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The War Below: A Green Tea Chat with Ernest Scheyder on the Critical Mineral Battle
Overview
For Chinese language version, watch here
Lithium, copper, and many more critical minerals are vital to manufacture clean energy technologies. To reduce dependency on China for these minerals and accelerate decarbonization efforts, the Biden Administration has been working to ramp up domestic mining and production. Because of pollution and land degradation concerns, these efforts have intensified conflicts among US mining industry, environmentalists, and indigenous communities.
Join us for a conversation with Ernest Scheyder, senior correspondent for Reuters, as we discuss his new book The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. We will explore mineral conflicts in the US, China and beyond.
Speaker Highlights
Ernest Scheyder
"The War Below is a book really about critical minerals at large, as you were saying, Jennifer, but at its core, it's a story about community and about choice. And what are the choices we're willing to make if we as citizens of the world want an energy transition? And there's no easy answers. There's a lot of trade-offs."
“When you burn off oil or natural gas in an internal combustion engine, it's gone forever. [...] But lithium doesn't lose its ability to retain a charge just because it's been sitting in a battery for 20, 30, 40 years. Copper can be remade into wiring or pipes [...] so that ability for critical minerals to be reused again and again is actually a huge part of the appeal.”
“China [...] has huge investments across the world in nickel and cobalt [...] in places like Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Argentina, and elsewhere. [...] And so China has begun to realize that whoever controls the production of lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, and other critical minerals will control the 21st century economy.”
“The 1872 mining law is a law that has governed hard rock mining in the United States since Ulysses S. Grant was president. [...] The law is just written for a different time. And so as a result, you've got some perks built into it that were designed to populate the US West. But the law also means that if you're a mining company and you extract critical minerals off of federal land, you're not paying the taxpayer any royalties. That's a perk that oil and gas companies would kill for, I promise you.”
“I also think that many American companies and Western companies are huge supporters of these supply chains in China. Albemarle, the world's largest lithium producer and processor, has multiple facilities in mainland China to process lithium and supply their EV industry. [...] Apple, obviously a huge producer there, and many, many other companies as well. So that cross-border collaboration is there, and I think it obviously helps GDP and trade. [...] The more that you have that, it helps reinforce the relationship between the two countries.”
Panelist
Ernest Scheyder
Hosted By
China Environment Forum
Since 1997, the China Environment Forum's mission has been to forge US-China cooperation on energy, environment, and sustainable development challenges. We play a unique nonpartisan role in creating multi-stakeholder dialogues around these issues. Read more
Environmental Change and Security Program
The Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) explores the connections between environmental change, health, and population dynamics and their links to conflict, human insecurity, and foreign policy. Read more
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