Podcast episode: Thea Riofrancos on Tackling Transition and Consumption
Electrification offers an opportunity to rethink how we use energy and how we get around. Researcher Thea Riofrancos wants to see the U.S. seize that opportunity and set the country on a path to a better, more equitable future.
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Related Intercept article: https://theintercept.com/2023/05/08/energy-transition-electrification-consumption/
Transcript
Amy: Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today I wanna talk about something that has been getting a lot of attention lately and is kind of rife with misinformation. That is the environmental impact of the Electrify Everything movement. This is something that a lot of climate folks have been really hesitant to talk about or even have been kind of defensive about, because they don't want people talking as though renewables have the exact same impact as fossil fuels or this idea that they'll be even worse or that they're not an improvement. All of these are, are talking points that several folks on the right are starting to push. You've got Ted Cruz ringing his hands about child labor in Cobalt Minds, for example. You've got a lot of. Pundits who carry water for the fossil fuel industry, claiming that the land required for both mining and installing renewables, the materials required, all of that is going to be a bigger environmental problem than drilling for oil.
That is not true. However, there are definitely impacts, and one of the key ways that we can minimize those impacts is to curb energy consumption across the board. We are at this moment right now, that's very pivotal, where the US in particular is trying to plan out an energy transition. And instead of going, oh no, electric is great.
We don't need to think about this stuff. It's actually the perfect time to figure out how to minimize the environmental impact of our energy system. One way to do that is to curb consumption. That is not something that any energy company wants to talk about. It's not something that most American capitalists wanna talk about, but it is absolutely necessary for systemically addressing the problem of climate change.
I wrote about this recently in The Intercept, and for that piece I interviewed a really interesting researcher on this subject, Thea Rio Francos.
She recently put out a report for the Climate and Community project entitled Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less. Mining that report concluded that even relatively small, pretty easy to achieve shifts in our behavior, like reducing the size of cars and their batteries could deliver big returns.
A 42% reduction in the amount of lithium needed in the US even if the number of cars on the road and the frequency with which people drive stayed the same.
I asked Rio Francos to talk me through her report and all of its very interesting findings, and that conversation is coming up after this quick break.
Thea Riofrancos: I am the Rio Francos and I'm an associate professor of political science at Providence College, and also a member of the Climate and Community Project.
Amy: Awesome. Okay. Can I have you, and I know this is annoying cuz you just wrote an 80 plus page report on it, but can I have you just give kind of a, a brief summary of report is and kind of what
Thea Riofrancos: So, maybe I'll, I'll start with like the origins of why we even thought to create this report, cuz I think it, it helps listeners understand what the state of the kind of policy and academic conversation is on these topics, and what some of the gaps are. So. Many years ago, in early 2019 when I was first in Chile, researching the social and environmental impacts of lithium mining there. And Chile is the world's number two producer of lithium and also some of the kind of contentious politics around extraction of this mineral. I started to kind of think, you know, would it matter in terms of how much lithium was needed, how the sort of global energy transition is designed or how the US energy transition is designed right?
Are there futures in which less lithium and less of these other transition minerals are required than some of the most alarming kind of reports and predictions I began to see from the International Energy Agency and then the World Bank and multiple o other forecasting agencies. Which were and remain pretty alarming in terms of how much mining they are predicting will occur or be demanded.
And I started to kind of look for that research. And at the same time I was doing a lot of climate advocacy work, a lot of green New deal organizing. And so I was thinking a lot about an urgent and rapid and just energy transition in the us. But I was kind of thinking about both ends of the supply chain at once.
Like here I am in Chile, in the Atacama Desert, seeing these mining related harms. And then there I go in the US kind of advocating for a rapid transition. Like how do I align these two goals and is there a way to kind of have a less extractive energy transition? And the answer was that that research didn't exist, at least not for the US transportation sector.
Right. And each year that went. On, you know, up until the present, up until the launch of our report, that research still didn't exist. I saw forecast after forecast that assumed basically a binary of the future, right? Either we stay with the fossil fuel status quo and the existential crisis that that is causing for the planet and all of its people.
