The goal: Can the U.S. actually meet its ambitious climate targets?

The United States has set ambitious goals to transition to clean energy.

We’ll need more mining to do it.

But given the environmental, political, and human costs of accelerating mineral mining, can the United States meet its climate targets?

Today, On Point: The conclusion of our special series “Elements of energy.”

Ernest Scheyder, senior correspondent at Reuters, covering the clean energy transition and critical minerals. Author of “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives."

Douglas Wicks, program director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Laura Lammers, CEO of Travertine Technology.

Kate Finn, executive director of First Peoples Worldwide.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Elements of energy: Mining for a green future. And you have arrived at episode 5. Throughout this series, we've talked about lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel.

We've gone to North Carolina, Nevada, Panama, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Indonesia. Today, we bring all of that back to the United States and to the question, can the U.S. actually meet its ambitious clean energy goals?

PRES. JOE BIDEN: We didn't tear down. We build up. We didn't look back. We look forward. And today offers further proof that the soul America is vibrant. The future of America is bright, and the promise of America is real and just beginning. (APPLAUSE)

CHAKRABARTI: President Joe Biden there hitting the aspirational notes at the signing ceremony for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Ernest Scheyder is the author of “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives." He's also senior correspondent at Reuters, where he covers the clean energy transition. And Ernest has been with us all week, giving us those one-on-ones on each of the elements we've explored. And today he joins us live. Ernest, welcome to On Point.

ERNEST SCHEYDER: Hey, it's great to be with you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so before we answer the question that everyone wants to know about, can the United States meet its goals, I want to hear from you first about specifically what are those clean energy goals that the Biden administration has laid out for this country?

SCHEYDER: Sure. They're pretty aggressive.

They're basically trying to transition our entire economy from being primarily dependent on fossil fuels to one dependent on materials, namely the critical minerals we've been discussing this entire week. And to do that, you have to have a rapid shift and a rapid change in how energy is produced. Where, what are the building blocks that can actually power our economy across the country?

And that has huge implications. Obviously, we're going to need a lot more of the critical minerals we've been discussing. We're going to need a shift in jobs. We're going to need a shift in how we process these materials and also how we turn it into the building blocks. And there's a lot that goes into that.

Certain policies like the IRA and the BIL, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, do try to make us forward, try to move us forward there. But we can't achieve any of those goals unless we have more mining, unless we have a collective wrestling with where are the places that we actually want to allow mining and what are the standards by which we allow mining.

And we're not really having that discussion right now. Broadly.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So we're going to talk in just a second about some specifics in the Inflation Reduction Act, et cetera. But I have to say, when we, and I include myself in this, across the media, talk about a clean energy economy, right? And a full transition to that.

It's a very vague sentence or phrase to describe what should be specific goals. How would we measure what a clean energy economy looks like? Does that mean no fossil fuel consumption in this country? Does it mean a 50% reduction? What exactly does it mean?

SCHEYDER: I think that's part of the problem.

It means different things to different people. But I think broadly, when we look at some of the goals set forward by the Paris Climate Accords that was signed by President Obama, we are striving for a movement towards net zero global emissions by 2050. And that can mean that we either use carbon capture to take some of the carbon that might be emitted from fossil fuels and store it, but probably the easier way would be to say, okay, we're going to move towards zero emission vehicles, zero emission transportation, electric vehicles being a huge area there.

Potentially moving air travel in that direction, if that can be achieved, the shipping industry, having that reduces many emissions as possible, as well as other everyday devices that are right now powered by 2 stroke engines, for instance. Like a leaf blower, which is a whimsy innocuous example, but they're powered by leaf, powered by 2 stroke engines and they emit a lot of noxious emissions.

And if they could be powered by critical minerals, then that could move us towards that. So that broadly tends to be the goal that people are talking about.

CHAKRABARTI: Ernest, gas powered leaf blowers might seem like a tiny and innocuous example, but that's the one that will get most people going, let me tell you, in neighborhoods where there's a lot of leaf blowing.

Okay.

