Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. Can we have our SUV cake and eat it too in the race to go electric from American

Public Media? This is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Last month, the Biden administration proposed strict new emissions standards that would

essentially require two-thirds of all new cars sold to be electric by 2032.

But going big on EVs might not be the big win for the environment we hope if it means also

going big on not-so-sustainable mining practices to extract lithium and other materials for batteries.

That's according to Thea Rio-Frankos, she's a political science professor at Providence College,

who recently wrote a paper about thinking smaller when it comes to electric vehicles.

Our model shows that zero emissions in 2050, if we don't change our car dependent kind of habits,

will the U.S. alone will require three times the amount of global lithium production that

currently is produced, right? So we'll just need an enormous amount of lithium to just satisfy

the U.S. market if we don't change how we move around. And that, of course, leaves open the

question of what about all these other major markets, China, the European Union, India, etc,

that are also in the process of electrifying and also will need huge amounts of lithium

as just one of the minerals that are needed, right? We focus on lithium, but there's cobalt,

there's nickel, there's copper, there's graphite. But I think lithium gives us a window into a bunch

of other minerals that also will be in high demand as different societies electrify.

And yet, a lot of the excitement in the electric vehicle market in the U.S., at least in recent

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