Or we transition to. An electrified, renewably powered future, but that doesn't really change anything about how these sectors or economic activities are organized. Right. So it's, it's binary. It's either fossil fuel or kind of electrified version of the status quo. And, and there was, there's was very little research sort of in between those two.
Or that mapped out or sort of broke down, let's look at the electrified future and. Say that there are multiple ways to design it, with implications for all sorts of things, including how quickly advanced towards our climate goals, including how equitably we do so, and including these kind of supply chain considerations that we also bring to the table in this report.
So, you know, with that kind of frustration, but also that kind of continued curiosity about like, is there another path forward that's not currently being modeled? We set out to create that model and kind of actually have. A data-driven analysis of the very different pathways, all of which are zero emissions, all of which are electrified, all of which are renewably powered, but very tremendously in the specifics, in ways that, as I said, have these kind of broader implications.
And to combine that with more qualitative research on the harms of mining on some of the supply chain bottlenecks and constraints that we see on the horizon and to produce something that we hope is kind of useful. To advocates across the supply chain, you know, whether it's climate, transit, folks that are concerned about mining impacts, whatever the issue at stake is.
I think that there's a way to align them if we think holistically about the design of the energy transition.
Amy: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I think that one of the things that really jumped out to me in You know, again, like kind of along the lines of this binary that you're pointing out, I think people are often like, okay, we can either electrify cars or have fossil and that's it. There's no, there's, you know, there's been very little conversation about moving away from dependency in general and and very little kind of movement on that front. I feel like, you know, Every once in a while, Elon Musk will like poo poo the idea of public transit, and we'll get a little bit of like when we're talking about decarbonizing wondering, have you kind of map out these, these three different, or four different scenarios that you map in the report and kind of walk people through what would be required to, to do each of those.
I, I was really struck by the fact that like, even if, you know, nothing else changes and we just have some policy around the size of EV batteries, for deliver a. Pretty major,
Thea Riofrancos: So the way that we design our report, it is kind of interesting and I think again, it draws out these themes of connecting the dots kinda across the supply chain. We first kind of sketch out what are different possible zero emissions transportation futures, like if we look ahead to the US and 2050 and assume that our transportation is.
100% without carbon emissions. What would that actually concretely look like? And we sketch out four different scenarios, again, all of which eliminate emissions. But they differ and in, in some cases pretty dramatically on a variety of parameters. So the first scenario, as you kind of suggested, and as I was hinting at earlier, Just keeps everything the same except electrifies it, right?
So we have the same patterns of car usage and car dependency and vehicle ownership. We also have the same kind of land use patterns of that suburban sprawl that itself incentivizes car use or even requires it. And so we change basically nothing about American society built environment infrastructure, but we swap out.
Ice vehicles for EVs. And we do so, in a growing manner, over time until we get to 2050, that's scenario one, electrified status quo. We have three others, and what they do is kind of progressively in a step-wise fashion add in more changes. Some of them are not huge changes, some of them are more dramatic.
And so it gives us a real range and, and as I said, gets into the black box of electrification and opens it up and reveals it to be a whole host of choices, right. So in scenario two, what we look at is shifting mode share. And that's just a fancy technical term for what percentage of people are using what types of transportation for their trips.
You know, am I using a bus or am I using a bike, or am I, you know, which mode of transportation am I using a car? Right? And so we move people so that more of those trips are being taken in. Non-car options, but we still have cars. We still have EVs, but, but we, we start to nudge people towards buses and cycling and walking.
Right? In the third scenario, we do more of that, so we do more of that mode shift towards transit, cycling and walking. We also densify metropolitan regions, right? We see a lot of sprawl in ways that are very out of line with like the rest of the world. Like when we move, especially to the edges of a city or to those first ring suburbs and then out to the exces, like the distances just get really big and we don't even have to go to rural areas to see those, that sprawl or that distance.
And so we densify things a bit so that the distances are shorter and those changes also get accompanied by a decrease in. How many people own vehicles, right? So that's scenario three, more of a mode shift, slightly denser, metropolitan regions and lower levels of car ownership. Scenario four is like our turbocharged in a positive sentence scenario, right?
