The Transition to Renewable Energy Truths and Consequences

please give a really warm welcome to Adam Simon [Applause] it's actually darker than I thought it was going to be but I'll make it all right so here's what I want everybody in the room to do right I want you to think about waking up in the year 1800. all right what would life have been like if you woke up in the year 1800 right what would the first thing in the morning you have done how would you have put food on the table what would you have needed to put that food on the table how would you have provided energy to cook the food that you put on the table right life today in almost every place on the world and there are certainly challenges life today is different well than it ever was all right so if you woke up in 1800 one of the ways that you would have provided energy for both light and also for heat would have been to use a fossil fuel and your fossil fuels of choice would have been wood that you would have failed and chopped up and had in your house ready to burn or you would have had a candle like the one that here I have at the front of the room and this is a Tallow candle you can buy them today on Etsy and other bougie websites and Tallow is animal fat so to provide meat you most likely would have had animals or you would have known somebody who had animals and periodically you would butcher those animals and you would consume the meat and you would use some of the fat to fry the meat and add flavor and then you would render the fat a liquid and then cool it to a solid and you would put a wick in it and you'd use a Tallow candle to provide light and that was it that was it right those were your fossil fuels if we think of animals cows and sheep when they're dead they're fossils and if we look at the data here right from left to right you're looking at years so 1700 through today and what I want to highlight is that again if we go back a couple hundred years to pre-industrial Earth you would have used candles made from animal fat we then learned how to use coal to produce what we called Town Gas we then decided that killing whales all over the planet and rendering the fat from whales to use as candles was a good idea then we figured out in the 1850s how we could use crude oil and extract from crude oil one of its components which is kerosene and kerosene lights became extremely popular because they were on demand and they produced a lot of energy and then we had a game changer in green the game changer was electricity and this is when the game changed for Humanity we used to have world's fairs where scientists and others would display their new inventions right we had world's fairs where the hot dog was displayed ice cream was displayed popcorn was displayed things that today we simply take for granted and at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 was the first time on planet Earth that humans saw how electricity could be used to create artificial light so that at night we essentially could live as we did during the day and if you've read the text by now this Monumental moment in human history we had president Grover Cleveland who attended the World's Fair and after all the lights went out he flipped a switch and when he flipped the switch current or charge flowed along copper wires and illuminated a hundred thousand light bulbs and this is one of the original black and white images we had not yet invented color photography but that was a game changer and trust me when I say every person who had access to a newspaper at the time and saw this image every person said I want that every person only a few years later there was another game changer so if you go back to 1900 in the countries that we call the European union today the United States Canada there were more than a hundred thousand humans who woke up at that time six days a week and worked 12-hour shifts and only took off on Sunday and every day more than a hundred thousand people went one too fast woke up and made carriages for horses every single day and the image on the left is New York City's Fifth Avenue in 1900 and here's how fast this game changer happened the red circle is the only vehicle that's a combustion engine everybody else is riding a horse 1913 no horses now at the time this was viewed as incredibly good for public health because horses defecate when they want to defecate right they're not like dogs they don't go to the door and go and then you let them out so one of the big Public Health crises in major cities around the world at the time in more developed countries was literally all of the horseshit that would leach into the subsurface when it would rain because rain water has a slightly Negative PH it's a little acidic and all of the E coli and other bacteria got into water supplies so this was viewed as a major advance in public health it was also important because it forever changed agriculture so this is a black and white photograph of the way that we farmed in the 1800s in the late 1800s 75 percent of all U.S citizens were farmers 75 percent right today it's less than one percent and why is that because from then to now what used to take an entire day 25 men we do in six minutes six minutes so we went from producing agriculture at that time faster than we had ever done and now we do the same thing every single six minutes phenomenal and that has allowed our global population to increase from roughly 1 billion people pre-industrial time to now we're eight billion people and Counting and without a doubt when we look