SCHEYDER: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: So let's talk specifically about some of the policy tools that the Biden administration has put into place to see if the U.S. can get to these goals. So first of all, let's listen more to what the president said in August of 2022 while signing into law the Inflation Reduction Act.

BIDEN: The Inflation Reduction Act invests $369 billion to take the most aggressive action ever in confronting the climate crisis and strengthening our economic, our energy security.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so take us into the act, Ernest. What are some of the specific things that the IRA does?

SCHEYDER: The main thrust of the IRA is to encourage automakers to make more electric vehicles.

And how are they going to do that? There's a mechanism in the IRA whereby you can get tax credits if you have a certain percentage of that vehicle built with critical minerals produced in the United States. Or within countries that have U.S. free trade deals. And that was designed by the primary author of the bill, Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, a Democrat, to encourage mining in the United States.

And it also is a realization that the United States probably does not have all of the critical minerals that it needs within its borders. And so how can we work with ally nations? And the free trade deal mechanism was seen as a stand in for allies. Because if we have a free trade deal with them, they're an ally nation.

And so that is the rough goal of the IRA to say, Hey, we're going to want to encourage domestic mining. We know that right now we've been depending on other parts of the world for other forms of energy. If we're going to have this transition, the thrust, or the impetus behind the IRA is to say, let's dig it out of the ground in America and process it in America.

Like most pieces of Washington legislation, though, the devil is in the details. And right now, there's a huge wrestling in D.C. about what that actually means when the rubber meets the road.

CHAKRABARTI: Gotcha. Okay. Let's hear again from the president on some details that he offered in his speech again about the Inflation Reduction Act.

BIDEN: It gives consumers a tax credit to buy electric vehicles or fuel cell vehicles, new or used. And it gives them a credit, a tax credit of up to $7,500 if those vehicles were made in America. American auto companies along with American labor are committing their treasure and their talent, billions of dollars in investment to make electric vehicles and battery and electric charging stations all across America.

Made in America. All of it made in America.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Ernest, so this gets us back to what you were just saying, that the Biden administration has laid out a goal and a vision, but if we've learned anything from this week's series on Elements of energy, it's that the made in America part's going to be very hard. Because so much of what we need to achieve this vision has to come from other places.

So does the Biden administration have any other policies that directly address those elements and the mining of them and the challenges around extracting them both here in the United States and abroad?

SCHEYDER: I think if you talk to the mining industry, and I would even venture even to the conservation environmental communities who I've spoken with a lot, it's very confusing what the administration's policy is when it comes to actual mining.

So it's one thing to say, yes, we have this broad goal of moving towards a green energy transition. But Meghna, now you can't have the IRA without more mining. That's just the simple reality. And so there has to be clear rules of the road as to exactly what it means to propose a mine. What are the standards by which the federal government is going to allow mining, and how that project can actually move forward.

President Biden didn't even actually start talking about critical minerals into a year into his presidency. And I'll grant him that, he had came into the office with a pandemic and other things. But he made clean energy one of his main staples. And that confused a lot of people. It said, okay what are the actual rules by which this administration is going to actually say, yes, this mine can move forward or no, this mine cannot move forward.

And there's several examples out there where the administration has talked about financially supporting one project, but taking other steps that might actually block it. And so when you add each of those up, it gets confusing about, okay, we're going to have more domestic cobalt and nickel and copper and lithium, or are we not?

CHAKRABARTI: Ernest, it's not that he hasn't been asked either. I understand that you've repeatedly asked this question of both the president and the administration. Can you quickly tell us that story?

SCHEYDER: Yes. Yeah. As part of the 2020 presidential campaign, I embedded with Biden's campaign as part of my day job at Reuters. And these tend to be very frenetic activities.

You're following the candidate around for 14, 15-hour days. I had one question that I wanted to ask the then vice president, now President Biden, does your clean energy plan require more mining? And I didn't get an answer. I wasn't able to get an answer at all during that time I embedded. And then that whole first 12, 13 months that he was in office, I also tried unsuccessfully to get it.