Our most ambitious one. We do all of those things, but more we say like, you know what if we really brought mode shares in line with like the places in the world where folks use like the most transit or cycle the most, right? What if we densify even more, right? Or bring vehicle ownership. Rates down even more.
And I just wanna flag that even in scenario four, there are lots of EVs, right? You know, and I, and I'm aware of, you know, the debates, around this topic, right. So I just wanna flag that we don't actually eliminate electric vehicles in any of our scenarios. We just play around with getting people to take trips through different modes, making those distances shorter and discouraging car ownership, which tends to happen when there are other modes available.
And also when the distances are shorter.
Amy: Right. Can you Can you talk through what the obstacles to those kinds of shifts are? You know, what are the, the kind of things stopping either? The options being made available or people availing themselves of those options. What are the things in place right now that are stopping those, those
Thea Riofrancos: I might, if you don't mind, just slightly personalize this, because I have, experienced this firsthand where, you know, the, the. I know that our, that in the us and especially in in auto industry advertising to consumers, cars are very associated with freedom. Right. You know, this is like the American dream is like you drive anywhere, everyone owns their own car.
But you know, for me, when I look at the transportation system and also my own interaction with it in my own life, I experienced this as like, A lack of choices. Like a lack of freedom, right? Like I have lived in places where it was not only not required, but actually more annoying to have a car than to use a bike or bus or, or a subway or something else.
And I now live in a place where the opposite is true. I live in a city which is Providence, Rhode Island, but it's very hard. To just live your daily life and be a full member of society without owning a car. And it's actually the first place where I got a driver's license. I think I was 31 or 32 in other places I lived, as I said, in the US and elsewhere in the world.
, it was just not a thing. You didn't have to own a car. I grew up in New York City, so I know I'm weird, but I'm more kind of just wanna say that like, I moved to a place that, again, was an urban environment and there are buses and people, there are some bike lanes a little bit, but it, it was impossible for me to commute, to work, and to do the rest of my daily life stuff without a car.
And so, you know, I think
that's the situation that, yeah.
Amy: Yep. I had this exact experience. I, I lived in San Francisco and Oakland forever, and then I moved to the mountains and like, there's theoretically a bus, but it's like, there's like a two hour spectrum of time of when it may or may not come. So, you know, if you have like a normal job where you have to be anywhere at a particular time, that's not gonna work for you.
And. That's the only
Thea Riofrancos: So, yeah, I think that, you know, it's totally understandable to me that, you know, the vast majority of Americans use cars to get around because they live in contexts, even some urban contexts, but especially suburban and obviously, especially rural contexts where they're. Really is no other option.
And so I neither blame individuals for those choices, but nor do I see our current transportation system as a paragon of freedom, right? I mean, especially when we consider how financially burdensome I. Cars are for poor and working class people. Right. It's, it's a real, you know, it's just an expense and it's an, it's a set of annoyances of maintaining increasingly old cars and filling them with gas that's increasingly expensive.
Right? And, you know, there's a real affordability concern around electric vehicles, which obviously federal subsidies are meant to address. And I don't, I don't oppose that, but I do think that it raises the question of is there another path forward? Not that fully eliminates electric vehicles. I don't see that as f feasible in any like, near or medium term, but that kind of gives them the right proportion in a broader transportation system that involves other options and, other possibilities for people to move around that are more equitable, more affordable, maybe even free. If we look into experiments and like the fare-free buses popping up in some cities, that are more active like biking and walking and, and good for physical and mental health in that way, you know, there's a whole host of benefits that that accompany. Just again, may not eliminating cars, but bringing them down to size and having other modes of transportation available to people and sort of creating different types of street scapes and land uses around that.
Amy: yeah, who, like, what are the what are the forces that are pushing against that? Because I, I feel like most. People, average Americans are like, yeah, it would be great if I had a cheap and easy way to get around I don't you know, to your I don't think it's an individual choice problem.