at population increase and we look at life spans the average lifespan in the United States in the last 100 years has doubled doubled that's phenomenal now that takes into account maternal fatalities infant mortalities childhood mortalities we had no vaccines for anything a hundred years ago we couldn't cure cancer a hundred years ago there was no chemotherapy no modern medicine so without a doubt these can be thought of as cause and effect our ability to grow food on a really large scale very quickly allowed us to provide food for the masses and again I recognize that there are still challenges but by and large when we look at our modern medical infrastructure there are problems but the technologies that we have available to us today allow for our lives to be better than at any point in human history and we did that by transitioning from wood and Tallow candles and whale oil to these three fossil fuels coal oil and natural gas and you can clearly see an almost one-to-one correlation that as human population increased our consumption of fossil fuels increased in lockstep and I'm going to play an animation now because I want everybody to have a sense of how much of these fossil fuels we consume right individually we have some sense if we still drive a combustion engine vehicle and we go and we put Petrol in our car how much fossil fuel we're consuming but let's look at it globally here hopefully I got to get rid of my laser pointer okay so we're going to start in 1830 and you can clearly see up here on the top in 1830 primarily we used wood that was it and a little bit of coal and Watch What Happens what you see is the displacement of wood the displacement of Tallow the displacement of whale oil and you see the incredible growth in consumption of oil coal and gas which is natural gas methane and wood be down here on the lower left now when we talk about energy it's important to distinguish between primary energy and secondary energy secondary energy is electricity and politicians in the news media always get this wrong right electricity is a drop in the bucket of our total Global energy consumption and electricity is secondary because we use a primary fuel and then we produce electricity so when we look at Global primary energy consumption all I want you to see here is that coal oil and natural natural gas they dominate primary energy they're 85 percent of global energy consumption 85 percent and the other 15 percent includes everything else everything else to put that in local perspective if you're a fan of football and concussions and other things you all recognize that the big house at capacity seats 115 000 people now it's 10 46. if you came into this room at 1006 globally we have consumed oil equal to filling the entire big house up to the top of the press boxes and we have drained it and we're restarting at 10 47. and in the next 40 minutes we'll fill it and drain it again so when you think about energy consumption and oil is the number one traded commodity on the planet this is what we're talking about when we think of oil right the media likes to talk about we produce and consume 32 billion barrels of oil a year but think about it in terms of the big house which we're all familiar with now I said that global population has increased and our consumption of fossil fuels have increased in lockstep and most people would agree that life today is pretty good to what it would have been in 1800 1700 1600. there's a reason the show is called Naked and Afraid I rarely meet people that want the naked part without being afraid okay so what are the downsides well now you're going to look at an animation and I want to highlight where your eye should start which is England up here England is where the Industrial Revolution began for a variety of reasons England was the first country on the planet that allowed individuals to patent intellectual property and if you have the ability to patent intellectual property that means you own the property and you can charge a royalty when people use your ideas so Thomas newcomen who invented the steam engine in 1712 patented the steam engine and James Watt had to pay him to make improvements England also had major seafaring ports and it also had a lot of coal at the surface of the Earth it also heavily depended on slave labor in the United States where Africans were brought to the U.S and forced into slavery to grow cotton essentially with no remuneration whatsoever and that cotton went to England and it's the direct result of slave labor and cop and cotton production in the United States that allowed England's economy to grow that's a cause and effect here you're looking at carbon dioxide emissions that we know the cause so let me play this and we start in 1751. England is the first country where we have evidence the Industrial Revolution happened it made its way to the United States in the early 1800s and you start to see the U.S pop up in color you see the diffusion of Industry from England across the English Channel to Continental Europe so what you're looking at here are in each place game changers that forever modified how humans live and I'm not assigning good and bad to that but every time we see a particular place light up we're looking at combustion of fossil fuels that are either directly being used to provide energy in that local area or combustion of fossil fuels embedded in the products that we use now how can that be bad well here is global temperature from 1850 red is hot blue is cold and what you see year over year is that