[00:00:27] Speaker A: You are listening to Write on radio on KFAI 90.3 FM and streaming live on the web at KFAI.org I'm Eric Zimmerman. On tonight's program, Josh will be talking with Augustina Paglian about her new book, Raised to the Rise and Spread of Mass Education.
Paglian's work examines how the expansion of primary education in the west emerged not from democratic ideals, but from the state's desire to control its citizens.
Then in the last part of the hour, Josh also talks to the acclaimed journalist Vince Beiser about his new title, Power the Race for the Resources that Will Shape the Future. Beiser's research shows the powerful ways the metals we need to fuel technology and energy are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval and rising violence, and how we can do better. All of this and more. So stay tuned to Write on Radio.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: All right. Augustina, are you there?
[00:01:55] Speaker C: How are you?
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Doing well. How are you?
[00:01:58] Speaker C: Doing well, thank you.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: I'm going to do a brief introduction, then we can begin our discussion. Okay.
[00:02:03] Speaker C: Awesome.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: This evening I'm talking with Agustina Peglian about her new work, Raised to the Rise and Spread of Mass Education. Drawing on unparalleled evidence from two centuries of education provision in Europe and the Americas, and deploying rich data that captures the expansion of primary education and its characteristics, Raised to Obey offers a political history of primary schools that is both broad and deep. Agustina is a political science and public policy professor at the University of California, San Diego and a non resident fellow at the center for Global Development. She is internationally renowned for her expertise in how politics shapes and is shaped by education systems. Agostina, welcome to write on radio.
[00:02:50] Speaker C: Thank you, Josh. I'm thrilled to be here.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Your book argues that education systems historically aim at social control rather than reducing inequality. Could you elaborate on how this goal shaped early educational policies in Western societies?
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Sure. Let me begin by clarifying a little bit what I mean by social control. So the primary goal of mass education when it emerged in the west was to teach children to respect the state and its laws and essentially to form obedient citizens.
When you think of how education systems were designed to accomplish, all kinds of policies were used. The curriculum, for example, focused primarily on teaching a specific set of moral principles that particularly highlighted the importance of being obedient and respecting rules. The training of teachers and the certification of teachers also focused on instilling in teachers the moral values that they were supposed to then transmit to children. And also screening teachers based on whether they had the right moral character to be the Agents of the state in teaching obedience. Inspection policies were also adopted to have ICE in classrooms, to deploy inspectors who were checking whether schools were actually doing an effective job of instilling discipline, instilling obedience. And finally, there were also compulsory schooling laws that were passed because governments were concerned that if education focused on social control purposes, parents were not going to want to send their children to school. And so they instituted compulsory school schooling as a means to force parents to send their kids to school.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: In your research, what evidence did you find most compelling in linking state regulated education to efforts that maintain social order?
[00:04:52] Speaker C: You know, social control theories of mass education have been around for quite a while and they were dismissed several decades ago as being cynical interpretations of history or lacking in evidence. So I'm glad you're asking this question because I also used to think of these things, theories, as sort of conspiracy theories. There are many different pieces of evidence that changed my mind. But I will say that the most compelling is simply looking at what politicians said when they debated the design and the idea of creating a mass education system. They did not hide in any way that the goal of these systems was to convert unruly children into obedient citizens who had unquestioned respect for the state and its laws. So I think that that's their book has, as you mentioned earlier, a lot of statistical evidence, also all kinds of quantitative evidence. But I personally find that the most compelling is just hearing politicians in their own words say what was the reason why they developed these systems.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: I was debating if I should bring this up or not, but I mean, what are your. I think with someone, Trump's rhetoric, I know he has also talked about defunding the Department of Education in the United States due to. To concerns of federal overreach. I think in the classroom, I think. What was your response to that? Do you see that as an example of social control in the classroom?
[00:06:15] Speaker C: So let me first clarify that. While Trump has said that he wants to dismantle the Department of Education, he has also made it extremely clear that he plans to use the power of the federal government to shape the curriculum across the country. And what he has also made clear is that the goal of his efforts to shape the curriculum are to promote patriotic education, to instill a love for the United States, to instill respect and admiration toward existing political institutions. And so in this respect, everything that Trump has announced is no anomaly. It just fits this cross national pattern and a centuries old playbook of using education for social control purposes.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: So let's jump forward here. I guess another question I had here. Your work suggests that fear of internal threats plays a critical role in educational expansion. Could you discuss specific historical examples where this fear directly influenced policy decisions?
