think about or do you bother to think about...
Thea Riofrancos
No, I do.
David Roberts
...the political realism of what are very, very substantial reforms in US land use and habits and public spending and on and on.
Thea Riofrancos
Yes. So there's a lot to dig into there because I absolutely do think about it. And I'm a political scientist, for whatever that's worth, and also someone who's done a lot of political organizing, legislative advocacy, et cetera. So as utopian as I can sometimes perhaps sound or feel or whatever, I mean, I have ambitious ideas. I'm a big proponent of the Green New Deal, et cetera. I do think about the brass tacks of moving people on issues and of what regulations or what legislation will be necessary and what's possible at the state or local versus federal level.
And I want to talk about all those things. I want to say something first, though, is just like a set piece, which is we've been treating these as like four big different pathways, right? Which they are. But what's important to note is that there are subpathways and subpathways meaning there's actually like dozens of scenarios that we test because there's a lot of on-off switches that can apply to each of these. And one key one is battery size. So let's go back to that scenario one that we've been talking about, which is the status quo but electric, or the status quo plus population and consumption growth, but everything EV, and it turns out it makes an enormous difference if we can just get back to where we were a few years ago with average battery size in the US, or where our peer nations are, or peer affluent nations like in East Asia and Western Europe are with battery size. We're now like double the size of a decade ago. We're double the size of the global average. And what's concerning is that...
David Roberts
God, that's so dumb.
Thea Riofrancos
It's so dumb. Because there's so many reasons it's dumb. Those cars are unaffordable to most Americans. The larger the battery, the more expensive the car. But it's also just being sold in a sort of luxury framework, right, of these fancy pickup trucks and fancy SUVs that contractors aren't using. I mean, it's just like affluent suburbanites for the most part, and they're using them to go to the grocery store, not to go hiking or to, like, haul stuff.
David Roberts
I know. And I get that every new consumer product you start on the luxury end, you make it an object of desire, and then you and then you move down. But like, we're like ten years into this shit, and...
Thea Riofrancos
It's getting worse! It's moving into opposite direction.
David Roberts
I know. They're getting bigger and bigger...
Thea Riofrancos
Like, now it's like everything is the Ford e-Lightning or whatever.
David Roberts
I know. Okay, let's get like some freaking hatchbacks now. Like we did it.
Thea Riofrancos
Is what most working and middle class Americans can afford and drop. And so we're getting really crazy with the average battery sizes double, as I said, the global average double where we were a decade ago. And it's concerning because it's a trajectory. So are we going to be triple that in a few years? Like, where is this ending? But, the good news is, that we can be as car dependent...we can change like, nothing about the political, social, cultural infrastructural status quo. Like, we could stay with our car dependency in all the ways that that's locked in.
And we could get really significant decreases in lithium volume, especially as we get closer to the end of our...we get to 2050. So in 2050, just snapshot year, because that's our final year that we model. We could have 42% less lithium in scenario one, the car-dependent scenario, if we have more normative—I don't want to say smaller because it's misrepresents it. It's like more normative sizes.
David Roberts
Normal-er.
Thea Riofrancos
Normal-er.
David Roberts
Normal-er batteries.
Thea Riofrancos
Where we were recently, and where most of the world is now.
David Roberts
Like, when I first read through, I thought that the reduced battery size demand in your scenarios was a causal result of land use changes and walkability....
Thea Riofrancos
No, it's a separate parameter.
David Roberts
So you're just turning that knob...
Thea Riofrancos
For each scenario.
David Roberts
Independently.
Thea Riofrancos
Exactly. Which is why—and I'll just say it here because it's my favorite of our findings, because it's the most dramatic—that if we compare scenario one like the car-dependent scenario and with large batteries, ones that are currently larger than average, but is, like the direction we're going. We compare that to scenario four with small batteries, with perfect recycling, with everything, like ideal utopian Vienna, whatever. In 2050, 92% different in lithium volumes, right? So there are radically different futures ahead of us. And it's helpful to look at the extremes, even if our worst case is, like, unlikely on the negative end and our best case is unlikely on the positive end.
Let's look at the total spread, because that's the spectrum we're working with. And that's where we can use policy, behavioral change, cultural norms, whatever is available to us as tools to shift people towards the best case scenario.