global temperatures have systematically increased now there's no expectation that they should have increased first in England because when CO2 is emitted during combustion of fossil fuels our atmosphere globally circulates and that CO2 diffuses throughout the entire atmosphere but these temperatures are real data so when we're looking at these temperatures and we just looked at CO2 emissions right if you're interested in exploring or testing the hypothesis that the emissions could be a cause for these increased temperatures what would you do but how would you test that and they continue to get hotter as anybody who followed the news last summer first summer in recorded history where Continental England exceeded 40.0 degrees Celsius ever since we invented thermometers now in 1982 a group of scientists working for Exxon that's 10 years before Exxon acquired mobile to become Exxon Mobil but a group of scientists at Exxon like many groups of scientists around the world they made the same observations globally the concentration of CO2 in that in the atmosphere is increasing globally the temperature of the atmosphere is increasing and let's test the hypothesis that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is the cause of increasing temperature so they and many other groups did what we think of now as simple experiments we are in a physics department so this is a simple experiment and what you're looking at here are two beakers the one on your left is filled with CO2 and the one on your right is our normal air and there are thermocouples in both beakers the thermocouple that is colored red is on top currently reading 24.0 degrees and the thermocouple in blue the bottom left is air so in 1982 scientists at Exxon did similar experiments and what they were able to demonstrate unequivocally is that in any volume of air as the concentration of CO2 increases the temperature increases there's no doubt we have done this type of experiment now probably hundreds of thousands of times so it's irrefutable so in 1982 if I can go back to my slides Monica what the Exxon Mobil scientist did is they said okay let's look at historic data they look back at 1959 lower left and they knew the reported atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 316 parts per million they knew in 1980 the concentration was 338 parts per million so what the Exxon scientist did is they looked at at that time how much coal humans were combusting how much oil humans were combusting and how much natural gas humans were combusting because combustion of those three fossil fuels requires that you add oxygen and that produces heat energy and carbon dioxide it's an irreversible chemical reaction so they then forecasted future consumption of coal and oil and natural gas and calculated what the concentration of CO2 would be in the year 2020. and they predicted it would be 415 PPM and they were exactly correct the scientists at Exxon were really really smart people so they tested cause and effect they proved that they then forecasted future CO2 and their forecast their prediction became correct and we understand well the concept of greenhouse gases absorbing energy so what Exxon did and the figure on the right is directly from Exxon so it's their study what they did is on the x-axis is year the left y-axis is the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and the right Axis is what should the temperature be at a particular concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere these are their data and what they calculated here is that as a function of time left to right and increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere temperatures should increase and the two lines here represent the uncertainty on their prediction exactly as the Exon scientist predicted Global atmospheric temperature in 2020 was 1.2 degrees warmer than it was in 1960 exactly irrefutable now that leads us to be able to predict if we do the same calculation that Exxon did in 1982 what's going to happen so we can look at time on the x-axis in years from 1990 out to 2100 and total CO2 on the y-axis and if I play this through we're looking at what we can consider business as usual if we as a global Society continue to consume energy produced by combustion of coal oil and natural gas then Global atmospheric temperatures will rise somewhere between 3.2 and 3.8 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial temperatures right the second option is that if we immediately stop combusting coal oil and natural gas then Global atmospheric temperatures will not rise by more than two degrees C relative to pre-industrial temperatures now a lot of people look at these data and say but Adam it's so nice now that Michigan Winters are warmer I don't have to shovel as much snow all right so what could the impacts be for a couple of degrees C so now what I'm going to show you are two images we'll let it catch up to itself where the lower left is the current and predicted or forecasted production of Corn Maize and the upper right is the current and forecasted out to the year 2099 wheat yield Productions red is bad sorry oh I've got a Mac so we know it's not my computer I can tell there are a lot of PC people in the room on that one where are we okay let's hope this plays so red is bad yellow's bad what do you see what we see right now in real time are latitudinal migrations of crops if we look at Maize only here look at the United States by 2099 the United States we won't grow corn and that's because when we think of these