It was only when President Biden finally held a virtual roundtable that he actually started to address the issue broadly.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Across the week in almost every single episode that we've had in this series, one particular thing has come up again and again, and that is China's role, even control, I would say, of some of the critical elements that the world will need for this clean energy transition.

So let's listen to what President Biden had to say about that in February of 2022.

BIDEN: When it comes to clean energy, China has spent several years cornering the market on many of the materials that power the technologies that we rely on. That's why I committed us to build a clean energy supply chain stamped Made in America.

And Made in America means using products, parts, and materials, as well as minerals, right here that are in the United States of America.

CHAKRABARTI: Ernest, here's what I wonder. This didn't just happen overnight, right? China just didn't suddenly materialize in Congo, Indonesia, etc. to be major players in the global supply of these elements.

It's been going on for 20 plus years. What was the United States doing while China was very effectively reaching into these markets?

SCHEYDER: Well, I would argue, and I do argue in the book, that the United States focused a lot more on tech and high tech issues while having a perception of mining as a dirty industry.

When we think about 20, 30, 40 years ago, Meghna, would the average American probably thought of mining as coal mining and as a dirty, dusty industry? It fell out of fashion in the United States. That's just the reality. Meanwhile, China realized that control of these critical minerals would provide economic weapons for the 21st century.

And whoever controls all of these critical minerals, we've been discussing this week, really will control the 21st century economy. But most of that know-how right now is in China. Because it's invested in China, in the technological spaces, invested in the university education and invested in all parts of the supply chain the past 30, 40 years, including all of the minerals that we've been discussing.

And it's just not a sexy industry, it's not tech, for instance, it's not AI, but it's so crucial. You can't have those two industries without critical mining. And China knows this and has really cemented its power in that space.

CHAKRABARTI: So if, first of all, if it's fair to say that China's control of these elements and minerals could potentially be a major hurdle for the United States to meet its clean energy goals, how would you describe what the approach is in Washington on how to handle that problem? It has to be a lot of things. I get it, like the United States needs to be more involved in the nations that it must partner with to increase the supply of these elements. There's mining here at home, but then there's also just the geo politics around any interactions with China.

How would you describe what the climate is around that?

SCHEYDER: The climate right now is, as you say, is a lot of moving parts and wading through it is a key goal for our policymakers in Washington, D.C. I would say two things right now. China has not only increased its production and processing at its own borders, but also looked globally.

And so we were talking earlier in the week about cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The largest cobalt mine there was actually owned by an American company, but had to sell it due to financial straits, financial dire straits that had found itself in. And who was the only buyer? A Chinese company.

And the U.S. government did not step in at all to stop that. So now we have this giant cobalt facility in the Democratic Republic of the Congo owned by a Chinese company. And I would also say that here in the United States, there is not a political will among voters to actually grapple with this. And I really hope that after this week, and after folks read the book, and just really process a lot of this material, that they think through the collective wrestling that we have to be having, because we have to be discussing about where, how and why.

We want to get the building blocks for this energy transition. It's all about choice, and it starts with how we think through the products that we buy every single day. It's how young people get educated. It's how we demand of our policymakers' updates. Meghna, the law that governs mining in the Western United States has been around since 1872.

That's when Ulysses S. Grant was president. That law did not envision an energy transition, and it was actually designed to encourage mining and encourage populations to move to the U.S. West. Now I've been to the U.S. West very recently. I can tell you it's got a lot of people. It doesn't need any more people to go out there and move it.

What the law also does, though, it says to mining companies, you don't have to pay royalties for any copper or lithium or other metals that you take out of federal lands. And yeah, that is a perk that is not given to oil and gas companies, and I can tell you oil and gas companies would kill for that perk.

And so there's a lot of folks that say we have to update this piece of legislation that's been governing hard rock mining in the United States for more than 150 years, to bring it into the 21st century, to update our laws. So I would say those are just two buckets that sort of hold back where we are going right now.

CHAKRABARTI: Ernest, please tell me that it has been updated at least a little since the Grant administration.

