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The Elements of Power: Supply Chains, Technology, and Energy with Nicolas Nicharos
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In this episode of Breaking Math, Autumn and Nicolas Nicharos critique the "green" narrative of lithium-ion technology. Tracing the industry from its 1991 commercialization to modern geopolitical tensions, the hosts expose the exploitation and environmental degradation inherent in global mining, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By challenging the presumed sustainability of electric vehicles, they emphasize the need for supply chain transparency and urge listeners to adopt a more informed, ethically-conscious approach to modern consumption.
Takeaways
- What does it really cost to power the future?
- The bargain as stated is clean energy in one part and at the other end, you have corruption, pollution, and human suffering.
- The greenest vehicle is not always the electric one; it depends on the entire lifecycle of the product.
- We need to improve conditions on the ground, not just extract resources.
- Corruption is unfortunately a fact of life and is very closely related to extraction.
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction and Background
- 03:24 The Journey to Congo and Corruption
- 07:13 The Birth of Lithium-Ion Batteries
- 09:35 The Uneven Global Bargain
- 12:16 Mining vs. Oil: A Different Kind of Harm
- 13:56 Onshoring Battery Production: Challenges and Opportunities
- 17:13 China's Dominance in Battery Manufacturing
- 18:51 The Race in Battery Technology
- 21:39 Corruption and Poverty in the Congo
- 24:31 The Human Cost of Mining
- 29:12 Health Impacts of Mining
- 31:52 Colonial Legacy and Modern Mining
- 34:00 The Future of Battery Technology
- 39:12 Introduction to Complex Narratives
- 39:53 The Reality of Resource Extraction
- 39:59 Embracing Curiosity and Reflection
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Transcript
Introduction to Lithium-Ion Batteries
00:00:00
Speaker
Lithium-ion batteries power almost everything around us. Your phone, your laptop, your electric cars that glide silently through cities, and even the medical devices that are quietly keeping you alive. Increasingly, the systems run off of artificial intelligence itself.
00:00:19
Speaker
They're so familiar, we barely notice them. which is exactly why they're so powerful. Because the battery-powered world that we live in rests on supply chains that we never see.
00:00:31
Speaker
One that stretches across continents, across political systems, and across the lives lived very far from where our technology is designed and consumed.
00:00:44
Speaker
Today's episode is about the batteries that become more than technology. They become a new kind of power.
Beyond Energy: The Complex World of Battery Power
00:00:52
Speaker
Power measured not just in energy density, but money, geopolitics, surveillance, labor, and control. Power that concentrates in some places and extracts itself violently from others. This is a story that runs on cutting-edge laboratories to open pits in the southern Congo.
00:01:14
Speaker
And the reality of it is that it's more than just the electric vehicles that we use. And it promises more than just sustainability. It also tells us a lot more about the uncomfortable reality of who pays for it. I'm your host, Autumn Finaf, and joining me on Breaking Math is Nicholas Narakos.
The Cost of Powering the Future with Nicholas Narakos
00:01:39
Speaker
Discussing his new book, Elements of Power...
00:01:41
Speaker
Today, we're asking a simple but unsettling question. What does it really cost to power the future? And who gets to decide? Now, tell me a little bit about your background and what inspired the book. Yeah, so I've been a journalist most of my professional life, basically all of my professional life. um I started as a fact checker and then I left fact checking and I was very, very keen on reporting on stories that had to do with corruption. One of the things that I had done while I was at the New Yorker was report where I could during holidays and time around work and so on.
00:02:21
Speaker
on the migration and refugee issues surrounding surrounding people coming to Europe. And that had really started in Greece. And my family is from Greece. I'm i'm from Greece. and And so I saw the beginning of that Europe.
00:02:37
Speaker
the islands in the in the east of Greece, Lesbos and Samos and so on. and And then I started going deeper into issues that were actually affecting the countries that the people were coming from. So I started looking at...