crops that for us are simply ubiquitous some are corn they require relatively narrow temperature windows right they need winter temperatures to be about the right temperature and summer temperatures can't be too hot the same thing for fruit if you go to the state of Georgia right the state of Georgia is the peach state 20 30 years from now Georgia won't be able to grow peaches because the winter temperatures will be just warm enough that it will eliminate the ability for peach trees to grow so when we hear people dismiss oh it's only one or two or three degrees it has Global consequences because when we look at what we now call America's bread basket we won't grow wheat we won't grow corn we won't produce bread so what do we do right we've got choices we can business as usual we continue what we're doing or we can think about alternatives and one of the alternatives is to eliminate the combustion of fossil fuels that right now account for about 75 percent of global CO2 emissions so that's one of the choices we can make and it requires a number of things it requires that we Electrify everything now again remember electricity is a secondary form of energy and we simply use coal and natural gas to produce that energy the majority of the oil that we consume is for transportation going from A to B and back to a so if we Electrify everything that means we need other sources of energy to produce that electricity and in order to reduce the potential for Global atmospheric temperatures to rise by more than two degrees Celsius by 2050. we have to provide 90 of our Global primary energy from renewable energy resources 90 percent so wind turbines and solar panels you can think of as primary sources of energy that will then generate the electricity that we consume and we need battery storage at a local and a large scale what is often referred to as a grid scale so these are data for the United States and I don't want you to squint what I want you to see is right now anything on here that's not a name in black or a black dot are where we currently have wind and solar cited not individual homes but large scale utility wind and solar this is 90 percent this is what we need now when you look at that you probably had a whoa that's a big change from where we are now to where we need to be but remember in 1900 everybody rode around on horses in New York City by 1913 not everybody but the middle class who had previously afforded horses and carriages didn't drive them anymore they drove cars so we have made this type of change on a shorter time scale now the magnitude of the change is greater today but humans have done this so how do we do it well as a geologist when I look at wind this is what most people see this is what I see I see all the medals that are required to build wind turbines so when you drive anywhere and you see a wind turbine and you see the blades are spinning yeah sure why are they spinning those blades are spinning because natural gradients in heat in the troposphere create convection and that is what we call wind and as those blades are spinning what do we get we get electricity and that's what we want there's no combustion there's no coal there's no oil there's no natural gas but we're getting the electricity which is what we want because ultimately for all of us who have access to electricity at home and work what's the number one thing that we want to do in the morning we want to grab this and take it to the bathroom and make sure it's fully charged right so that wind those blades spinning charges our phones and everything else that we use but we need all of these metals when you look at a solar panel right almost intuitively now we have a sense of okay solar panels allow us to charge things and to power things from the solar panels so we've got up here two solar panels and I'm going to highlight that one of them is really large and one of them is much smaller and this is what solar panels do in real time when the sun is shining and incoming solar radiation is received by the solar panels that creates a circuit and we have a charge that flows in this case to the wind turbine to make it spin and equally so that could be a hot water heater that could be anything else that we want the solar panel to charge so when I look at solar panels this is what I see all of the metals that are required to manufacture solar panels when I look at a battery electric vehicle what do you see in the news all the time we're told that electric vehicles have lithium ion batteries that's the current choice for electric vehicles and what I see is that every single battery electric vehicle needs 25 pounds of lithium so think about the last time you bought sugar in a five pound bag five of those lithium are in a battery electric vehicle every single battery electric vehicle but battery electric vehicles also have 200 pounds of copper 60 pounds of nickel 44 pounds of manganese 31 pounds of cobalt and 5 to 11 pounds of rare Earth elements in every single battery electric vehicle in the United States we currently have a goal that 50 percent of all vehicles sold in 2030 will be battery Electric in the United States we produce and sell about 16 million cars every single year so this is 8 million battery electric vehicles by 2030. and our former governor secretary Gran home and the doe almost by the hour if you follow her on Twitter there's something coming out of either Grand home's office or Shaw's office about battery manufacturing facilities and again I hear that and I think that's great we have all these battery manufacturing facilities Shaw has something like hundreds of billions of dollars at his disposal and we then look at other places the European Union wants a hundred percent battery electrics by 2030. 