So like, what are the powers that are shaping
Thea Riofrancos:Yeah. It's a lot of kind of political and economic interactions at a variety of, of scales of, of our, you know, government and economy, right? I mean, We could go back in the early 20th century and look at what were some critical decisions that were made that kind of put us on this path dependent, which just got of course, like much exacerbated in the sort of post world war boom and this sort of great acceleration of the 1970s, right?
We could look at all these critical moments where it's often a confluence of, lobbying efforts by some combination of the fossil fuel or auto industry in some cases, specifically to dismantle what prevailed in a prior era of like street cars in downtown, in, you know, in downtown urban areas, right?
Like that, that were in some cases, Eliminated to make more room for cars or to make wider avenues, you know, the neighborhoods that were destroyed by highways the whole emergence and it, and very high levels of government investment in the interstate highway system. The sort of declining investment on the other hand for. Public transit authorities, and for the commuter rail systems, and let's not even get into Amtrak sort of state of affairs. Right. So, you know, I don't have a conspiratorial worldview though sometimes, it can be tempting, right? But there are a lot of decisions that took place at relatively high levels of power authority and sort of financial investment and resource allocation that in combination and at critical junctures of US history where we see these inflection points. That kind of both put us initially on a path of car dependency and then reinforce that over time. And my concern, and just to sort of close this point out, is that we are at such a critical juncture, you know, between the sort of escalating climate crisis and the ways that that is destabilizing people around the world and in the United States, right? On the one hand, and the other hand, this in many ways exciting and very important opportunity to totally change the energetic foundations of the world, right? Like to move away from fossil fuels once and for all and to go to, you know, to, to power our societies through renewable energy. But we're at a critical juncture in terms of specifically, How that renewable energy transition is designed, who the winners and losers are, what the, what decisions made around certain trade-offs.
Right. In, in the sort of policy and, and resource decisions. So, I'm worried that this moment, which could. Could, if we think about it critically, organize around it and advocate for us, like for it, maybe put us on a slightly less car dependent path, right? And use this as a moment to, create a different kind of, of infrastructure transportation, will instead reinforce not only car dependency itself.
But with the idea that like EVs as an individual technology are the panacea, right? But, but actually reinforce some of the worst trends within a car dependent status quo. And I specifically am thinking about gargantuan cars with gargantuan batteries, which actually take us further away climate goals.
Amy: which we're, we've seen like an
Thea Riofrancos: from
Yeah. Yeah.
Amy: explosion of in the last year or so. I feel like it's like the EV truck and the, just so many of the of the, like the Super Bowl ads last year were for these like oversized EVs and I was like, oh God, why?
Thea Riofrancos:There are reasons, terrible reasons, bad reasons, like bad faith reasons and more understandable reasons that this trend is happening and it is a real trend. We currently, US average battery sizes for electric vehicles are like double where they were a decade ago and also double like the global average.
And so they're really on their own path right now. They are just getting larger and larger, all of those. Also, it's worth noting the larger the battery, the more raw materials and we'll get into in a moment like what our findings were with different, you know, how much lithium would be required by these different scenarios, but, you know, definitely larger battery means more lithium and nor more of anything else that goes into that battery.
It also, by the way, means more expensive. I think the e hummer is like $110,000. It's so expensive that it doesn't even qualify for the Ira RA subsidies, which max out at 80,000 for an s for an E S U V. So they're not affordable. They're very heavy. They're even heavier than the equivalent, like, like a gas guzzler, S U v because the battery's so heavy, which poses safety risks to pedestrians and other drivers.
So there's like, they're wrong on all counts. The real reason I think they're being pushed is because the auto industry has a massive need for new financial investment in retooling all of its factories to be, to create EVs instead of ice vehicles. And they want a profitable sales item and.
As we know, just like with gas guzzling SUVs, E SUVs have really like wide profit margins. Like they're, they're really profitable compared to more compact cars. So that's their obvious interest. And then they sell this as consumers are demanding it. Now, that's less clear to me because of how tightly connected consumer preferences are with fossil fuel and auto industry advertising.