00:02:54
Speaker
conflicts, I started looking at economic issues, and I went down a rabbit hole on Congolese corruption. And I found out that the country has some of the minerals that are so that are, you know, super important for building batteries, cell phones, electric cars, and it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of underground resources. And yet it is still one of the poorest places in the world. So I think that that was what brought me to Congo. There was a specific story of corruption around a man named Dan Gertler, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in 2017. And was
00:03:33
Speaker
and he was a kind of his story was something that I wanted to go and write about. And then I went down there, I realized it was so much bigger than this one story. And um I guess I sort of went on Amazon and I looked and I said, is there a Cobalt book? And then, you know, in 2018, 2019, there was not you know, there have been some books that have have treated certain aspects of this this this issue. But what I kept feeling as, you know, as I was writing my book and I saw these other books coming up around it was actually that this story deserved a greater len and lens and expanded worldview, a look at what was happening in China, a look at what was happening in Indonesia, a look at what was happening in the Western Sahara, and not just focusing on one aspect,
00:04:23
Speaker
of of the supply chain. So, you know, luckily, i had a wonderful team at Penguin who were very supportive of that. And that was kind of, you know, we said we set out to write a global history of this very, very complicated supply chain, I guess. Now, what kind of power are we actually talking about?
Geopolitical Implications of Battery Technology
00:04:43
Speaker
power here functions both as a, you know, as ah as a very, you know, in a logical way, it's electricity and it's a storage of electricity, but it's also about geopolitical power. It's about who owns the mode of powering society, of getting around, of heating our homes, of being able to communicate, of going on social media, of, you know, so on, so on. And it really, it really just goes The list is endless. And oil was the definitive story of energy in the 20th century. In the 21st century, there are so many different ways of getting around. There are so many ways of powering your devices. But lithium-ion is just the most important to this point. And that's to do with, you know, Tesla making the lithium-ion battery the
00:05:34
Speaker
technology to use an electric vehicle. Now there are some sodium ion battery powered vehicles in China and and, you know, that's obviously a development. but but But most electric vehicles are powered by that. Most of our cell phones are powered by that. Most of our laptops, most of our Ori rings. Payments. Yeah. but Whatever it is, is, you know, these wireless headphones that I just got for running because somebody told me I was going to get moaned down by a vehicle if I didn't use non-noise cancelling headphones whatever it is. So yeah, it's really, it's, they're everywhere.
00:06:07
Speaker
And they're, you know, we see that fire departments are saying that they're causing fires in people's homes. We see that people are able to make smaller and smaller things. I get ads for battery packs on Instagram the whole time. And I think that that's,
00:06:21
Speaker
That was very much true for the global north for a long time. And maybe the global south was not so much, um you know, that technology had not gone out to the global south. I think that that has definitively changed in the last 10 years, basically.
00:06:38
Speaker
there is There is a proliferation of these batteries everywhere across the planet. I mean... I guess there are some sort of uncut uncontacted tribes in Peru and Brazil who are not affected by lithium ion batteries in some way. But if not, everybody's life everywhere is is affected by these things. So essentially when batteries die, modern life briefly stops or may actually stop in one way or another. Yeah, exactly.
00:07:05
Speaker
Now you start a little bit with an origin story around 1991.