100 percent so if we think about that Through My Lens and the metals that we need for 8 million vehicles it's 200 million pounds of lithium 1.6 billion pounds of copper 480 million pounds of nickel 352 million pounds of manganese 248 million pounds of cobalt and 40 to 80 million pounds of rare Earths now whatever quantity you choose to use that's a lot because this is all new metal that we currently don't have access to and on the right just for scale I include the current U.S production from mines notice that manganese we produce zero all of the Rare Earth elements that we do mine and they're only a small amount from one mine in California we ship them to China and China does 100 of the processing we do a good job on copper but all of this Copper's spoken for so it's not available for the 1.6 billion we need for battery electric vehicles so I'm going to focus for the next few minutes only on copper right we need 1.6 billion pounds of copper and that's for only 50 percent in order to have a hundred percent of our vehicles it's 3.2 billion pounds of copper and all of these other numbers double as well and then we have the European Union and China and Japan and Australia and India etc etc etc so you're going to see here data plotted as a function of on the y-axis is millions of tons of copper so just think bottom left is zero copper and increasing on the left y-axis is copper and on the x-axis is time and what we're looking at are real data for 2017 through 2022 and then forecasted data to 2035 based on the stated policy goals of the United Nations their sustainable development goals the Biden buildback better Administration and the European Union so we're using all of the goals that the UN the U.S and the EU say they want to achieve here's the global copper demand over the next 15 years and here is the amount of copper that currently operating mines around the world the whole world will produce over the next 15 years do you see a problem now there are some proposed new minds and if they are permitted and if they start to produce copper they can help make up a little bit of this but here's the problem we have a huge supply Gap deficit it doesn't matter how many battery electric facilities and Jennifer build doesn't matter those battery electric facilities will literally be idle without copper and all the other metals can't make a battery if you don't have the ingredients it's literally not possible so we have a problem and it's not just for copper if you look at this schematic of data schematic of data graph of real data the y-axis is Supply over demand and the x-axis are the metals lead manganese chromium zinc silver silicon molybdenum Rare Earth elements Platinum Group Metals copper lithium nickel Vanadium Cobalt graphite and there are more but for every single one of these Metals by the year 2030 the only metal that we can produce to meet demand is lead every other metal on the entire planet we have a supply shortage of so when I look at all of the stated policy goals they're unachievable right now they are literally unachievable doesn't matter what they tweet post to Facebook say at a press conference say on the stage at the Rackham theater a few weeks ago doesn't matter we do not have the supply of the metals to produce electricity with wind and solar and Battery electric vehicles we don't have them right now so this isn't possible this isn't possible this isn't possible this is not possible so what do we do I was introduced saying that I have some hope and I do what's the solution to the Metal Supply shortage what do we need to do right and this is where depending on the political climate when I give talks I see Smiles or frowns this is literally the only solution the only solution to meet the demand is to mine because metals have to be mined to be available to build batteries and solar panels and wind turbines now if you've ever flown into the Salt Lake City Airport about 20 miles Southwest of the Salt Lake City Airport you see this image this is taken by a 35 millimeter camera from the space station and it is one of the world's largest copper mines on the planet it's called the Bingham Canyon copper mine you can take tours and it was begun in 1906 is when the first shovel went into the ground and since 1906 it has produced 45 billion pounds of copper and every year they produce 350 million pounds of copper every year only for electric vehicles solar panels wind turbines Etc we need 1.6 billion pounds of copper so the math tells us that we need at least five of these mines every single year to be producing copper and probably more like 10. every single year well a question that I get asked a lot is you know Adam can we find those mines can we find these areas that God has endowed with with copper and we can dig that copper out of the ground and the answer is yes and what I'm going to spend the next few minutes talking about are some myths about Mining and other aspects of renewable energy so I get asked questions such as or I'm flat out told there is not enough wind or sunlight to produce all the electricity we need exclamation point I hear this a lot depending on the news Outlet that I listen to and it's not true trust me we have more than enough wind and more than enough solar even in Michigan to provide a hundred percent of the electricity that we need