[00:07:15] Speaker C: Yes. And again, let me say something first about this point, which is that when you have internal threats against the status quo, that's what the book shows are the instances when governments become particularly fearful of the masses of their moral values, and therefore become more interested in putting children in schools to teach them that the status quo is actually okay.
Examples of this abound and the book is full of them. But for example, the first law requiring primary schooling in the world was in Prussia in 1763. And that was a law that was instituted in response to a series of peasant revolts that led the king at the time to conclude that the current policies that were in place to try to forge social order were insufficient and that what needed to happen was also to educate children to respect the king and his authority in the United States. In Massachusetts, Shays Rebellion in the 1780s also played a key role in triggering the first Massachusetts education law because that rebellion created anxiety among political elites about the unruly and the moral character of the masses and led them to come to an agreement that education, mass education, was really important for converting these undisciplined lower classes into obedient citizens and submissive. Also. These are again, the words that they used. That's why it's so compelling. It's just to read it in the words. Then throughout Latin America, in Argentina, in Chile, in Colombia, there are numerous examples where civil wars in which the masses participated in violence against the state. Those civil wars were key triggers of the creation of primary education systems and the expansion of primary education. So there's many different examples, but the common thread is that internal threats against the state's authority heighten elite sphere of the masses and then lead them to focus on education as a means of preventing dissent.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Let's talk a little further about this. What are some key milestones in the evolution of global primary education enrollment, do you think?
[00:09:40] Speaker C: There's a lot of different things that one could look at here in response to this question. I'd say just to give people a big picture, the two main things that states did to create mass education were first to pass a lot of education laws that regulated the curriculum, regulated who could become a teacher, and then the other thing that they also did was to construct schools to hire the teachers, and essentially to expand primary education. If you look at this history of the creation and expansion of primary education systems, Prussia led the way under an absolutist regime. Then the US followed and Canada as well, and continental Europe also followed. And then Latin America came after that. And finally, much later, you had Asia and Africa. So the west was the part of the world that paradoxically led the development of state regulated mass education for social control purposes, Even though today we associate it with maybe the autocracies in Asia and think of China as doing a lot of indoctrination. The idea of using education to indoctrinate came from the west or was at first implemented most forcefully in the West.
[00:10:57] Speaker B: What role did elites play in championing or opposing mass education? How did their motivations shift over time? Because I think when I first think about initially with recognition or sponsoring of primary education, I mean, like for the turn of the 19th century, I could see like big tycoons and building public institutions or libraries. But I think that attitude has changed over time.
[00:11:22] Speaker C: Yes, there has been some change. So at first it was really elites that were championing mass education because they had a conception of what mass education was that was completely different from our conception of mass education today. They thought mass education is equivalent to indoctrinating people for obedience. And so they were the ones that pushed forward. And precisely because of how they thought of mass education, you didn't really have many elites opposing it. They didn't think of mass education as something that could empower the masses. But over time, you did start seeing changes, particularly around World War II, new theories emerged that linked education with economic development, with reductions in income inequality. And so at that point, you start seeing changes in the kinds of arguments that elites are making. And you start seeing some elites actually say that they're going to expand education for promoting economic development or reducing poverty and inequality. Now what they say in this post war period isn't necessarily what they think, because there's also really interesting and in my view, compelling evidence that others have done that shows that even today, when you ask education policymakers what are the main goals of education, they think that docile citizens is a much more important goal than eradicating illiteracy, for example. So there has been some addition of new goals, but I think that the goals and the goal of indoctrination has changed much less than we might think.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Could you, could you explain the variations in educational reforms following key conflicts like such as France's civil unrest in the 19th century or Chile's internal struggles?
[00:13:07] Speaker C: Yes, and these were, as you point out, very different types of internal conflicts. In the case of France, it was rural riots, people who were hungry who were blaming the government for their hunger. And so they were destroying tax collection agencies, destroying granaries. In the case of Chile, it was a civil war in which people were upset about the level of central government intromission in provincial affairs. There was also anger at the intervention of the church in state matters. So the causes of these conflicts, the scope, there were a lot of different things that varied between France and Chile and other examples that I talk about in the book. But what you actually see is a common response, which is that central governments then respond to these protests by creating and expanding mass education systems with the goal of instilling in children the idea that respecting authority, respecting rules, and ultimately respecting the state is the most important thing that they need to learn.