History and Development of Lithium-Ion Batteries
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah. Tell us about that. Why does it matter? um So 1991 was the first commercialization of the lithium ion battery. It had been this ah sort of essentially a a research project up until that point. It had been in the 70s, Dr. Stanley Whittingham, a sort of genius scientist in working for Exxon, put together a lot of kind of hints essentially um ah about how uh well he he had worked on fast iron transfer in solids and he realized that you could create a ah very very efficient battery um by using lithium intercalating lithium ions into a a positive
00:07:58
Speaker
anode and a negative anode and so moving it across into a negative anode. And then, you know, in the early 1980s, another brilliant scientist, John Goodenough, and his team in Oxford realized that you could use cobalts to to create the cathode. And then by the mid-1980s, scientists in Japan were looking at a way of creating powerful batteries for small devices, especially because the existing technology, nickel cadmium, was quite polluting. And the Japanese, after after various different chemical spills, um ah were were incredibly, were getting more and more worried about pollution and and toxic dumping and so on. So the lithium-ion battery was seen as a cleaner way of powering things and a and a much more powerful way of powering these these small devices. And 91 was when Sony came to the market and said, you know, this is the device. um
00:08:59
Speaker
ah the Sorry, this is the battery that powers our device. The first device that they used it in was a handheld camcorder. And That was was very, very successful right out of the route ah right right off the bat. And by the mid-90s, lithium-ion batteries were being used in lots and lots of small devices around Japan. And the Japanese really stole a march on on the rest of the world and and understood that this technology was commercializable, useful, and would be big, I guess.
The Ethical Dilemma of Clean Energy
00:09:30
Speaker
Now, you describe a deep, uneven global bargain. Tell us about that. What was the bargain finally stated? So the bargain was stated, the bargain as stated is clean energy in one part of the world and then at the other end, and I don't think it has to be like this, but this is the way that it has developed in the system that we live in. At the other end, you have corruption, you have pollution, and you have intense human suffering as people in a very, very poor country like the Democratic Republic of the Congo scramble to get these minerals and try and sell them to the outside world. Or you have pollution and, and and you know, kicking people off their land, like in parts of Indonesia.
00:10:17
Speaker
um Or you have very explicitly colonial ah arrangements in which people are deprived of rights and liberties and so on. And this is, you know, to some extent, that this is in the Western Sahara, I show it, but it's also clear as well that this is happening in other parts of Latin America. northern argentina parts of chile and um and then there's another supplemental story about about deep sea mining um which i don't really go into in the book they people have built these huge tubes to suck these nodules ah which are rich in critical metals off the ocean floor that is seen as a i mean i had a just to digress for a second i had a conversation with a with a major mining company uh um
00:11:00
Speaker
operator and he was like i just don't understand it i mean we haven't really worked out how to like properly create and finance mines and why don't we just work on that ecosystem why are we trying to build giant tubes to suck things off the ocean floor like these things exist in mines so yeah i mean i guess the point of my book is like if you work with local populations these minerals are there it's not that this system has to exist. It's not that like like we have to pollute places. It's just unfortunately due to corruption and human selfishness and geopolitics and fear, this system has has arisen. And that's that's that's the bargain that you were talking about. yeah Now, I find that to be interesting because it seems that battery supply chains make harm easier to ignore than oil ever did. Why is that? Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not an expert on the oil oil industry. I mean, I think you... Understandable.
00:11:59
Speaker
I've read ah've i' read you know Dan Jรผrgen's amazing book. And the oil industry, you know, you caused a bunch of harm in terms of geopolitical... issues but i think and you know i guess if you're looking at the kind of there will be blood era you know there's a there are a whole series of of problems around that mean that was very problematic but mining is very different because it's a much less complicated proposition you know you go down into the mine with a metal bar and you start chipping away at the soil and you know lo and behold this stuff is under the ground
00:12:33
Speaker
And it's just it's just a much, the barrier to entry is much lower. So the scope for abuse is lower because it's much more accessible. And you can access this stuff by, you know, sending people with metal bars and no shoes to go and mine it. And you can you can access it by sending children to mine it and so on. So I think that that aspect of the abuse is very clear.
00:12:58
Speaker
And then I think um there's a bit of a quirk behind the back battery supply chain, which is... I would say because it's so focused in a country like the DRC, which has had governance issue and has ah just a particularly nasty history of colonialism, that that has really allowed a system of corruption and of dispossession to take hold and has allowed certain companies to do things like kick people off their villages in order to build a mine and then give them nothing in return or give them very little in We take it for granted these the resources are infinite, but indeed that they're not. It kind of shifts from not just ethics, but also to geopolitics. And we talk about a little bit about the geography of power. Why can't countries just on short batteries and solve their own problems? Okay. I mean, I think onshoring is a trend and it has has been successful in some industries. The battery supply chain is very, very, very complicated.