David Roberts
You highlight three specific changes that are the most efficacious kind of levers to pull to reduce lithium demand. There's reducing demand for vehicles overall, densifying urban centers, and then reducing battery size. I get reducing demand for passenger vehicles. You do that with better public transit, better land use. You do that in part through densifying urban centers, increase walking and stuff like that. But it's notable that battery recycling, which people are quite bullish about, doesn't really make much of a dent for quite a few years. So maybe just tell us a little bit about what is the state of recycling, what you expect from it?
Thea Riofrancos
Yeah. So what's interesting about recycling is that you need to have enough feedstock available. Meaning, like, if you're going to use recycled, recovered materials to manufacture batteries instead of new mining, which is the goal, we want to use circular economy kind of approaches so that the end of life batteries and also the manufacturing waste, all the things that are spit out by our system, like reenter the loop. And we close the loop. And so instead of new mining, we're sort of like we're mining batteries, right? Instead of mining the Atacama Desert.
David Roberts
Right.
Thea Riofrancos
So that's great. We're super proponents of it, and there's very optimistic results shown in terms of how we can get close to 100% material recovery. The technology is there. That's what I want to start with.
David Roberts
Maybe it's too obvious for you to even say, but I'll just put it out there. Signpost is just even best case, recovering 100% of materials. You still have to get enough materials in the loop in the first place.
Thea Riofrancos
That's where I'm going. We're several years out from that being significant because we don't have the level of EV penetration yet. And then forget about just the current level of EV penetration. How long do people own their cars? Hopefully, these cars last a minute, right? Like they're durable goods, right? So, yeah, it might be ten years, you know, whatever it is, right. Until we're actually end of life with those batteries. And then it's interesting. I'll just throw this out there because I think it's it's kind of interesting and it helps people understand how materials cycle through systems.
So when we get to the end of life of a battery in a car, it no longer gives the power and energy density that a car requires to move quickly and for distance. At that point there are a number of other applications we could use the battery for, and we often go to the grid as the first thing, and that's great. Backup storage or primary storage, even on an energy grid because of variable solar, wind, et cetera. So we can store energy, but also we can even use it for less intense mobility applications, right? So, like, a city bus does not move as quickly, it also gets much more frequent overnight charge. There's a variety of ways in which buses strain their batteries less and can work with a second-life battery. So there's lots of interesting applications. But there's a critical choice there, like, do we put the battery in a second-life application or do we strip it of its materials and use those materials to become feedstock for new...and I'm not trying to make it, like, a zero-sum thing, though I guess at the literal cell level, it is, right, like one or the other is happening.
David Roberts
Don't you want to do both? I mean, can't you completely exhaust the battery and then get them...
Thea Riofrancos
It puts the horizon back, defers the horizon because if we're reusing then and... reduce reuse, recycle, that old environmental thing is actually useful to remember. So we're talking about reducing lithium demand in this report. We're also talking about reusing and recycling at the sort of end of life. Right, but you first reuse, then you recycle, but it just pushes out the time frame for when we'd have enough recycling feedstock to really be replacing significant amounts of new mining.
David Roberts
Right.
Thea Riofrancos
And one other way I like to, just as a metaphor, think about it is: over the pandemic, we've had lots of debates on different public health tools and one thing that public health experts said about the vaccine is that if we don't reduce the spread in other ways we're asking the vaccine to do too much work.
David Roberts
Right.
Thea Riofrancos
It's not a perfect analogy, but I think that way about recycling. And I think people gravitate to recycling because nothing else has to change and also because it's itself a business opportunity, right? There's a lot of new investment in recycling facilities. So it's sort of like, "Oh, that's the silver bullet. We're going to get recycling to sort of totally replace new mining." Well, maybe in 2050 or 2070 or something that could start to be possible, but not in the near term. And so we need to do other things so that we're not expecting recycling to be the number one demand reducing tool.
David Roberts
Right, so you're reducing demand for lithium in the first place helps...
Thea Riofrancos
Recycling play a bigger role.
David Roberts
Recycling, it helps decarbonization, in addition to helping reduce the need for mining and injustice and all that other stuff, it just makes...the lever you can pull that makes almost everything we want easier to do. So you have these scenarios that basically involve—and this is stuff I know Volts audience knows very well—just your basic densification, helping walkability, bike paths, all that kind of stuff. So, let's just say a bit, because I don't want this to get lost. In addition to all the benefits of reducing lithium demand in terms of our ability to decarbonize on schedule and are just having enough and getting recycling going better, it's also worth noting that all these changes being discussed in the transportation sector have numerous co-benefits and, specifically, are extremely beneficial to the poorest and most vulnerable.