SCHEYDER: I would say yes, there have been ethic edges, at the contours, there have been updates, but at its core, if you'll forgive the pun, yes, it is still much the same that it was when Ulysses S. Grant signed it. The main function, no royalties for miners in the U.S. West is a key function. The fact that it did not actually envision where we are today. The clean energy transition is a key stumbling block for that. Also, the rules just aren't clear. Let's just take this hypothetical.

Let's just say you own 1,000 acres in Nevada and or you are interested. You prospected, you state a claim on 1,000 acres of federal land in Nevada, and you are convinced that there's a major lithium deposit there. How would you start going about the permitting process?

CHAKRABARTI: I have no idea.

SCHEYDER: Exactly, like it's so myopic.

It's so confusing. And that's confusing for the mining industry as well as the conservationists and environmental community that in some cases may want to oppose them or partner with them. So that best practices are observed. It's so confusing to get to either a yes or a no. And what the clear process is. And that's holding back President Biden's goals that he just enumerated in the clip he played.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I want to talk then about some of the modernization, let's put it that way, that hopefully is happening in terms of policies to aid not only mining in this country, but all the technologies that we need to go around the increase in mining for a clean energy transition. So in a minute, we're going to hear from Douglas Wicks.

He's the program director of the U. S. Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E, okay? But before that, we just want to give everyone an example of the kinds of things that ARPA-E is supporting, because they fund the development of technology that creates new ways to generate, store, and use energy.

And not that long ago, ARPA-E awarded Denver, Colorado based Travertine Technologies, some $2 million for technology they're developing that would separate elements from ores in a much cleaner way. Laura Lammers is an environmental geochemist and CEO of Travertine, and she says she got into the industry because she believes there's simply no time to waste.

Climate change is forcing mining technology to make rapid strides forward.

LAURA LAMMERS: Mainstream extractive processes, taking energy critical elements like lithium or copper out of rocks and oars, are using chemicals to leach the elements out of the rock. Take a primary chemical, it's called sulfuric acid, react it with the rock, and you end up with a waste product.

And typically, that waste product is discharged to the environment, or it is landfilled. And so our process eliminates that waste by recycling it back to the original chemicals.

We don't have any commercial scale projects yet and that is a symptom of this very early-stage nature of these new technologies serving the mining industry.

Today, there is a voluntary market. Companies are stepping up to purchase high cost, durable carbon dioxide removal and sequestration. A number of companies have built interesting consortia like Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe.

They've built this frontier climate coalition. And so that's creating a market for one of our products, which is the carbon removal product, but in the absence of government regulation, in the absence of government optics, that's not a durable market into the future.

I think the number one challenge is, at the end of the day, cost.

And right now, we're living in a world where there is no real green premium for products. You don't buy a certain EV because the nickel was produced in an environmentally friendly way, for example.

And so without that green premium, we're beholden to trying to compete on cost with the most environmentally damaging processes out there. In trying to develop a new technology, we need a level of certainty that a market will be there. And that there will be a cost associated with an environmental outcome. And in the absence of that, it's very difficult to actually develop a new technology. And having a very highly polarized political environment that's directly impacting investment in the clean energy transition is an additional hurdle that makes it hard to move these new technologies forward.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Laura Lammers, CEO of Travertine Technologies in Denver, Colorado. As mentioned, Douglas Wicks joins us now. He's program director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E. Douglas Wicks, welcome to On Point.

DOUGLAS WICKS: Ah, thank you, Meghna, and hello for the day.

CHAKRABARTI: As Ernest Scheyder has said repeatedly, there's many aspects about mining in the United States that need modernization.

And it sounds like infrastructure and the direct technology used to pull elements out of the ground, to process them, is definitely one of those places. Can you talk about some of the challenges or hurdles there that ARPA-E is aiming to overcome?

WICKS: Yes, Meghna. Our focus really is, how do we develop the technical solutions to address the environmental, societal, and really economic concerns, as Laura emphasized, to do this.

