We're just used to showing up to a store and buying something without thinking through how it was made, what are the building blocks behind that.

And now, as we're at this point where we're changing our whole economy to move from primarily fossil fuel base to slowly moving in the direction of being material is based,

where do we get those materials?

And we're not having those discussions right now.

So if we're not careful, we are going to repeat

the same mistakes that we made 150 years ago.

I'm Mary Long, and that's Ernest Schider, a senior correspondent at Reuters and author of the book The War Below, which tells the story of lithium, copper, and the minerals that power the modern world.

Dieter Willard caught up with Schider to discuss what a lowly leaf blower

tells us about the supply chain, environmental, pretty privilege,

and a mining company that spent more than a million dollars on botanists.

Just to set the table for people,

why are lithium and copper so important

when it comes to EVs and batteries in general.

Sure, so lithium and copper really are the building blocks or the

cornerstones for lithium ion batteries and lithium ion batteries are used not just in electric vehicles, but in millions of other

consumer electronic devices that now make up basically our everyday lives,

things like cell phones and many, other devices and those are built with

lithium and copper and so you can imagine whoever controls the production of

those essential critical minerals really will control the 21st century economy.

That's what's at stake here.

And most of that currently is not happening in the US.

That's right. I mean for lithium, I mean the biggest producer in the world right now are Australia and Chile

...