This is all completely extrinsic to the greenhouse gas discussion. Just these changes you're talking about making in transportation are good for a bunch of other reasons and so I think...probably we mostly get that. But let's just say a brief word about how transportation in the US is specifically a kind of source of injustice and how these reforms would serve justice.
Thea Riofrancos
There's so many things to talk about here that we won't get to them all, because it's such a sort of nexus of where so many injustices inequalities and also inefficient uses of resources kind of intersect. One thing to remember is just how financially burdensome car ownership is for low-income and working class and even middle class people. Buying the car or leasing the car, the auto insurance, the maintenance of the car, and the gasoline—until we electrify, right. Caveat there on gasoline point—but are all very expensive, and they're more expensive the lower income you are, they're like a bigger portion of your overall income, right?
And they're also more expensive if you're lower income because you're more likely to have an older car, which requires both more maintenance and more gas per mile. And so we think about car use as a form of freedom in the US. And there's tons of scholarly books written on this and just a million pop culture examples and just the advertising of the auto industry itself. It's thought that carnership is like a key to freedom understood as this sort of spatial mobility. Like, you go wherever you want, right?
David Roberts
Super generational, though. Super generational thing. A real generational divide, I feel like.
Thea Riofrancos
Yes, I agree, and I'm hopeful about that. And we should come back to that point because we still haven't really discussed the policy tools and the politics of this in the contemporary moment. But I think of it almost the opposite way, which is, like, total choicelessness, which is unfreedom to me.
David Roberts
A single choice. I mean, literally the only way to do something.
Thea Riofrancos
And I know that very firsthand, not to make it too personal, but for many years of my adult life and childhood and everything, I didn't use cars very much. I grew up in New York City, right? So I'm weird in US context. So I grew up in New York City. I use public transit. We just use a car if maybe we're going upstate to the Catskills. But, basically, I'm going in public transit, and I'm walking. Then I become 18, moved to other places. I moved to Portland, Oregon. I then live in Philadelphia. I live in some Latin American cities, et cetera.
In all of these places, I used a bike. I used mass transit, or I walked. And I did not actually get a driver's license until I moved to Providence, where I currently live. And after the first three months of biking to work, which was really not a great situation, there were no bike paths, like, it was extremely stressful and dangerous. But I did it because I like bike riding. And it was only 20 minutes. It wasn't a big deal. It was just a stressful 20 minutes. Once November came, New England, right? So it got cold. It's like, "Oh, I guess I have to do something else to get to work."
I looked into the bus situation. Impossible. Like, an hour bus first is, like 20-minute...because I had to go downtown first, go to the main hub. I mean, the bus is for stigmatized poor people in Rhode Island, basically. I mean, that's how our bus system works. It doesn't have commuting in mind. It doesn't have other types of users in mind, and it's just underfunded and a whole crisis.
David Roberts
A very familiar story, all Americans, I think, will have some familiarity with.
Thea Riofrancos
And so I got a license. Like, I was forced to get a license, and I started using my partner's car, which I had never driven before, to get to work. And I experienced that as a constraint, like, I have one option.
David Roberts
And more stress, I mean, this science on this is very well-settled. Like, you probably were taking years off your life by switching to a car just from the noise stress.
Thea Riofrancos
Exactly. But so there's lots of benefits of moving us into these other scenarios.
David Roberts
Let's talk about the policy levers that you're talking about. A lot of these I think, will be familiar to my audience here, just sort of urbanism stuff. But did you have particular...because I know one of the things the report says is that transportation decarbonization policy, insofar as it's popped up in the US, especially at the federal level, is very car-centric. Talk a little bit about better policies.
Thea Riofrancos
Yeah, so I want to circle back to something you said earlier that's on this point about can we imagine the US being like a European city, or not the US, but US. Cities. That seems utopian, as you said. And I understand that. But I want to also just note that things have changed a lot in European cities, recently.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Thea Riofrancos
And you reported on this in Barcelona and maybe elsewhere, right. And so we could go to Barcelona, we could go to Amsterdam, Paris, London. Our global cities in Europe, like the cities that have a lot of stature, those were actually more car heavy a decade ago.
Two decades ago. They used policies ranging from the design of streets, right, the super blocks in Barcelona that you discussed to like congestion pricing to increasing mass transit options, to designs, making mass transit free or lower cost, a whole battery of kind of policy tools. And significant, like in Paris, they decrease car use by 30% over 15 years.