There are variations. So there are some countries, for example, where the moral education that the state is imparting is religious. There's a very high component of religious doctrine in the teaching of moral principles, like you shouldn't steal, you shouldn't lie, you shouldn't cheat, you shouldn't kill. And in other countries, they have a moral education that is secular. It's not based on religious principles. But you do see consistently, after these internal conflicts, an emphasis on moral education.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: What role did political instability and elite anxiety concerning social order play into driving rural versus urban education efforts?
[00:15:00] Speaker C: So a lot of the internal conflicts and threats to the authority of the states that occurred often came from the rural areas, the ones that were farthest away from the capital. And what happened then was that the states then responded by primarily expanding primary education in those rural areas, not in the urban areas. And one of the things that they also thought very carefully is, well, the goal of this expansion of rural education is not to equip people with skills for industrialization. We're not trying to develop these backward areas economically. The goal again here is to convert these rural masses into obedient, civilized citizens. And so one of the things that states often did was to have different curricula for rural areas versus urban areas, precisely so that the children in rural areas weren't learning skills that could then be used for getting a job in the city. They didn't want them to move to work in a factory. They wanted to stay in the rural areas, to stay there contentently, and to respect the state's authority.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: How do national curriculums reflect the priorities of social control rather than skill development or critical thinking? And I was wondering if you could also talk about how democracies try to reconcile the tension between promoting critical thinking and maintaining social control through education.
[00:16:35] Speaker C: So let me start with the first one of how national curriculums, even today reflect social control priorities, more so than skill development or critical thinking. So you can see, for example, all of the emphasis that schools often plays on rote learning and memorization.
You can also see how there are all kinds of rules in school that kids have to comply with, even if a lot of those rules are arbitrary and completely questionable. But the point is for kids to learn that rules are there, that they are imposed by others, and that they need to respect them.
There's also all kinds of punishments and rewards for complying with rules that are there to induce kids to learn to comply. And punishment doesn't have to be physical abuse or hitting a kid. It can be simply humiliating a kid, making them feel bad in front of their peers and classmates for having talked without raising their hand or other forms of rule violation.
There's also a lot of emphasis, and this comes from some evidence that I gathered with a group of social scientists looking cross nationally at 160 countries. Most countries around the world, when they teach history, they focus on teaching a particular interpretation of historical events instead of exposing children to diverse viewpoints and diverse interpretations and letting them make up their own minds based on the evidence that they are provided with about which interpretation they find more compelling. So that's again an example of social control, as opposed to encouraging critical thinking.
Even the classroom setup is designed for highlighting the authority of the teacher, with the teacher standing in front, the kids sitting in desks. So there's all kinds of things. But to your question also about how do democracies reconcile promoting critical thinking and maintaining social control, what democracies have done is to allow critical thinking when they teach certain subjects like science. If you're learning photosynthesis, kids can ask, well, but why does it work that way? And why does it work that way? So if you're learning science or you're learning geography or some subjects, there's. Democracies allow more critical thinking in those subjects. But what they don't typically allow is for kids to question the moral and political values that justify the existence of democracy. So you are taught that voting is the most legitimate way to express your discontent and that violence is always wrong. And that's an example of indoctrination, because it's an example where that, as the word indoctrination indicates, according to the dictionary, kids are being taught to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. That's the definition of indoctrination in the dictionary. If you do not allow kids to question, but why is democracy the best. Why are elections the best way for choosing leaders? And why is violence always wrong?
Not allowing that critical thinking to happen in the classroom is a form of social control.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: So you discuss indoctrination as a primary motive for state regulated education.
How has this motive changed with economic or military motivations in different periods?
[00:20:02] Speaker C: So again, back to the, to the post war period. In the post war, with the context of the Cold War, you start seeing a lot of concerns about economic competitiveness and being able to claim that you are the economic superpower or the. And the military, military superpower. And so in that context, you start seeing, for example, the US moving away from its focus on patriotism and social control and suddenly noticing that the Soviet Union isn't just indoctrinating students, that they're also putting a lot of emphasis on teaching everyone strong scientific and technical skills. And so that changes a little bit the conversation among education policymakers in the US where they start talking about how well they need to catch up. They don't want to fall behind.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: According to your findings, how does indoctrination and democratic and authoritarian systems operate comparatively? How are they similar and different?