And we've launched a program, of which Laura is part, called the MINER program, which is really saying, how do we reimagine the mining and extraction process? To develop raw materials for the energy transition that have the best environmental footprint, of least societal change and the best economics.

And it's quite a challenge to do this. Because we have to look for new sources of minerals to develop these. If we want to do them domestically, we need to make sure that we can process them in such a way that there's not wastes that are likely to be a legacy going forward.

CHAKRABARTI: I understand that the scope of the challenges is actually once you comprehend it, somewhat mind boggling.

For example, in order to meet the goals that the Biden administration has laid out, or even for any kind of clean energy transition, the U.S. or the world is going to have to produce, what, as much copper in the next quarter century as we have in all of history. So that is going to put a lot of pressure on as you said, technological development to make it happen.

But Douglas, I'm thinking of what Ernest said earlier, that mining isn't exactly, it doesn't really have the same appeal as a tech CEO standing in front of a giant LED screen and talking about the next phone or sharing software that's coming out. Is that changing at universities, or are you, do you still meet some resistance or even quizzical looks when you come to them and talk to them about mining?

WICKS: I have a lot of, I get a lot of quizzical looks. I will say, I personally have taken it upon myself to really go out and talk to universities and try to stimulate interest from outside of the mining disciplines. And so last year, I gave more than 40 talks at the top universities in the United States to say, you need to get involved.

We don't just need the people who are involved in it already. We need new ideas to come in. We need to bring people in from different disciplines. And one of the things about the mining industry is there's a lack of technical innovation infrastructure, so there's not a startup community where you can go forward and look at it.

Startups are going to be really where our breakthroughs come from, like Laura Lammers, who just talked, and I fund it. And so we are not only trying to develop and fund technology, but also stimulate, through what we call our miner boost program, a lot of startup companies in the area.

CHAKRABARTI: One thing that governments always face when trying to use the significant power of a federal system to help advance technologies, or in any aspect of industrial policy, is the question of should the government even be in the business of picking winners and losers with these new technologies? How do you handle that question or that challenge?

WICKS: I'm not really picking winners or losers. I'm trying to find as many different solutions to put forth, really for the market to follow up on. So companies like Travertine or other ones who develop technologies and attract the private industry to come fund them. And in the fourth episode, you had Todd Malan on from Talon Metals. The advantages he's talking about are actually coming from several of the programs I've funded, to look at and say, how do we reimagine the mining process to be almost carbon negative in producing metals?

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let me ask you, and I understand right now you're in government. So if there's reluctance to answer, I'm still going to push you for an answer anyway, if you could give one. Which is, do you feel optimistic about the United States being able to reach its clean energy goals? Whether it's by President Biden's mark or soon thereafter?

WICKS: I have to be optimistic. (LAUGHS) To look at this and say that there are technical solutions, and I've seen them being developed. That really can address the, again, the environmental, societal and economic needs, when the country decides to move forward. And I think we have the tools, and now we need the will to do. And that's outside of the technology development side.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you think that the public, the American people, will they themselves create some of that will? Because one thing we've heard throughout the week also is that people have very legitimate concerns about expanding mining in this country.

We can overcome the technical problems, for example, but there's always going to be a moral question or political concerns about who suffers the immediate impact when mining is expanded, Douglas.

WICKS: I look at this and say, we have the capability to do it domestically safely, and we have to understand that if we do it in our backyard, we can see and monitor the way it's being done.

So we don't have the issues as discussed in earlier parts of the program, of things taking place in countries that do not have the rules, regulations and oversight that we have here.

CHAKRABARTI: Douglas, I think one thing that you've definitely left us with, and I hope there's some really smart and eager young folks out there who hear that there is a great potential to get government funding to really come up with great, fantastic new technologies to help with mining in this country.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI:  Ernest, we have to focus for some time on a really important issue that was hinted at by Douglas Wicks.

And that is, if we're going to expand mining in this country, there are people who will both directly benefit from it and people who will both directly bear the cost of it. So let's listen to a moment to Daranda Hinkey. She's co founder of the People of Red Mountain. It's an activist group working to protect Indigenous lands from the impact of mining.