David Roberts
Wild, what they're doing so fast.
Thea Riofrancos
In London by 40% over the same time period. In Amsterdam—and we think of Amsterdam as like the cycling haven—but that's increased over time. Like they have actually used policies to make it more friendly to cycling. These things that we think of as so, like exotic, like, are actually the outcomes of intentional policy decisions that took those cities off of a track, getting more similar to the US to a track of where they are now. So it's important to not like naturalize, exoticize, essentialize, whatever it is, like, because we could do these things too. And in fact, in cities, you know, cities and other localities and even at the state level, we have a lot more options than at the federal level, so we should look at those urban experiments very closely.
You know, it's duh. The GOP controls Congress. Like, I am aware, I read the news, right. So I'm not super enthusiastic or waiting on the edge of my seat for some massive infusion to public transit authorities coming from the federal level. I don't think that's about to happen. Thankfully, we got a little in the bipartisan infrastructure, otherwise things would be even more dire. We didn't get anything in IRA. We didn't even get e-bikes in IRA. I mean, it's nutty, like how car-centric that bill was.
David Roberts
I don't know if this was inevitable and unavoidable, but it is unfortunate, though, that the whole reactionary, backlash, conservative movement as it exists is now more or less organizing around defending sprawl. I don't know if that was just going to happen at some point regardless, but it's just not good that one of two major parties is foursquare against all the reforms you're talking about.
Thea Riofrancos
Exactly. This has become a culture war point. But those culture wars are a little bit less intense at the state and local level, though unfortunately, they're there too. I'm not, again, Pollyannish, but let me throw out a couple of things. So what I think would be really cool—which we couldn't directly model because of data limitations, but we do discuss—is e-bikes. So we can't yet break down, like what proportion of cyclists are on e-bikes and how much lithium is in the e-bikes, because again, the data constraints. But we know that e-bikes use so much less lithium just on the battery level and the per rider level when we compare it to any of the other e-transportation options, right. They're better than buses, even, in terms of the lithium use per person.
And so we have had some cool stuff. So Denver, Colorado did a major ebike subsidy experiment, and it worked. It not just worked in its popularity, but it got people out of cars, specifically. They showed that now in research on the experiment. Hawai'i, I don't know where exactly it is in the legislature, but it's moving along. I think it's been introduced for a state-level big e-bike subsidy program. And there's a bunch of other cities, if we look them up, cities and even states that are looking into subsidizing e-bikes, both for the climate reasons, the affordability reasons, but also specifically to reduce car use. That's like their goal. So they're designed with that goal in mind and they're making sure, like, we're subsidizing e-bikes that could replace cars for grocery store trips or commuting.
David Roberts
And of course, the more of your citizens are on bikes, the more political power.
Thea Riofrancos
Yeah, you build a constituency which you have in places with a lot of cycling, like Portland. Like literally, there's like a bike lobby. I mean that in a positive sense, right? There are people advocating and watching policies. There's a couple of other things that are interesting. I'm going to do one more on e-bikes because this was surprising to me. I just learned it. In 2021, Americans bought nearly twice as many e-bikes as ecars. There was a huge amount of e-bikes being bought, and I think there's like a variety of reasons for that. Some of it was like pandemic people doing this outdoorsy stuff and the e-bikes were coming on market at this.
So I think there are some just like circumstantial factors there. But it's interesting. Americans like e-bikes, so we should think about that and think about that as like a climate policy more among climate progressives. Think about how to expand that. There's a few other things. One is bad, but I want to talk about it, which is the so called death spiral for mass transit. So there's been this ongoing thing, but it got much worse during the pandemic where lower ridership, which really dipped, of course, when there were much more limited movement due to COVID concerns. So people stopped taking transit as much, worrying that they'd get COVID if they took transit or they just weren't commuting in the first place.
And then that undercut a major source of funding for transit agencies, which is the fare. And so you had this death spiral which then they would do fewer buses or fewer trains or subway cars and then that would further depress ridership because it was less reliable or less frequent. And that's the death spiral. So we're at kind of a critical juncture for transit in this country, and we need to sort of decide, like, especially among climate folks who are at least people thinking about this, do we want to actually include refunding? And actually more secure and sustainable funding models that don't just rely on the fare as much or these like emergency federal or state funding, but just have more secure funding over time, more durable.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, the juncture we're at is like, are we going to let our lame minimum that we have die completely or are we going to maintain our lame minimum? Effectively, outside of New York City, we don't really have, like, a full-fledged worthy of Europe in hardly any city, much less, like, all these mid-sized cities.