[00:21:01] Speaker C: So they are similar. This is incredibly interesting. Again, back to this data that we gathered from 160 countries. If you ask education experts, to what extent does the history curriculum focus on teaching a specific set of moral and political values that substantiate or justify a particular social and political order, you're going to see that their responses in autocracies and democracies are extremely similar. And across regimes, there is a very heavy emphasis on doing this. What differs very much between autocracies and democracies is which are the specific moral and political values that are being taught. So in the case of democracies, you can probably guess that the democracies, their education systems are teaching kids that democracy is the best system in the world. Whereas in autocracies, that's not what they teach primarily in history lessons or in other classes. And then the other big difference is not only in the content of the indoctrination, but also, as I said earlier about the room for critical thinking, that there's a little bit more room for kids questioning the things that they are taught, not so much when they're learning about politics and the existing political institutions, but more generally.
But even so, the other really interesting thing is that even if democracies allow more critical thinking than autocracies, when you look at how much room for critical thinking is there versus how much emphasis is there on teaching a particular set of moral and political values. Well, the latter is actually more prevalent than the encouragement of critical thinking.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: What do you tell critics who, who argue that emphasizing indoctrination overlooks education's emancipatory potential, or the historical evidence suggesting education has fostered social mobility and democratization in some context?
[00:23:03] Speaker C: So first, let me say for me that's not a criticism at all. Because one of the things that the book shows is that some of the moral education curricula that were put in place for social control purposes actually contained some elements that you could imagine. They inadvertently led to social mobility.
The other thing I'll also say is I'm living proof of the fact that education can empower people to live a meaningful, autonomous life. So I sympathize with that claim. But as a social scientist, my goal is to try to detect general patterns and to try to detect whether my experience with education as an empowering experience, whether that's the most common experience, or whether that's more an anomaly than the norm. And that's where I think the evidence becomes clear that if you look around the world, one third of kids who have four years of schooling cannot read a simple sentence. So that tells me that there is a massive failure on the part of education systems to do something extremely basic.
Likewise, in the United States, kids come into kindergarten with among high income kids, much higher literacy skills than low income kids, and schools fail to close those achievement gaps. So there are a lot of social scientific pieces of evidence that suggests that for most people, and particularly for low income people, schools are not delivering on their promise, even if they have for me. Right.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: How do you see the relationship between education inequality and stability evolving? Considering your research?
[00:24:51] Speaker C: That's an interesting question.
Let me think a little bit more about that.
So I think one possibility is for people to worry that if you don't use education for social control, that that's going to lead to more political instability, that in some ways you need to compromise, to do less effort to empower people and to promote social mobility for the sake of social cohesion, for the sake of social order. And I think the jury on that is actually still out. So I can imagine based on personal experience also how someone with very strong critical thinking skills might, based on their own reasoning capabilities, decide that they don't want to rebel against the state. So I think we often tend to assume that critical thinking is destabilizing when we don't actually have evidence that it is. It is a very common assumption, but we don't really know. And if you go back to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. I would hypothesize, again, this is for others to study, but I would hypothesize that the level of critical thinking skills among those who participated in the capital wasn't among the highest across the United States. So there is a question there, I think, for future people to study. Is it actually the case that critical thinking is destabilizing as most people fear?
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Okay, we got, I think enough time for one more question. I really want to ask you this. What lessons can policymakers today draw from the historical roots and I guess examples like the raid on the Capitol in January 2021 to address current challenges like inequality and the learning crisis and lacking critical thinking skills.
[00:26:47] Speaker C: So one of the key lessons is that education systems in democracies today, including in the United States, were either inherited or copied from absolutist education systems. Starting with the Prussian example, these systems were not conceived for the sake of making people develop or helping people develop the critical thinking skills that make democracy resilient. And so I think one of the key implications of the book is that both for the sake of democracy and for the sake of the economy, we need to completely rethink education systems.
This isn't about adding a subject or tweaking the way we teach civics education. This is about transforming education systems so as to emphasize critical thinking skills a lot more than we do today. And of course, basic skills that support social mobility as well.
The challenge that I think the book also identifies is that the challenge in order to transform this is not a policy challenge. It's not a technical challenge of how do we actually promote critical thinking? The challenge is much more political. How do you get governments who fear people who might have strong critical thinking skills? How do you get governments to actually adopt the policies that would lead to a transformation of education for the sake of promoting critical thinking?