And we heard from her in our very first episode on lithium. Hinkey is also a member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone tribe. So we asked her whether she thinks the positives of mining lithium outweigh the negatives of tribal nations losing that land.

DARANDA HINKEY: No, I don't. Those cultural resources are so like important to us and for us, you can't just put up a sign and be like, "Oh, this is what was once here." That place should go like untouched because of what's happened there. But I definitely don't think it's the first time a Native person has felt this though. And we see that all across Americas, is that Native people fight for these places, say no, they don't want it.

And then they don't get heard or they're not actually listened to.

CHAKRABARTI: Ernest, what has your reporting revealed about this particular issue? Because mining anywhere in the United States will touch Native peoples, because of so much of the mineable land in this country is very close to or on Native lands.

SCHEYDER: Yes, wildly complex issue, Meghna. What the speaker there was just referring to, the project that she herself is directly opposed to, is the Thacker Pass Lithium Project in Northern Nevada. This is just on the Nevada-Oregon border. This is actually the largest deposit of lithium found anywhere in North America.

And the company that wants to develop it has General Motors now as its largest shareholder. And the organization that Daranda represents actually tried to fight this proposed mine in court and lost. And as we sit here discussing today, that mine is actually under early construction.

And actually, yesterday, the U.S. Department of Energy controlled by President Biden gave the company that is developing that mine $2.26 billion, conditionally owned. That's billion with a B. And this project would supply primarily just General Motors, all the lithium that it needs, starting in 2028. And the concerns of the people of Red Mountain and other indigenous groups have been part of the conversation, but they have not always succeeded.

Certainly, this mine is moving forward. I should say that the Fort McDermitt tribe that Daranda is a member of, it has supported the project broadly as a tribal council, but not all of its members do. So therein lies some of the complexity.

CHAKRABARTI: Because, just to add to what you're saying, many members of the tribal council felt that it was an opportunity for the community to benefit from some of the things that they would get, as the mine goes forward.

But go ahead.

SCHEYDER: Yes. Yes. Therein lies sort of the tension and the rub. And I would argue, and I do argue in the book, I have a chapter that focuses just on Thacker Pass. I went there and went around the site. It is an issue for us to be grappling with, not only at the policy level with our leaders, but also as Americans.

Are we comfortable having these traditional lands? That were owned by these people's for generations being taken away and dug up. And I think we have to be grappling with that. We're not grappling with that right now. We're not grappling with, are there some places too special to mine? And if we do allow mining, where should we go?

When I visited Thacker Pass, it's this immensely beautiful place. It's filled with varied wildlife and it's just idyllic, especially at dusk, you can just see hues of colors across the sky, just an amazing place, but it's also got tons of lithium there that will power our green energy transition for generations.

And so you can hear in Daranda's voice, the pain, the palpable tension around, should this be dug up? And this isn't the only project, there's also the resolution copper project in Arizona, which would destroy a site that's sacred to the San Carlos Apache people. And that's been winding its way through various court cases.

Right now, regardless of the specific case we have to be as Americans debating this and we're not right now.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I want to come back to that in a second, but just to reiterate what you said, just yesterday, big news about the Thacker Pass lithium mine. That $2.26 billion loan announced from the energy department.

So to your point, Ernest, the Biden administration is definitely giving that mine a big vote of confidence. Now I want to just listen a little bit more to concerns from Indigenous peoples in this country. Because putting some details on what I said earlier, 97% of nickel, 89% of copper, and 79% of lithium, and 68% of cobalt reserves and resources in this country are located within 35 miles of Native American reservations.

KATE FINN: The goal, the sovereignty, the ability for tribes to act upon their own economic, environmental, cultural, and social priorities. So the ability for a tribe to have the first say about what happens in their community and how it happens.

CHAKRABARTI: Kate Finn is the executive director of First Peoples Worldwide and the chair of the executive committee of the SIRGE Coalition.