Thea Riofrancos
And they've gotten worse. I mean, some of them used to have better transportation in the past. I mean these streetcars, all this thing was destroyed, partly by auto industry lobbying. This history is very sordid.
David Roberts
It would have to be a real huge culture turn.
Thea Riofrancos
Yes, but I want to say it's important to remember that the first culture turn was a big one. Like getting these cities off of what they previously did, which was walking and streetcars and commuter rails and that kind of thing, into the current car dependency. That happened not in our generation but in one more back. So this stuff has not been since like the literal founding of America or whatever that...you know what I mean? Like these are all things that happened over the 20th century and dramatically.
And so we have the climate crisis to deal with. We also have a variety of economic crises where we want to think about redeveloping and making cities more flourish. We have a lot of things happening at once and it's one of those other critical moments of: are we going to just let transit die or are we going to embrace it? At the very least, I would love to see progressives that are climate advocates like, fully embrace transit, e-bikes, all of these solutions that are good for a host of reasons that we've discussed and center that.
David Roberts
One of the things that sort of raise an eyebrow about this is that the modeling more or less assumes that lithium is going to remain dominant for the foreseeable period of the study. Battery chemistry has lurched around a bit over the last few years, and trends in battery chemistry can change pretty quickly. Like, LFP was dead for a while, and then all of a sudden it's roaring back. I guess I just wonder if you're worried you might be underestimating the possibility of technological improvements. Because I know a. people have their eye on lithium as a bad thing because of the mining and all the rest of it, b. they have their eye on it because the prices are rising and it's threatening the entire edifice of transportation electrification. So I know there's work going on trying to reduce lithium, trying to make batteries without lithium. How confident are you that at least for the next 20 years, lithium is going to stay on top? Did you give a lot of thought to that?
Thea Riofrancos
I have, partly because anytime I tweet about my research on lithium, someone says to me, "Lithium will be dead tomorrow. Don't. Why are you spending so much time on this?"
David Roberts
I don't know if I go quite that far.
Thea Riofrancos
No. But there's a lot of reply guys on this point, on Twitter especially, which has fortunately helped me, like, has had the positive impact of me thinking about this question more. So I in some ways appreciate the reply guys.
David Roberts
Thank you, reply guys.
Thea Riofrancos
Yeah. So, the 20-year question is an interesting one because that does feel harder for me to answer. I feel pretty confident, a decade out, that lithium ion batteries will be the prevailing technology. That doesn't mean the only one, but that changes will be at the margins and that they will still dominate when we get out to 15-20 years, I still feel like due to some costs, due to the prior investments, due to the fact that there is just like an energy density advantage with lithium over anything else, those are still all true, and those, I think, will still make it the sort of majority technology.
But after we get to 15-20 years and beyond that, I think that there could be substitutes. But let me say a couple of things. So people got very excited about the CATL, the major Chinese battery manufacturer, announcing that it was going to really commercialize and at scale, the sodium battery. That announcement was made, I think, a month ago or something like that. When you dig into the details there, they cannot make a whole battery pack for a car with sodium cells. There are still many lithium ion cells, right? Because remember, a pack, the modules, the packs, we get, like, many cells pressed together, so we can't get the energy density a car requires with just sodium cells. We can swap in some of the lithium cells for sodium and maintain decent energy density.
So that just goes to show two things at once. One is that substitution is possible. But two is that we're not at a point where we have full substitution and we just get rid of the lithium altogether. So that's one thing to keep in mind. I think there's a bigger—I don't want to say philosophical, it's probably not the right word—but just like a deeper question here, which is I've used the word silver bullet already. I think that regardless of what the raw materials are and their specific impacts, and it might be true that sodium has less impact on lithium, and I'm absolutely willing to agree that there would be a set of materials that, for some reasons, involve less environmental impact when they're mined or they're more efficiently used or something other, right.
I'm also a big believer in making the batteries more efficient with the raw materials that they use, right? Getting more out of less, right. So I'm a believer in all of those things. But what I'm not a believer in is this idea that we can just escape the dilemma of resource extraction just by technological innovation. Right, this kind of sci-fi idea...I like the sci-fi that's more realistic, where extraction is there. Like, if we look at "The Expanse," these kinds of shows that show these problems with extraction still exist in the future or in other landscapes, right?