to be 100 Electric right when we look at global wind power density potential it's phenomenal when we look at the same for solar it's phenomenal and blending these two wind plus solar allows us to produce a hundred percent of our electricity we've modeled this for the southeast Michigan area by using real data from DTE the total amount of electricity we consume every year in southeast Michigan and then we have modeled 100 percent electricity with no combustion of anything and what you're looking at here are the colors in in uh to me looks pinkish when you look at the map you're looking at farms that would be converted to solar when you look at the map and you see the grayish colors you're looking at farms that would host wind turbines now say a couple of things wind turbines have zero effect on agricultural productivity because wind turbines you cite them along Farm edges property lines roads you still Farm the same amount of land solar farms and I'll highlight that one of our Board of Regents members Sarah Hubbard her father now leases 500 Acres of his farm to DTE to produce solar because every kilowatt hour that his solar farm generates electricity he gets a royalty so you look at the map and initially you might think that's a lot but it's really not that much space for all of Southeast Michigan to go 100 Electric next one solar panels wind turbines and electric vehicles are just horrible for the environment just horrible and they must have greater Greenhouse emissions than conventional fossil fuels not true so here are data where the y-axis is what we call the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions or some people refer to it as from well to wheel or from mine to junkyard if you look the lowest life cycle emissions Are For What battery electric vehicles compared to everything compared to Green hydrogen blue hydrogen gray hydrogen whatever you want to compare it to the life cycle of battery electric vehicles has a lower lifetime environmental footprint than every other fuel on the planet well it's too expensive Adam I don't want my power bills to go up it's just really cost prohibitive not true these are data from 2009 through 2020 and all you need to look at is the column on the right is in order of most expensive at the top least expensive on the bottom what's the least expensive solar and wind without any doubt solar and wind but Adam isn't it more expensive to have to build these new solar and wind farms compared to I've already got a coal plant I've already got a natural gas plant the answer is no oh and by the way these are unsubsidized costs there's no government incentive here so without any tax credit wind and solar are cheaper when you compare building a new wind farm and a new solar farm against what we call the marginal costs to produce electricity from coal and oil and nuclear and natural gas or you can think of those as the cash costs right if DTE owns a coal-fired power plant how much does it cost them today to produce that electricity right and that cost includes all of their infrastructure operations and maintenance salaries benefits coffee Keurig machines you name it and what you see if you look from left to right for both subsidized and unsubsidized is there is a dependence on area but on average new wind and solar are cost competitive with existing fossil fuel plants which means that you could close existing fossil fuel plants build new wind and solar and the overall cost for your utility will go down which means cost increases for the consumer go down but Adam what happens when it's a hot day in Ann Arbor I've just come home from top of the park I walk in the house left the windows down left the curtains open it's really hot and I want to crank up the air conditioning and everybody else wants to do that too now currently one of the choices we used is called a natural gas peaker plant p-e-a-c-p-e-a-k-e-r and we have the natural gas plant just sort of sitting it's idle it's what we call a non-spinning reserve a peaker plant and as soon as all of us go home and turn on the air conditioner they Crank That natural gas plant up now there's a lot of data on this slide but I want to break it down in terms of well there are three columns the middle column is the range of costs for solar and wind in different places around the world the right column are the costs for peaker plants so using solar and wind now are cheaper than using existing natural gas peaker plants if you want to see how this is true these are data for wind electricity as a share of total State electricity generation for the 10 states on the left the top ten and if you've followed anything about politics in the last decade what do we see here we see that even in states where elected leaders and group think say they're against wind they're not because their utilities have realized it's the cheapest way to produce electricity now Texas their politicians might say one thing but the reality is Texas is crushing it with wind because it's the cheapest way to generate electricity and I come from a rural conservative southern town there's not a friend of mine who doesn't like it when their electricity rates go down they all love that but Adam what about storage when it's not sunny and it's not windy you get the theme Here Right those prices are dropping literally by the week and these are the headlines in battery storage space we're already seeing batteries are cost competitive for long-term storage four hours six hours eight hours 12 hours 16 hours 20 hours right we're seeing this is