The Necessary Evil
How We Survive
Marketplace
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2021
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mining is a complicated business. It’s destructive, it’s dangerous. But in order to get the lithium we need to power the energy transition, mining could be a necessary evil.
In this episode, we go from protests in South America to a gold mine in Nevada, where we take a ride on what looks like a massive Tonka truck, all in the hopes of finding out if there’s a better way to do things while getting the metal we need to survive.
After talking to mining experts, environmental justice advocates and a very vocal CEO, we get some answers.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Back in our last episode we found out that spinning up a whole new lithium mining industry in the United States to help get us off fossil fuels, it's going to be tricky. |
| 0:10.0 | These people couldn't be transparent if their life depended on it. |
| 0:14.4 | At what cost? Are we the sacrifice for that cost? |
| 0:17.5 | My life is devoted to stopping this mine right now. |
| 0:20.5 | And spending the summer driving around the desert, hearing everyone fighting with |
| 0:27.8 | each other while it's literally record-breaking heat and smoke-filled air |
| 0:31.6 | feeling like the world is ending, I couldn't stop thinking |
| 0:34.8 | about this sci-fi book by Neil Stevenson called Seven Eves. This, by the way, happens a lot. |
| 0:40.5 | I'm a big sci-fi nerd and sci-fi is actually what got me thinking about the climate |
| 0:44.8 | solutions of the future. So in Seveneves, the moon disintegrates for unknown reasons and the |
| 0:50.8 | debris in the atmosphere causes the oceans to boil and everything to burn on Earth. |
| 0:56.0 | About 1500 people escape to space to start a new civilization. |
| 1:00.0 | And spoiler alert, even when there are only 1,500 people left in the whole galaxy, |
| 1:06.2 | they still manage to fight and have a war and literally almost go extinct |
| 1:11.0 | because they could not stop being humans. And I don't bring that up to |
| 1:15.9 | be pessimistic or bleak, but only to point out that this podcast is also about that. |
| 1:23.0 | About how we keep also about that. |
| 1:27.0 | about how we keep acting podcast from Marketplace about how |
| 1:39.0 | finding solutions to the climate crisis is a messy business. This is episode two, the necessary evil. |
| 1:47.9 | Mining is a pretty easy villain in general. It tears up land, it displaces animals and kills plants, it can |
| 1:55.0 | pollute and poison, it's dangerous work, and the workers aren't always well |
| 1:59.1 | protected. But also, most of our modern life wouldn't be possible without it, and the massive transition |
... |
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