I don't like the sci-fi idea that we just escape our earthly impact and presence.
David Roberts
Well, you build a blue light arc reactor, and it just hums and pumps out energy. Right?
Thea Riofrancos
And, yes, maybe certain things we can be totally synthetic, or we just...I don't know. But even with, like, hydrogen, you just had your newsletter about that. In the way that we are producing all of these climate technologies, there are going to be earthly impacts, there are going to be extractive requirements, and our goal is always to be more resource efficient, regardless of what the substrate of resources is.
David Roberts
Right. And this is kind of the main point I want to make about this whole report and this whole sort of subject matter, which is: it's not like we should improve material efficiency because it'll reduce our mining impact on the environment, but there are countervailing considerations. There really aren't any countering considerations.
Thea Riofrancos
It's all good to do that.
David Roberts
It's better for people. It's better for decarbonization, it's better for our physical and mental health. It's better for, literally the financial health of cities. Like you just go down the list. One of the things I think is most exciting about this report is it is an explicit attempt to get climate advocates, global justice advocates, and urbanist, city advocates on the same damn page, pulling in the same direction, working with one another toward the common vision. And I've just thought that that is like, sort of implicit, but it's like, you don't see it translating into efficacious organizing.
Like, you don't see those groups really working together as much as you want. So how much of this report was just had that in mind? And is that too utopian? Do you think that's a doable thing to get these interests on each other's team?
Thea Riofrancos
There are two motivations of this report in terms of its origin, like, why we decided to do it. One is, back when I was first in Chile researching lithium in early 2019, I learned about the impacts, I learned about the protests, the concerns, et cetera. And I started to think, like, is there a way maybe not to eliminate lithium, but at least to reduce the stress on landscapes and to reduce the volume required? And I was reading these alarming forecasts at that point, and I thought, "Oh, there must be a study that shows that there are more and less lithium intensive ways to decarbonize transportation."
Like, I booked that up on Google Scholar and I tried like, 30 different keywords, and there was no such study. And then I asked every expert that I interviewed who was expert on transportation, battery tech, whatever this question, and they said, "Oh, that study doesn't exist. It would be useful, though, just to know."
David Roberts
It's kind of telling how utterly hegemonic the kind of car centric view is. It doesn't even occur to people.
Thea Riofrancos
It's not an askable question.
David Roberts
Yeah, people don't even ask the question.
Thea Riofrancos
So that was one origin point to this. I just wanted this data so that when I presented my work on lithium and the political economy of it, the contention when people ask me, like, is there another way I could say something other than, "well, logically, if we had more mass transit, we'd need less" just if-so facto or whatever. So I could just say something with data. So that's one origin point. But there's another origin point that's equally important, which is I participate as a researcher, as an advocate, as a think tank person, and wearing different hats, like, in a variety of coalitional spaces with some of the people you just mentioned, but not with all of them at once often.
So that's important, right? I think that that full spread has not quite happened yet in terms of building coalitions and constituencies that are speaking to one another. But there is some of each in a variety of political spaces. And I find that there are tension points and...this not a novel observation at all, actually. Much ink has been spilled on this. Like, is it totally impossible to decarbonize without harming indigenous rights? These stories have been written. These analyses and thought pieces have been written, but they're not just like, takes. They're also like, real people trying to work through real problems and not always having the data or policy tools that would kind of show a different way forward. And so aligning those, not perfectly, because I do think there's different ideologies, there's different personalities, like, you can't make everyone agree perfectly...but at least showing that these are not as fundamentally at odds as they seem. If we envision a little bit more broadly and creatively like what the energy transition might look like.
David Roberts
Yes, and just do the sort of grown-up thing of explicitly acknowledging that we have multiple goals, some of which are in some tension of each other, and the best we can do is to balance them as best we can and try to pull in a direction that serves all of them at least somewhat, right? Like an adult way of making decisions not characteristic of our society necessarily. Thank you for coming on and talking through this. I mean, there's so much in this report. I feel like any chunk of this report, we could do a whole pot on it. A whole thing on lithium, a whole thing on transportation, a whole thing on justice, and everything else, but I do think it's for just those reasons you said there in your last answer, like, this is much needed and much overdue. So thanks for doing it and thanks for coming on.
Thea Riofrancos
Thanks so much. This was a great conversation.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.
Decarbonizing US transportation with an eye toward global justice