Decarbonizing US transportation with an eye toward global justice

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.


(PDF transcript)


(Active transcript)


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
s**t, 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


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