But you know, to the extent that consumers want these, I think, you know, there are different reasons we could get into sort of like, Toxic masculinity stuff. But to just put that aside, like I think the most valid reason that a consumer would want a large vehicle aside from if they're like a construction contractor or something, is that they're concerned about range, right?
They, they think a larger battery is true will get them more range. We'll get them two, 300 miles right on, on a charge.
And we have a really, insufficient charging network in the US so that, that is real, especially for folks. Again, in those really sprawl rural and suburban areas and excerpts where, you know, you might be going long distances between a charging station.
Of course most folks are, are taking really short trips on average. But, so it's more of a mental anxiety than a sort of real one, if that makes sense. But, you know, the way we address that is through thinking about charging stations through thinking also about density and the distances that folks are sometimes traveling, rather than filling that gap with an e Hummer, which is just not a rational way to, to fill that that social need.
Amy: right, do you feel like the automotive lobby and industry kind of in general is, gets less attention than the fossil fuel guys in all of this, and is that fair? I see so much more on the oil companies, but that's also. Because of, , the work I'm doing.
So I don't know if it seems to you like there's, an adequate amount of attention on the way that the automotive industry works to shape, policies and market preferences
Thea Riofrancos: I don't think there is enough. And it's a really important industry to look at both historically and its role, and as I said, lobbying to dismantle other transportation options. So we should have that critical historical lens and how deeply intertwined its interests have been with the fossil fuel, industry and fossil capital.
Right. So that's another lens, right? Sort of approximate to your own work. And then on the other hand, how they, alongside mining companies, some of which by the way are like coal companies too. I mean these, these mega mining companies mine in multiple sectors, including in fossil fuel sectors. And so now mining companies and auto companies are, are literally, and this is no exaggeration, you can go to any of their websites, investor relation, communiques, you know, press releases and see how they're setting themselves up as like climate saviors, like the auto industry with the mining industry is gonna save us from the climate crisis.
That in a deep way, the mining industry. Quad its role in fossil fuel extraction and the auto industry as like the main consumer. Good, aside from the power sector that uses fossil fuels, like these are the culprits, not the saviors. And I don't think we should be designing an energy transition or envisioning one in which these two industries have as large and sort of strategic roles as they currently do.
And we should be sort of thinking about like, you know, again, what were the causes of the climate crisis? What would a society , a zero- emission society look like that's equitable and just, and like what role then should technologies like lithium batteries, electric vehicles and the mine materials that furnish them play in that right.
Rather than kind of assume as I worry that. Some, you know, colleagues in the climate sort of world are, are doing is that any new lithium mine built is like climate action or any ev sold is climate action. When we know that some, many people buying EVs, it's their third car and we don't even know if it's replacing the use of their gas.
I mean, the data is still in progress there. Right. But, but it's not. It's not the same to buy an EV as to bring down emissions, right? We have to evaluate those separately and see how they relate to one another. While I'm absolutely in favor of electrifying transportation, 100% and EVs are gonna play a role there.
I just think we need to disentangle, like our goal is, is confronting the climate crisis and politically confronting the, and economically confronting the actors that caused it. And that should be our kind of horizon and our framework for then what specific policies or practices we advocate for.
Amy: Yeah. The thing I kind of come back to over and over again is that just replacing the energy source is not ever gonna be enough that there needs to be a, a, a different decision making framework . We can't keep evaluating decisions, in the context of how little change does this require of people, or how little change does this require of, companies or whatever. And you mentioned Chile before, one of the things that I've been looking at is, is rights of nature as sort of an, an example of a different type of decision making framework that just prioritizes different things than, you know, corporate profits or you know, Lack of discomfort for consumers.
I'm curious what you think about the shift that is happening in some Latin American countries towards that and, and whether it is one of, of the ways that people could start to, to look at, okay, what does a different decision making framework look like?
Thea Riofrancos: For sure. No, I'm so glad you asked about that, cuz I think that, you know, first of all, in and of itself, it's a very interesting legal innovation that's been adopted, as you said, in several Latin American countries and constitutions in ordinary law and regulations and increasing numbers of court cases that have been won on nature's behalf.