00:14:08
Speaker
You know, you have to you have to mine, you have to refine, then you have to go through various different stages of production, also various different stages of refining. So those different ah those stages, some of which are quite polluting as well, some of those things are quite difficult to do in the US. Same with lithium, although Tesla yesterday, I think, actually announced that it was opening the biggest lithium refinery in the US. I think it's a little bit easier than cobalt.
00:14:34
Speaker
Nickel, the same. Getting battery metal out of laterite nickel is very, very energy intensive. And the most economic way to do that is using coal power in indonesia um so i mean it's and you know you could you could you know you you can create cleaner plants to do that and you can invest more and try and use things use cleaner technology to to refine this nickel but the cost always goes up I don't think actually it's going to be a huge it would be a huge increase on the consumers. Supply chain experts that I spoke to were talking about a matter of, you know, $100 or something like that for a new cell phone. You know, it it it makes a difference, of course.
00:15:21
Speaker
But these are not things that are completely impossible to countenance. So I think, you know, going back to the beginning of the supply chain for these large companies, working with working with people on the ground and trying to improve conditions, both at the mines and to do with you know other industries and so on, would actually be, in my mind, preferable to onshoring. Because, you know, the the global system can work.
00:15:51
Speaker
It's, you know, it's not it's not necessarily that these things moving around the world or whatever it is doesn't work. I mean, it does work in this kind of, as I've shown in the book, in quite unpleasant way. It's more that you have to that you have to figure out how to to clean up its each step of it. And of course, it would be great to onshore battery production and if every country could produce its own batteries. But because of quirks of geology and various other, ah you know, and also because of the history of some of these places. So China, for example, has has invested over the last 20, 30 years very, very heavily into battery manufacturing. And so you have a situation in which one country is much better equipped to do it than than almost anywhere anywhere else in the world, apart from Korea to some extent.
00:16:42
Speaker
So... so you know does the u.s want to put in that huge investment i mean there are some some indications that apple has has to try to do it but it has been very very you know it's been a flash in the pan compared to compared to what their operations in china look like so i think that that's that's very interesting Now, you talk about China's dominance. And when people hear 70 to 90 percent of batteries are made in China, what do they misunderstand?
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, people misunderstand that it's it's that it's just that they're just kind of magically created there almost. I mean, people, I think people seem to think that cell phones are kind of God-given device at this point.
00:17:31
Speaker
um They don't really think about where they come from. And yeah, I mean, it's a huge amount of work that is done in China and and It's not just that China, you know, took this or it's not just that they like stole it or something like that, which I think is is very much a political way of looking at this. It is that China put in a huge amount of work, blood, sweat, tears, accidents, blowing up batteries and so on, and just stomach that and decided that they were going to be number one in battery manufacturing. And lo and behold, through
00:18:06
Speaker
that intense amount of work and through just the volume of people. I mean, the early batteries, as I i talk about in in the book, built by BYD, which is now one of the biggest electric car companies in the world, were literally created using something that they called the human chain which was people folding these things together using their hands i mean oftentimes these are quite toxic chemicals as well i mean just think about that there's like a thousand people sitting in a room you know putting these batteries together so and and now that now the chinese factories it was it was interesting i spoke to her
00:18:42
Speaker
a scientist at Argonne National Lab in Illinois. And she said, look, the battery factories that I've seen in China are just way beyond technologically anything that yeah anything that I've ever seen here. i mean, it's all completely automated. It's all, you go to these battery companies, these battery fairs, and you see these Chinese factories companies talking about their factories and they show you these videos and it's just extraordinary so it has they have developed very quickly out of a system that was that was pretty rudimentary so i think that yeah beyond just understanding that there's a lot of logistics and so on it's that there was a lot of work and that and this idea that that uh you know the u.s is going to take back the supply chain and so on it's like well you know does the u.s want to put in that amount of effort. Maybe it does. Maybe, you know, maybe it doesn't. maybe Maybe it's still happy to get its batteries from China. That is a good point, because what if the U.S. and Europe are essentially going to, at some point, wake up?
