Eric Liu: I was working on a piece about how various federal agencies were racing to get things done before President Trump left office. One of the things that I saw was this surge in new applications for mining operations and spots across the United States. He says electric vehicles require something like six times as many metals as gas-powered cars, mainly to power their batteries. Liu: The existing mines just aren't producing nearly enough of these metals to satisfy the booming demand for these materials worldwide.
The adoption of electric cars has been hailed as an important step in curbing the use of fossil fuels and fighting climate change. There is a snag, however: such vehicles require around six times as many metals as their gasoline-powered counterparts.
A giant storehouse of the necessary resources sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But retrieving them may, in turn, badly damage the environment.
Guest: Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
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