And so it's a whole interesting topic in and of itself, but, Just to zoom out a little bit, you know, I think that. I'm a little biased in terms of both family background and also my research area, being Latin America for so long. But, I do think Latin America really shows some of the most, both harmful, but also progressive and just, and innovative, like instantiations of, of both extractive sectors and of potential ways that humans in nature can relate to one another.
Like the whole range is there, like, you know, just to make it really stark, like. On the one hand, Latin America is the most dangerous place in the world to be a water or environmental defender, right? To be someone who is defending their access to clean air, to their livelihoods, to culturally sensitive territory against the encroachment of whether it's extractive sectors or the agribusiness sector.
Both of those are, are pretty culpable here. It is extremely dangerous to be an activist and people get. Killed every year doing just that, right? Engaging in forms of civil disobedience. So on the one hand, it's an extremely dangerous place to engage in this protest.
On the other hand, it's the place where we see, and these are probably in some ways not unrelated facts like, Some of the most militant, inspiring forms of protest against fossil fuels, against extractive industries, more broadly, mining, et cetera, against you know, large scale hydroelectric dams. You know, a whole host of projects that have been seen to be harmful to people or environments.
People are willing to fight over them. Right? And also, you know, whether it's direct action or whether it's in the electoral arena and electing people that, that hold these values or you know, whether it's rewriting constitutions and ratifying them. And so, you know, we just see a very contentious both on the harmful end and on the inspiring end kind of political economy of extraction in Latin America.
And I think this is more relevant than it seems, not just because Latin America sort of. Close by and we share a hemisphere. And so we should think about, you know, what's happening south of us, let's say. But, but also because, you know, as the US and other global north countries so it's the US Canada, a bunch of European countries are wanting to.
Onshore mining, so-called critical minerals mining, you know, for strategic purposes, right? We wanna make sure we have lithium at home close to home, and we build these supply chains at home instead of being reliant on, you know, foreign entities of concern. I think that's the language that's used federally for, for China and, and, and other countries that have large roles in these supply chains, right?
So there's this desire on the part of policy elites to. Onshore a lot of mining. Right. I like to refer to this map that the Center for Biological Diversity Nevada Director Patrick Donnelly maintains of western of lithium mining in Western states. And he's mapped like 110 projects at some level of like permitting or financing.
Across just the western part of the United States, just the western states. Right? 110. Just lithium. Right. Not all the critical minerals and not all the states in the country. And of course some of these mines will never happen. They'll reach, they'll encounter a regulatory hurdle or a financial hurdle, but it's a lot of projects.
Right. And so as the US is kind of scrambling, the US government, I should say, and to some extent, you know, corporations as well are kind of scrambling and saying like, We want to do all this mining here, and GM just literally invested hundreds of millions of dollars directly into a lithium mining project in Nevada.
So this is the mining industry. Auto industry relationship is getting very close now. You know, as that's happening, it's gonna spark conflicts that. Don't look that different from conflicts in Latin America. They're often gonna involve indigenous peoples, not exclusively, but in many cases they do.
They're often gonna involve concerns about groundwater, about where we properly consulted. Did we give our consent? And these are exactly the structural conflicts in in Latin America. And you'll see this, you know, similar opposing arguments like mining will bring jobs. Mining is good for national security, you know, et cetera.
Right? So that kind of whole gamut of the way the politics of mining plays out to sort of see how that. Has happened in Latin America, where, which contains some of the top producers of X, you know, X or Y mineral in the world, right? Chile is also number one copper producer, right? I think shows us not exactly our future, but does show us what a society looks like.
That is riven over conflicts, over extraction. Which is maybe not how we think about the energy transition, right? Because obviously the energy transition involves. Moving away from the enormous volumes of extraction for fuel. Right? And that's important and, and many a climate advocate will rightfully point out that the amount of coal and gas and oil mind in our current energy system just is so much bigger than the amount of.
Critical minerals mining that will take place over the next few decades. And that is true and correct, but I think just saying that does not really tell us very much about how the politics and social conflicts and divides around the mining that will happen during the energy transition are gonna play out.