00:19:46
Speaker
What's going to be the bottleneck or maybe even the hardest part for us to catch up? I think infrastructure, factories, workers, skills. There are 180,000 researchers at CATL, which is the big battery firm. my God. And, you know, in Germany, there's like, I'm trying, sorry, I'm trying to remember the the statistics. It's 180,000 at CATL and 18,000 at BYD, but in Germany, there's like 15,000. So it's really huge amount of r and d There's a huge amount of, you know, there that you know there's not really ah a focus on on mining. There's not really a focus on creating...
00:20:29
Speaker
on creating on these kind of industrial parts of, I mean, it's not valorized in the same way as it is in China. Sure. in the US. I mean, I think that people aim to go, you know, intelligent kids, you know, go to college and they aim to go and work in finance and finance is a very different thing from, you know, industrial production. Obviously, you know, the US still has a great many industries and many and varied industries, but things like battery production, things that are kind of like prosaic almost are not as
00:21:02
Speaker
ah not as, I don't think as are are as well resourced. And but I don't think that there's just, I just don't think that there's as much of a brain trust as there used to be. So, yeah.
00:21:13
Speaker
And I think that's to do with the way that the economy has moved in the last, you know, 20 years from being, you know, focusing on these large, large companies to being more of a sort of services based, finance based economy. Yeah, i I agree with you there. a lot of the jobs also aren't there.
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Because they can't find the job or the position that they want. Let's shift this a little bit. You talk a lot about Congo and the
Congo's Wealth Paradox
00:21:42
Speaker
moral center. How can a country so rich in minerals remain so poor? I mean, the simple answer to that is is corruption. um ah it's and And I don't mean just corruption of people on the ground there. I think it's, well, I guess it's extraction extraction and corruption. So Congo has been knocked around for a very, very long time and has been treated very, very poorly. You know, first by slave traders, then by the Belgians, then by by their own dictators after 1960, and recently by various different
00:22:16
Speaker
kind of cowboy adventurer businessmen types who have basically come and tried to exploit the country for its resources and then and then sort of leave holes in the ground essentially and some are better than others so yeah i think that corruption and extraction are the two words that should remain in in your mind because it is a country that has powered and has been important for global transport. Look, the rubber that was was extracted by King Leopold II from Congo was used to ah build tires.
00:22:52
Speaker
mean, it was the biggest rubber exporting country in the world at the beginning of the 19th century. ah ah that was That was concurrent with the automobile and the bicycle boom. So rubber tires came from came from Congo. Then when when electricity started being put into everybody's houses, a lot of the world's copper came from Congo. When the atomic bomb was built, the minerals for the first atomic bombs came from from the south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Belgian Congo at the time, I guess. And then cobalt, then copper, you know, became important Cold War commodities. There's another type of ore in the northeast called coltan, which is used... um
00:23:33
Speaker
ah to produce tantalum and that is used in capacitors in batteries around the world oh sorry in capacitors and electronic devices around the world so it just appears as if every single time something is found in congo you have this sort of resource curse And again, it doesn't need to be like that. I mean, you know, you could extract these these these minerals from the soil and properly pay people. Of course. And Congo, as I point out in the in the book, has a pretty strong mining code. Legally, the legal system is there, but it's just ignored. And that's the problem, is that.
00:24:15
Speaker
So much money is stolen by so many different types of people that very little it gets down to the man on the street. So essentially, it almost becomes unavoidable, whether it's in the story or whether it's for our resources. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that corruption is is an unfortunately a fact of life and it is very, very closely related to extraction. Now you're going to have to help me get through this name. Why did you choose to begin with corruption?
