Eric Liu: I knew that the electric vehicle revolution was driving huge shifts in our economy. But now power and money is going to be defined at least in part again by access to metals like these sea nodules, he says. "The story of seabed mining ... it's just one chapter in this transformation that we're living through," Liu says.
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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