That's all I have to say on that.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: I think it's a great place to leave off on that. This has been my time talking to Agostina Paglien, the author of Race to the Rise and Spread of Mass Education, available now from Princeton University Press. Augustina, thanks for being with us on the program.
[00:28:36] Speaker C: Thank you, Josh. I really enjoyed this.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: And now this KFAI is proud present.
[00:28:48] Speaker D: Lemon Bucket Orchestra at the Cedar Culture.
[00:28:51] Speaker B: Center on Thursday, December 5th.
[00:28:53] Speaker E: The Lemon Bucket Orchestra are Toronto's original Slavic Balkan plezmer party pumps. The multi award winning ensemble has been heralded as a groundbreaking genre bending phenomena by media and fans alike.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Open the Shell is local Ensemble Ukrainian Village Band.
[00:29:11] Speaker E: Tickets for the Lemon Bucket Orchestra can be found at the Cedar Cultural center website. Visit thecedar.org for more details.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Be very deliberate. My pacing.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: You are listening to KFAI 90.3 FM in Minneapolis and streaming on the
[email protected] I'm Eric Zimmerman and this is your what's Happening Calendar of literary events brought to you by the Rain Taxi Review of books on Saturday, November 30, 12 to 2pm at Once Upon a Crime in Minneapolis. Laura Childs, Victoria Laurie, Sam Chishida, Kristen Hussum and Karen Angstrom will sign their books on Sunday, December 1, 3 to 4pm at the Thinking Spot in Wayzata.
Jana Locke will present Somewhere in Minnesota on Tuesday, December 3, 7 to 8pm an online event, the Metropolitan Library Service Agency presents Club Book with Carla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of the Undocumented Americans and Catalina on Tuesday, December 3, 7 to 8pm at majors and Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis. Bruce White will present they Would Not Be the Enduring Struggle of the Mil Locks Band of Ojibwe to Keep the Reservation in conversation with Melanie Benjamin.
This has been your what's Happening Calendar of literary events brought to you by the Rain Taxi Review of Books. There are many other events you can check out at the Rain taxi
[email protected] and now this.
[00:31:20] Speaker B: Hello, Vince, can you hear me?
[00:31:31] Speaker D: Hey, Al.
[00:31:32] Speaker B: Okay. Yep.
Hi, Vince.
[00:31:35] Speaker D: Hey, how's it going?
[00:31:36] Speaker B: Doing good. I'm gonna do a brief introduction, then we can start our discussion.
[00:31:41] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: For the second part of the hour, I'm joined by Vince Beiser to discuss his new book, Power the Race for the Resources that Will Shape the Future. Beiser explores the Achilles heel of green power and digital technology that manufacturing computers, cell phones, electric cars and other technologies demand skyrocketing amounts of lithium, copper, cobalt and other materials. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals at enormous cost to people and the planet. Beiser is an award winning journalist and author. He has reported from 100 countries, states, provinces, kingdoms, occupied territories, no man's lands and disaster zones. Vince has exposed conditions in California's harshest prisons, trained with U.S. army soldiers, ridden with the first responders to natural disasters and hunted down other stories from around the world. Vince, welcome to Right on Radio.
[00:32:38] Speaker D: Thanks. It's great to be here.
[00:32:40] Speaker B: The first chapter of your book is called the Electrodigital Age. For our listening audience, could you describe what is the Electrodigital Age?
[00:32:51] Speaker D: Sure. The idea There is. We're really moving into a new era and it's going to be defined by three overlapping interlocking drivers. Number one, renewable energy. We're shifting away from fossil fuels and towards renewables like solar and wind. Number two, electric vehicles. Right. We're shifting again, part of the energy transition towards renewables, getting rid of fossil fuels, moving towards everything being run on electricity. And three is the digital technology that we all, you know, that's such an important part of all our lives that's, you know, making this conversation possible right now. So those three things taken together are going to absolutely transform how we do everything, how we get from place to place, how we heat our homes, how we power our civilization. But all of those things, all those three connected sets of technologies, they all depend on a basket of metals, which we're going to need billions of tons of these metals. And the concern is that we need to make this switch in order to stave off climate change, which is the biggest threat of all. But if we're not careful about how we do it, we're going to swap one set of problems for another.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: Yeah, so let's talk a bit more about that. You discussed the paradox of transition to renewables and electric vehicles while creating environmental and social.