00:24:45
Speaker
Odilon Kajumba Kalinga. So Odilon was a guy that I met out there, quite sort of thoughtful person who kind of understood his own place in the system. And, you know, that was and was quite good about talking about talking about it. He also sort of let me in to his life. And we had many, many conversations. I interviewed lots of artisanal minors for this story. And and I've used various various parts of various stories but Odilon's story to me exhibited the arc of a young man who was brought up to expect something from life and then his dad died tragically and he had to support his family so he went to this mine and started started digging out metals but he absolutely hated it and he was very clear about that And he said, you know, the reason I'm doing this today is that I don't want my children to be digging out metals from from the soil. and um But he was also somebody who just had so much bad luck. I mean, he just he just never could seem to make it work.
00:25:51
Speaker
And that was very, very clear that a lot of people were going through that. I mean, the majority of of of artisanal miners that... um who were trying to go through that yeah a lot of artisanal miners were were going through the same thing and what was interesting him about him as well was that he had had the presence of mind to say mind to say i'm going to stop i don't want to do this anymore and yet there was nothing for him to do basically his dream is to set up a little restaurant and to you know to serve people
00:26:25
Speaker
ah beer and have a little place where you can have snacks. And he has like quite a good... he yeah It's a terrace. He wants to like have an outdoor terrace kind of idea. And he has like quite a good idea of what he wants to do, but he's just not been able to do that meaning you know because the economic situations are such that he hasn't been able to put together the funds to do it. And he just hasn't been able to find any other type of job, which to me was emblematic of this real problem.
00:26:50
Speaker
When you have a... um When you have an economy that is based only on one type of industry, what do you get at the end? And that and you get a situation in which basically, unless you're and that's your mining, you're out of work. I mean, unless you're very lucky or have some kind of other means to to to to to you know invest in something else. Absolutely.
00:27:17
Speaker
a i think that's anywhere, especially nowadays. Now, you go into also a lot of the health of families and children and the long-term harm that's caused by mining.
00:27:31
Speaker
Now, beyond mine collapses, what's some of the damage that you see? So um there was a study by The Lancet which showed that there were some of the highest ah concentrations of metals, of heavy metals ever recorded in some in some people living in that region. some Obviously, heavy metals are very, very dangerous, especially for pregnant mother mothers. There's ore that people are washing.
00:28:00
Speaker
that's ah that's radioactive. You know, children who are fed various stimulants in order to go down the mine and given alcohol to boost their bravery or whatever it is there're ah There are children who are who are who are, you know, born with deformations because of the toxic minerals that their parents have have been exposed to. So there are many, many, many health effects. And I saw that very...
00:28:28
Speaker
um i frequent ah sorry I saw that in a very stark way, doing the rounds with a doctor who was trying to raise awareness awareness about this Dr. Billy McCong, who took me on his rounds. and and And we just, you know, person after person with health defects. And he was explaining how he had, you know, he had delivered many children who had swollen heads and and and various different issues that he attributed to um to to various different types of poisoning. Okay. Like we we usually don't, we don't see that as much firsthand here. yeah So it kind of, it's a bit of a culture shock when transitioning from that state to where we are. Well, when you also, when you just, it's a very, very, like, it's this kind of strangely logical thing. It's like when you have a mine where you're like digging up all these these these minerals, you produce a lot of dust and that dust blows across the city.
00:29:27
Speaker
And unless you like mitigate that, that dust is, you know, full of full of heavy metals, in which are in some case radioactive, in some case toxic. And even I, you know, even I being there for a couple of weeks at a time, you know, you would start getting c sinusitis, you would start getting issues with your with your and and with your nose and your whole sort of like everything would clog up.
00:29:50
Speaker
and and everybody And everybody there would say, you know, look, this is this is because you are basically inhaling minerals whenever you go outside. Now, it looks like it's essentially weak oversight sir on the regulations.