our reality well Adam that's all great but I'm anti-mining let's recycle our way there right you imagine you're at Kroger putting your cans in and getting your dime back and thinking oh this is how we build wind turbines recycling can take up some of the demand but nowhere near all of the demand so if we look at this graph of data time is on the x-axis projected out to 2040. the gray is how much in this case lithium we have to mine brand new and we see the same thing for every other metal so recycling without any doubt will get better but over the next few decades it cannot produce the materials we need okay Adam you've convinced me we can't recycle our way but we just don't have access to the metals not true we have plenty of access to Metals within the United States all of the metals that we need but we don't mind them because of this perception that mining is risky and because it makes great PR to say you're anti-mining but if you say you're anti-mining simultaneously you're saying your pro fossil fuels right the two go hand in hand if I am anti-mining therefore my shirt should say anti-mining pro coal Pro Oil Pro Natural Gas all right and it's not risky in the last 80 years 100 people have died at every metal mine in the United States 100. think of that compared to the number of people who die driving cars number of people who die falling in a bathtub the risk is really low and the United States has the strictest mining laws on the planet so if you're really pro-environment you would want to mine here where we have the strictest laws of any country on the planet well this all sounds great what's the problem the problem and I'm going to skip a few is we don't let any mining happen no mining we don't want it here we don't want it there we don't want it in my backyard we don't want it in your backyard nothing bumper stickers on cars that contain the entire periodic table that say no mining really I have to scratch my head on that one psychologists refer to that as cognitive dissonance saying one thing but actually really wanting the products my oldest son who's 20 and way smarter than I am calls it virtue signaling right let me virtue signal with putting signs in my yard and t-shirts on my back without actually thinking about it realistically and this is happening in real time this is an area of Minnesota that right now it has the potential to be one of the world's largest producers of copper and nickel remember those metals that we need for battery electric vehicles they just took it off limits gone but the mining company who planned an underground mind which is about the safest way to mine on planet Earth every year they produce almost 100 million pounds of copper 31 million pounds a nickel 1.6 million pounds of cobalt builds a lot of battery electric vehicles but Deb handland and Joe Biden said no not good for the politics we see the same thing in Alaska Pebble Prospect would have been the largest mine on the planet and would have produced 320 million pounds of copper every single year done off limits so when we look at what we need for these Metals we're simultaneously advocating for build as many battery electric vehicles as you can build as many wind turbines as you can build as many solar panels as you can but you can't mine anything anywhere right it doesn't add up right we look at U.S lithium potential we've got a lot in the state of Maine they have a lithium deposit there that would allow this to happen state of Maine by 2045 wants to be carbon neutral every vehicle is a battery electric vehicle this rock that exists above ground and below ground in the state of Maine only one percent of that rock could build enough battery electric vehicles for a hundred percent of the cars in Maine 100 percent and the rest of the lithium could produce 58 million more battery electric vehicles but in 2017 main band mining Bandit toughest mining laws in the entire country you gotta think ER pass in the news a lot the bite Administration greenlit it doe loaned them 650 million dollars federal judge within the last few days says yes I think it can move forward it only produces enough lithium for 664 000 vehicles so for 8 million we need Thacker pass and 12 more literally now to start going into production Cobalt we only have one mine in the entire country that produces Cobalt they actually ship all of the concentrate to Brazil where it's processed and purified to Cobalt that's only one million pounds it's 23 000 battery electric vehicles you sort of see that the math really doesn't add up we know how much we need but we're not permitting the mining to produce the metals on average in the U.S it's a decade it's a decade from when a company says I have found a particular place within the United States that is endowed in lithium or nickel or copper copper or Cobalt it is 10 years before they get a permit to begin mine Construction 2023 that would be 2033. all right you can't make 20 30 8 million battery electric vehicles who has seen the writing on the wall it's China China over the last 20 years has planted the seed around the world outside the United States and also investing in some mines in the United States and they now have the potential to acquire all of these medals which means right now we're 100 dependent on China for all rare Earths right and again Rare Earth how can they be important well they make permanent magnets that make the motors that you use to drive a battery electric vehicle Atrium is chemically considered a rare earth and if you've ever seen night vision goggles