Both groups aim to ensure governments do not infringe upon indigenous people's rights in the clean energy transition.

FINN: The regulatory regime will approve a company to come into the indigenous people's territory, onto tribal lands, however that is, and that company will provide employment for a certain amount of time.

But largely the financial benefits go to the company. And then all of the burdens are left on the ground. It's incredible, because the companies then leave and actually the employment is now lost too. So you have communities that have been built around employment. But now their local economic drivers are bad.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Finn says that is a pattern that has been repeated for over 500 years in the United States. And across this week, we've heard similar concerns and observations from people in Congo, in Indonesia, and reasons why they want to take back control of the mining of the elements that come out of their ground.

And Finn says in the U.S. the burdens borne by tribal nations are not simply economic ones.

FINN: In many cases, you can look to the Navajo Nation and others where there's been uranium that's been mined. You have higher instances of cancer. You have high instances of asthma and other kinds of health consideration, higher instances of human trafficking and criminal enterprise that enter the communities.

But those things stay in the community, even when the money and the company leaves.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, across this week and especially for today's show, we asked nearly all of the experts we talked to whether or not they are optimistic about the United States meeting its clean energy goals. And here is Finn's answer.

FINN: If our ultimate goal together is a better climate, is to make sure that our planet is healthy, and that people are able to live well on it, that is a long-term timeline.

And the policy goals that the U.S. has put in place are extremely short. And so if we take a short-sighted approach, what will happen is this paradigm of lack of engagement will happen again. And the benefits and the burdens will be unequally distributed, again.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Kate Finn, Executive Director of First Peoples Worldwide and the Chair of the Executive Committee of the SIRGE Coalition.

They are groups that seek to ensure governments do not infringe upon indigenous rights in the clean energy transition. Ernest, I mean, what Kate Finn says gets to really the heart of the important conversation that you keep saying the American people need to have. And I want to get to something which I think is very unique about this moment.

Because in previous generations, previous centuries, as we've touched on all this week, the profound, negative aspects of colonialism and the very extractive approaches that external powers have taken on places like, Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, it's clear. It's quite black and white that people suffer immediately and long term.

There's no question about it. And very few people benefit it. But here, with the need to increase mining in order to guarantee a clean energy future for the world, the moral question is not so cut and dry, right? Because yeah, there are going to be some downsides of expanding mining, but we're asking people to make that sacrifice in exchange to pull back the devastation of climate change that is happening and coming in the next several decades, and centuries. Those devastations will also be met upon the people who live on mining lands, no matter what happens, unless we make that clean energy transition, do you see what I mean?

It's much more murky.

SCHEYDER: It's a huge tension point. And as you say, for generations, some indigenous peoples have been treated horribly, and they are going to be understandably suspect if you come to them and say, now you must bear the physical brunt and the metaphorical brunt of this clean energy transition, unless you bring them along in a responsible and ethical and moral way.

That's why I think it's so important to be having a discussion about what are the types of minings that we're going to allow and how we're actually going to allow mining, Douglas at ARPA-E, talking about different technologies. I think that's a key part of the conversation here as well.

On Monday, we were discussing direct lithium extraction. There's also technologies around copper leaching and other ways that could lessen the need for a quote-unquote hole in the ground. Now, that's not to say that we're not going to still need to have those holes in the ground moving forward, but having input and dialogue with all affected parties, the more and more I reported on the mineral mining industry, the more and more that seems to be a key part of the conversation moving forward here.

CHAKRABARTI: How can that, but can I just jump in here. Because maybe we're about to say the same thing, but what I heard Kate talk about there is that the timeline is too tight.

To make these important systematic changes, like if we want to get to 50% emissions reductions by 2030, which is what President Biden has said, that's only six years from now. And she does not see the political infrastructure in place to have all the voices at the table of indigenous peoples in that timeline.

SCHEYDER: I would agree with that. These conversations take much longer than some would like. And I think the concept that Kate was alluding to is known as free prior and informed consent. And it's a bit of industry jargon, but it essentially means that indigenous communities give their acquiescence to extracted projects.