00:30:06
Speaker
Or no oversight. Yeah. Okay. No oversight in this case. What does that look like being on the ground? It looks like people without shoes going down into these mines. It looks like soldiers being paid off by...
00:30:23
Speaker
ah by miners going, you know, sneaking onto mine sites. it looks like ah It looks like the regulatory standards body being used as a way of extracting rent from artisanal miners by certain certain ethnic groups i mean it's it's it's i would say in terms of health and safety you know in some places it it barely exists that said the large industrial mines you know you if you cross the road outside of you know they're they they can drive at sort of 10 miles an an hour around these sites and then if you cross the road outside of the outside of the zebra crossing or whatever it is the crosswalk um uh you you know you're shouted at you're told you know
00:31:06
Speaker
Safety is the most important thing here. So i found that the only safety was private safety, and private security that was being enforced. The government had kind of very much receded.
00:31:21
Speaker
And the only palliative to that was civil society. And the Congolese civil society is very strong and unfortunately very under-resourced. But the amount of work that they do and the amount of incredible you know, document gathering and sensibilization and all these things is quite remarkable. Now, thinking about a little bit more about the history doesn't go away in any way, shape or form.
00:31:48
Speaker
I'm curious, how did colonial extraction shape today's mining? it So colonial ah extraction happened under a monopoly country company, which was called Jekamine, which actually started with this like colonial company called the Union Miniau, which started as started as the Compagnie du Katanga, which was started in in the very late 19th century as a purely colonial play.
00:32:13
Speaker
And then it became the Union Miniau, the mining union of Katanga. Then, ah this is just in in Congo. It's funny because in Indonesia, you saw very similar things happening with some of the Dutch companies. Western Sahara, the Spanish ah phosphate mining company, became the Moroccan phosphate mining company. um But in Congo, what happens is that this monopoly, this huge monopoly company, suddenly collapses in the 1990s because so much has been stolen from it. And it's gone through this crisis of management, They purged its management. There'd been ethnic purges against certain certain people from a certain ethnic group called the Lubacassi because of one of the opposition politicians was a Lubacassi. It gets very complicated. um And so that colonial vestige collapse, and yet it's still there. It's not doing anything, but it still has 20% of all these mines. And so they sell these things off.
00:33:13
Speaker
but But the sort of shadowy hand of colonialism, even though colonialism reinterpreted through, you know, years of indigenous dictatorship, remains and it remains to this day.
00:33:24
Speaker
And funnily enough, I think two days ago, you saw the first exports of of copper to the United States from... from from the Southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. And that was done under the aegis of this company, Jekamin, which has not really extracted copper in 20 years or 30 years. to So it's quite, quite interesting. And it was from a Chinese as well.
00:33:48
Speaker
So if we're looking at science and essentially what comes next, you included some battery scientists like Whittingham in this story. Tell us a little bit about him So Stanley Whittingham, brilliant scientist, British, studied tungsten bronzers while he was in Britain, came over, studied at Stanford, and then decided to go to work for Exxon, where he built the lithium-ion battery, of the first lithium-ion batteries. and And that was really ah a play by Exxon.
00:34:16
Speaker
Exxon were concerned that oil was running out. There was this kind of fear that that the world had had hit peak oil in the 1970s. That was obviously, that but that that with new discoveries was was kind of washed away very quickly. But that was one of the things that Exxon was thinking about. And they thought about how could we build an electric car? And that's essentially what Whittingham ended up doing, even though the batteries that he produced were sort of more like watch batteries.
00:34:44
Speaker
Now, you just mentioned electric cars. Thinking about the supply chains that we're dealing with right now, what's the biggest misconception about batteries and electric vehicles being automatically
Are Electric Vehicles Truly Green?
00:34:57
Speaker
green? So building an electric car is much more, much more environmentally problematic than a gas-powered vehicle or a hybrid.