And just saying that fact doesn't. Actually wrestle with the environmental, social, or even geopolitical and economic kind of impacts and, and dilemmas posed by the mining that's to come, you know, at the same time that we know that overall it's like less extraction from the earth in a system that constantly extracts for the purposes of fuel.
Amy: Right, right. That's such a good point. Okay, so can I have you just recap some of your, your high level findings
in, in this
Thea Riofrancos:Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for asking that. And I'm gonna go to the most dramatic finding, just cuz I think it, it shows the full range of possibility ahead of us, right? It sort of nicely arrays like sort of worst and best case scenarios. So if we go to tw the year 2050, our model models zero emission transportation, what that would require in terms of lithium mining.
From now in to 2050. But if we just take that snapshot year of 2050, and we look at lithium demand, our worst case scenario to our best case scenario is a 92% difference. So if we just take the year 2050, this future that we're looking at as your emission transportation sector, our worst case scenario is we maintain current.
Levels of car dependency, car usage cars have this outsized kind of share of overall transportation modes. Vehicle ownership rates remain like the same as they are now. And we also get, continue on this trend of bigger and bigger batteries, right, that are getting more and more out of step with. Like global averages.
That's our worst case scenario. Things get kind of actually worse but electrified. And our best case scenario is we bring battery sizes back to a sort of reasonable size. We expand how many folks are using buses or cycling. We densify our suburbs a bit. We have maximum levels of recycling and recovery that are technically feasible.
That second future is 92% less lithium than the first future.
And I know that the ambitious future is probably beyond the realm of what feels politically possible right now. And I understand that. You know, I am not like living in the clouds. I'm aware of that. But I think that having that option on the table, cuz in that most ambitious future, we totally limited emissions and everyone has a way to get around, right?
We're not denying anyone mobility and we're not falling short of our climate goals. And we could have that future and use a lot less lithium and then have all these other amazing co-benefits of reducing car usage.
So I think that's the, and then I wanna throw out one other finding. I'm gonna go for a drama right now, right?
Because you can get into the granular findings where we have in between levels of X, Y, and Z. But I just wanna sort of another finding that I really like, just cuz it, it addresses folks who are understandably concerned that like there is no America without car dependency. You know, we can't move away from being hard dependent, we just have to suck it up.
And I say to those people, we could stay in scenario one, which is the one where we keep levels of car usage and vehicle ownership rates and we don't densify anything and we've lots of sprawl. We could stay in scenario one and we could just bring our batteries to like the right size or not this gargantuan size.
And in 2050 we could use 42% less lithium with the same amount of cars and the same amount of car usage and vehicle ownership. If we just make the batteries a more normal size, like rather than the super size.
Amy Westervelt: And we're talking about like normal incom and like, like completely competitive with everybody else's
Thea Riofrancos: it's not a smart car. You know, those tiny European cars. I'm not, you know, I'm not even going there. Cause again, I know my audience, I know my limits of what I can suggest. So no, we're talking about the Nissan Leaf or we're talking about what people drive in Berlin or whatever. I mean, meaning our peer nations in wealthy global cities around the world.
Like what are people driving if they do drive? And that's the battery size I'm about
Amy: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That is incredible. And also like quite hopeful and achievable, you know, I think That if, if people are like, oh, come on, that the fact that there's this option on the table that really doesn't require, you know, a heavy lift that would deliver 42% less lithium is pretty incredible.
Awesome. All right. I'm gonna link to the report in the show notes and encourage people to go read it cuz it like it did actually, I don't know. Whenever I read reports like this, I'm like, oh, okay. Like there is actually a way to do it cuz I think that a lot of times, That's where people get stuck is like, okay, but how on earth would we ever do it?
And, you've mapped it out here, which is very helpful.
Thea Riofrancos: I'm so glad and as I said, like such a fan, I've like assigned my students the drilled podcast from the beginning
Amy: I'm so thrilled to hear that, thank you!
Thea Riofrancos: Thank you!
