Decarbonizing US transportation with an eye toward global justice

Will widespread electrification of the US personal-vehicle sector inevitably be accompanied by a huge rise in environmentally destructive lithium mining? Not necessarily, says a new report. In this episode, lead author Thea Riofrancos discusses options for reducing future lithium demand through density, infrastructure, and smart transportation choices.

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David Roberts

The transportation sector is the leading carbon emitter in the US economy, and unlike some other sources, it is on the rise. Decarbonizing it is inevitably going to involve wholesale electrification of personal vehicles. We're going to need lots and lots of EVs.

That’s going to mean more demand for minerals like lithium, which is mined in environmentally destructive ways and almost everywhere opposed by local and indigenous groups.

But lithium can be mined in more or less harmful ways, depending on where and how it’s done and how well it’s governed. And the number of EVs needed in the future — and the consequent demand for lithium — is not fixed. The US transportation sector could decarbonize in more or less car-intensive ways. If US cities densified and built better public transportation and more walking and cycling infrastructure, fewer people would need cars and the cars could get by with smaller batteries. That would mean less demand for lithium, less mining, and less destruction.

But how much less? That brings us to a new report: “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining,” from the Climate and Community Project and UC Davis. It models the lithium intensity of several different pathways to decarbonization for the US personal-vehicle market to determine how much lithium demand could be reduced in different zero-carbon scenarios.

It’s a novel line of research (hopefully a sign of more to come) and an important step toward deepening and complicating the discussion of US transportation decarbonization. I was thrilled to talk to its lead author, Thea Riofrancos, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and associate professor of political science at Providence College, about the reality of lithium mining, the coming demand for more lithium, and the ways that demand can be reduced through smart transportation choices.

Alright. Thea Riofrancos, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Thea Riofrancos

Thanks for inviting me.

David Roberts

I've been meeting to get you on forever and waiting for the right occasion, and this is just a humdinger of an occasion here, this report. It's right at the nexus of, like, a lot of things I cover a lot, and a lot of things I feel like I should cover more, bringing them together. So before we jump into the details, I just want to take a step back and summarize the report, the framing of the report as I see it, because I've seen and heard some media coverage of the report, and I'm always just a little frustrated by how other journalists cover things.

Thea Riofrancos

Understandably.

David Roberts

It's just this weird oblique... they don't take the time to sort of say, "what is the main thing?" Before getting on into weird little side questions. So I'll just say, as I understand it, the premise of the report here is we need to decarbonize transportation, yes. And electrifying vehicles is a huge and unavoidable part of that and extracting a lot of lithium is an unavoidable part of that. However, and here I will quote the report, "The volume of extraction is not a given. Neither is it a given where that extraction takes place, under what circumstances, the degree of the environmental and social impacts, or how mining is governed."

So the idea here is: yes, we have to decarbonize, we have to electrify, we have to electrify transportation. We need electric vehicles, but there are better and worse ways of doing that, more and less just ways of doing that, more and less lithium-intensive ways of doing that, and we should do it the best way we can. Is that fair?

Thea Riofrancos

That is fair. And you've also quoted one of actually my personal favorite lines of the report, because I agree with you that it really gets at the heart of what our goals are, the kind of questions that we're asking, and also this desire to align goals that might seem in tension with one another, right? Which is rapid decarbonization on the one hand, and on the other hand, protecting biodiversity, Indigenous' rights, respecting other land uses, and those can feel—and to an extent, materially are—in tension with one another in specific instances. But our goal was to say, "Is there a way to have it all from a climate justice perspective?"

What's the win win? Or what's the way to get away from at least a sort of zero-sum framing?

David Roberts

Right. Or just a north star, a way to look, a goal to pursue rather than just sort of this binary notion of we're going to electrify transportation or not. There's just a ton of room within that to do it in different ways. So that's the main thing here. We're thinking about how to decarbonize transportation in the best possible way, where it's both rapid decarbonization and as just as possible and as light on the Earth as possible. So within that, you sort of take as your primary metric: lithium. You compare scenarios based on their lithium intensity. So maybe let's just start there and you can just explain to listeners why choose lithium as your sort of central metric?

Thea Riofrancos

Great question. Because one could imagine this report being replicated across a whole host of transition minerals, and I actually hope that it is, right? I do see this as a kind of opening to a research agenda that we hope is malleable in other sectors as well. Why lithium? Maybe let's zoom out a little bit and just say how urgent it is to decarbonize the US Transportation sector, right? And so that's why transportation which we can talk about more later, of course.

David Roberts

Yeah, I think in the latter half we're going to get into transportation and US Transportation all the stuff.

Thea Riofrancos

It helps us sort of understand why the battery and the battery helps us understand why lithium. So I'll just treat it in that order briefly, which is transportation sector number one, and main steel sort of rising emissions sector in the US, right. In order to decarbonize that sector, there's lots of forms of transportation. We're focusing on ground transportation here. And the prevailing technology for decarbonizing ground transportation is the lithium ion battery. That may change in the future, and I'm happy to sort of entertain that. We can talk about it if we want. But right now, in terms of commercial viability, scale, and just the actual material production that's going on in the world, it's the lithium ion battery.

When we sort of dig into those batteries, and I know you've covered batteries on prior shows, there's a whole set of different minerals and metals used in the cathodes, the anodes, the separators, et cetera. Lithium is central, though. Lithium is the kind of non-substitutable element in that recipe. You can go to different cathode chemistries that do or don't use nickel, that do or don't use cobalt, et cetera, right. The iron phosphate versus the NMC. And those have different benefits or drawbacks in terms of energy density, power density, et cetera. But lithium is in all of them right now.

And so lithium felt like a good first cut, a good sort of catch-all. I'll also say that we expect that if we overall focus on reducing the raw material needs of the energy transition, those benefits carry on beyond lithium, right? A lot of our suggestions would also reduce mining of other materials, including those outside of the battery, right. Like copper, if we look at the broader car. So we chose lithium for those reasons. One other thing to sort of note is that lithium has also been a particular target of a range of public policy and corporate strategies over the past couple of years, right.

I hate to kind of use imperialist language, but I'll just use it because it's how the media frames it. Right, there's like a scramble for lithium, a rush for lithium, a lithium boom. It's considered essential and strategic by public and private sectors in ways that are also making it sort of a laboratory of new corporate and public policies. And so that's another reason to focus on lithium.

David Roberts

Yeah. Kind of an early indicator of how these institutions will approach decarbonization more broadly or materials more broadly.

Thea Riofrancos

Absolutely. And playing into that and also kind of a result of that at the same time is like the crazy price volatility with lithium over the past few years. And maybe volatility is not the best way to put it, because it's been just consistently rising. Over the past decade it's been super volatile, big crashes, big booms, and busts. But in the past few years, we've just seen steady increases, getting to the point of historic highs last year. So lithium is now a huge factor in the price and affordability of batteries, which are in turn, the main and most expensive component of an EV. So from a totally different angle, we care about how much