00:35:06
Speaker
The greenest thing, I ran the numbers on various different cars, a Tesla, BMW, and a and I think it was a Toyota Prius. And of those cars, the most environmentally friendly one was the Prius. So, This idea that electric vehicles are intrinsically greener is just is just not correct because you have to look at scope one, scope two and scope three emissions. That scope one emission is you know what directly comes out of the tailpipe. Scope two emissions are the the associate the the production emissions in production and then scope three is kind of like broader emissions that have come from creating this this this um this vehicle and if you look at all of those all together it's very very clear that having an electric vehicle and then selling it in two and a half years as the average american does is is the least green thing that you could do
00:36:02
Speaker
um And then buying another one because producing them is just so much more environmentally costly than producing a gas vehicle. Okay, that is mind blowing. That is mind blowing because nobody would ever think of that. Now, if batteries are not going away, what is one thing that we can actually do better on? We can do better by speaking to local communities, going there, trying to improve kind conditions on the ground, not buying metals from children, basically. um ah You know, thinking about the approved suppliers in the supply chains that are published. You know, for many years, people said, oh, we've had a green supply chain. And you look and you say, what's this company, Zhejiang Huayu Cobalt? Zhejiang Huayu Cobalt subsidiary in Congo is called CDM. And CDM has very, very lax, or at least I saw this firsthand, you know, CDM was buying from anybody. So, so yeah, that on a kind of corporate level, I think on a personal level, I mean, I would say maybe resisting the impulse to buy many lithium ion batteries, it's actually very difficult because, you know, cell phones die and and laptops need to be replaced and so on. So I think the onus is to some extent on the consumer. And then now with the new European battery passports, you know, it's not an infallible system, but, um you know, buying things that come from responsible sources, you'll be able to see the sources for your battery, supposedly, by the end of the year or I think beginning of next year. In Europe, there will be more transparency there. And then, you know, i guess writing to congressmen and writing to companies and things like that and raising this as an issue and showing that you care bringing it up at board meetings if you're a shareholder or whatever it is. Now, is there...
00:37:42
Speaker
anything that you want listeners or viewers to take away from this? What's
Advocacy for Ethical Metal Sourcing
00:37:47
Speaker
the big thing? I think the big idea that I'd like you to take away from this book is that even though we are told over and over again that these things are clean and there are alternatives and that these problems have been solved, they haven't been solved.
00:38:03
Speaker
They need to be addressed and they need to be acted upon. I think that if anything, I hope that you know, a couple of people will read the book and actually go out there and do the the most difficult thing, which is interacting with people on the ground, figuring out how to to get the wealth from from the resources of countries like Congo back to people on the ground, how to develop programs like agriculture and other industrial programs and so on for the people who are living in these places. You know, that that I think is really important. And then
00:38:39
Speaker
um I think that, you know, just being more informed about these these ah issues around critical metals and not just thinking this is a zero-sum game, like the U.S. has to have critical metals and the Chinese are like, it's this, it is a battle. It is a battle because because we've made it that way, but it doesn't need to be. It doesn't need to be and it could be. It can be a much fairer and better thought out system. And yet we seem to be scrambling into the abyss because people are scared.
00:39:11
Speaker
So don't be scared. Nick, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's tempting to want a clean ending to this story for the technology that we use. That could be a villain, a fix, or a technology that saves us without asking anything uncomfortable in return. But the reality of the world that we live in is that it's not how this story works.
00:39:35
Speaker
Lithium ion batteries aren't the problem. Climate change itself is real. Electrification matters. Innovation matters. Being ethical about how we source resources is.
00:39:48
Speaker
And none of this is going to go away. So the future may be electric, but it's still being mined. We still deal with politics. And we are still human. And as always, I'm Autumn Feneff. And thanks for listening to this episode of Breaking Math.
00:40:05
Speaker
If this episode made you feel uncomfortable, curious, or reflective, good. That's why I always tell you folks to keep questioning and always stay curious about the world that you live in So I'll see you next time.