And that can take a while. Many indigenous groups, especially in the United States, prefer what's called government to government consultation. That means they want their tribal council speaking with the United States federal government rather than the mining industry. And that does frustrate the mining industry.

But from the tribe's perspectives, that's their government speaking to another government, how the United Kingdom would speak to the United States. And that's how they approach these complex issues. And sometimes those conversations can take years. And they don't move as fast, say, as some in the mining industry would like.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you, this is all wrapped up in a very interesting story about a particular flower that grows on some lithium deposits. Can you briefly tell us the story?

SCHEYDER: Certainly, this to me encapsulates everything we've been discussing this week and it's the reason why I used it as the narrative spine for my book, for The War Below.

There's this rare flower found nowhere else on the planet at a site about 200 miles north of Las Vegas. Now that flower though loves this lithium rich soil. And underneath that flower sits one of the largest deposits of lithium in the country. And the question becomes what matters more. If we dig out the lithium, could the flower be destroyed?

And if we do nothing, wouldn't the flower go extinct due to climate change? And so it sets up this big tension point between the company that would like to develop this lithium project and a conservation group that is so focused on biodiversity and the need for that. And we heard on Monday this week about the big focus and the need for us to really be thinking through biodiversity.

And we really get to meet the people on both sides of this issue. And what I found so fascinating is the gentleman that's the chairman of the company that would like to develop this mine. He used to be in oil and gas. And for him, he finds that the development of this mine is his way to help basically make penance to leave the planet cleaner than the one that he found.

He wants his kids and grandchildren to have a cleaner planet than the one that he found. But on the other side, you have a conservationist that's saying, Yes, I believe in lithium. Yes, I think it's great. We have this energy transition. But if we let this flower go extinct, what's next? Is it a big tree? Is it an animal?

Is it a people's way of life? What is the line in the sand here? Is this a slippery slope? And then there's also broader questions of whether or not you can develop this mine and let the flower thrive and grow at the same time. Can they coexist? And then you put politics on top of it and policy.

And you've got one arm of the U.S. federal government that decides to lend money to the company that's wanting to develop the mine. At the same time, you have another arm of the U.S. federal government that declares the flower endangered. And so how do both of those things happen? And how do both of those things coexist?

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

SCHEYDER: And so you just put all of this into a pot. And for me, it just made for a really interesting stew of complexity that I really want us to grapple with. And that's why I made it, as I said, the narrative spine for this story.

CHAKRABARTI: And that tension is happening. everywhere around the world, a version of that.

And by the way, the flower is named Tiehm's buckwheat, right?

SCHEYDER: Tiehm's buckwheat, yes.

CHAKRABARTI: This series, it might seem wow, these are problems that are huge, insurmountable. Politicians, lawmakers, businesspeople are the ones sitting at the levers of power. But I want to close in the last minute and a half that we have with you, me, and everybody listening. Because, Ernest, we asked On Point listeners to complete this sentence.

Mining is

for the world's clean energy transition. And many listeners filled in that blank with the word critical, excuse me, for the world's clean energy transition. But that's not all.

(LISTENER MONTAGE) Mining is:

A problem.

Reasoned.

Necessary.

Destructive.

Mining is a death wish.

Critical.

The word is essential.

Complicated.

Mining is key.

A human atrocity.

Mining is not a good long-term approach.

Mining is going to be devastating for the environment.

Mining is going to be a mixed bag for the world's clean energy future.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Ernest, we got about 15, 20 seconds to end this monumental week for us.

What do you think are the questions that people should be asking themselves as they think about the clean energy transition and mining?

SCHEYDER: I think people should look around their houses and where they go shop and look at all of the electronic gadgets and gizmos that are so essential and that are used in our everyday lives.

And think about the lithium and the copper and the cobalt and the nickel in all of those devices. And think about how those devices have changed the past 30 or 40 years to incorporate more of those critical minerals. Then be thinking about the choices that we need to be making, and the choices we need to demand our policymakers make, about where we get these important building blocks.