you need Atrium to make night vision goggles so everybody in our military who has night vision goggles that night vision is courtesy of China when we talk about environmental justice there are some significant challenges so Thacker pass is probably going to go forward because it's a great political move for the bite Administration even though it literally is 1 12 of the amount of lithium we need but it also sits on land that is sacred to indigenous communities it sits on land where white colonists murdered a large community of Native Americans that's not me should I unplug and replug okay let's try right so these are real issues you know I I gave a presentation recently to the tribal energy Council and they're looking at renewable energy through the lens of where are all of the metals if you look at a map pretend you're looking at a map of the United States all of the medals that we need for renewable energy are located within Native American reservations or within about 40 miles so Native Americans there's tremendous fear of a new wave of white colonialism where we steamroll over them because we need the medals without helping them build the infrastructure that allows them to benefit long term from producing those metals so from an environmental justice perspective there's a lot of real concern but again you take a step back and say what do we need to do in order to transition from our current energy infrastructure to one that is 100 electric where all of the electricity is generated only from renewable energy resources maybe all right so these are real issues and I'm not proposing we steamroll and extract I'm suggesting that the broader we need to have these really important conversations same thing for the Cobalt mine in Idaho it's on land considered sacred to indigenous communities and it sounds great to ban the mining here that's great PR they're great tweets we've taken this off the market we're not going to allow mining here and if you do that through an environmental justice lens you're also then saying a couple of things I'm fundamentally anti-renewable energy because I won't allow the mining to happen to make it or I am pro-white colonialism where we impose our will on African countries and Latin American countries and Asian countries and force them to mine what we want right either way it's not what I would choose so this is that map I asked you to imagine Native American communities are concerned but what I see is simply a lot of PR and political rhetoric without actually addressing the problem so two slides left and if I can figure out how to make my mouse work ah it we'll go to the next one oh there we go promised myself I wouldn't curse at all and that's only one and those who know me probably are shocked that I haven't cursed more right we've got a choice right we're literally at that point we've got a choice we have the recipe to make all of this happen we do we know how it needs to happen right what are our biggest challenges political cycles of two years and four years right lawyering up is a major problem 1960 United States there was one lawyer for every 650 of us now there's one for every 250 of us one third of our house of representatives are lawyers fifty percent of the Senate are lawyers it's way too many for me because what they know how to do is Sue and what we're seeing in real time that 10 years of Permitting is lawsuits it's not on the mining company's perspective it's all because we have groups that simultaneously want 100 renewable energy and simultaneously disallow any of the mining of the resources to make that reality possible so something has to give and I mentioned this concept in psychology of cognitive dissonance this is what we see we see it on this campus we see it in the school for environment sustainability we see it in the department of Earth and environmental Sciences we see everybody lined up for what sounds good what allows them to Signal some virtues a little bit more what makes for great tweets and I'm over in the other line saying but hey we need copper we need nickel like I'm not making this up where is it going to come from oh you don't want to mine it in Minnesota you want to force mining to happen in Zambia or in Colombia or in Brazil or in Thailand Okay then don't tell me you're an environmental justice Warrior because we have the potential to do this the United States has four percent of the world's population we consume 15 of the world's energy if we do it others will follow that's always been for the last 100 years what we've seen happening and we have the potential to do that now but I think there are too many people in the wrong line and we need to sidestep and we need to start advocating for what fundamentally controls the entire supply chain for all renewable energy which is the metals in the ground and in the United States we mine in a phenomenally clean way I'm not saying there's never the potential for environmental degradation I'm not saying that you're clearly altering the environment when you mine but our level of oversight and third-party Consultants etc etc etc we can do it better here than anywhere on the planet and we have to start letting it be done in order to achieve the goals that everybody wants thank you thank you Adam for uh wonderful Insight on presenting us that conundrum and maybe some

Channel: Adam Simon Natural Resources

Views: 18,062

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Id: O9X7nSz4SWs

Length: 63min 51sec (3831 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023