Preventing. Creating environmental and. Sorry, preventing environmental and social damage. What are the most overlooked consequences of the transition, do you believe?
[00:34:28] Speaker D: So there's a whole range. I mean, in order to get the metals that we need, which is a whole. It's a, it's a collection of things that, you know, as you mentioned, lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, rare earths. These things come from many parts of the world.
But to get them right now, we are cutting. Rainforests are being cut to the ground in Indonesia, children are being put to work in mines. In Congo, a unique desert ecosystem in Chile is being threatened. Gangs of copper thieves are killing people in the streets of South African cities.
It's a whole range of things. Warlords are getting rich in Myanmar. Warlords are getting rich selling rare earths to China. And even one of Vladimir Putin's oligarch pals is making huge amounts of money selling metals to the rest of the world.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: You mentioned in your book that rare earths are among the most important of all the critical metals for the electoral digital age. The title Rare Earths, however, is somewhat of a misnomer. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that.
[00:35:35] Speaker D: Sure, yeah. It's such a weird one. Right, so rare earths are a set of 17. That term covers a set of 17 really obscure weird metals with names like neodymium and yttrium and terbium. They're way at the bot of the periodic table, if you remember your high school chemistry.
But in fact they're not, they're not earths at all. They're actually metals and they're not really rare. There's lots of them scattered throughout the Earth's crust.
The problem is they come, they're found in very, very small concentrations. So you have to dig up an awful lot of rock and or to get just a little bit of those so called rare earths.
And the reason that they're important, they're incredibly important to the whole electrodigital age. First of all, none of our electronics would work without rare earths. They all have sort of really super specialized uses that nothing else can do. Like the red in your screen when you're looking at your phone or your laptop. The red in the screen is created by a rare earth called europium. There's other rare earths that make the touchscreen work. Some other rare earths are used to help make the F35, the US military's most advanced fighter jet, work. Rare earths make the motors that make electric vehicles go on and on and on. They're these weird little elements that we had barely any use for 50 years ago and now we just absolutely cannot get enough of.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: You illustrate a vivid image of mining in California's Mountain Pass Mine in chapter three.
I was wondering if you could talk about what you learned about the environmental and human costs of rare earth extraction there.
[00:37:25] Speaker D: Sure.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, California, that mine, the Mountain Pass Mine in Southern California, it's out in the desert on the way between LA and Las Vegas. It was the world's biggest producer of rare earths for a very long time.
Then it closed down, basically because the entire industry, or almost the entire industry, shifted over to China. Just like so many of our other heavy industries, we basically offshored it.
But because it's so important, because, you know, rare earths have become so incredibly important in the last few years.
Some folks, a group of investors, bought that mine and are trying to revive it. They've brought it back online now. One of the reasons that it went out of business in the first place was because all the environmental damage that it created, it spilled. It was leaking huge amounts of radioactive water into the desert.
And the fines and the regulations around that were part of what drove it out of business and sent the industry to China where they just don't care about that stuff. As much so now it's kind of, you know, the damage is sort of out of sight, out of mind for us here. But in China, which is now far and away the world's biggest rare earth producer, the main area where they're producing rare earths, which is in an area called Inner Mongolia, it's one of the most polluted parts of the entire planet. There are lakes just absolutely filled with wreaking toxic waste. People living nearby have developed all kinds of terrible health conditions. Hair falling out, teeth falling out. It's a real, you know, it's really a nightmare. And the latest thing that's happening is even China has gotten tired of all the environmental damage, all the pollution that's created by rare earth mining. So they are also now outsourcing some of it to Myanmar, also known as Burma, the country right next door where there's lots of rare earths. And most of them are being mined by militias, basically by local warlords who just take control of an area, kick out whoever's living there, fill the mountainsides, just pump them full of chemicals, and then draw the rare earths out.
[00:39:36] Speaker B: What are the ethical implications of the global treasure hunt for resources, especially in developing regions? Is there any efforts to mitigate these impacts currently?
[00:39:47] Speaker D: Sure. Well, I mean, as you know, as you said, it's a real paradox, right, because we do need these things. We need these metals in order to build wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, all the rest of the infrastructure of renewable energy. Right? We've got to do that. We've got to get off fossil fuels to. To beat out climate change. So there's, you know, that's one ethical imperative. The other ethical imperative is, okay, but how can we do it without trashing the planet in the process, without exploiting and, you know, oppressing people in other countries or in this country for that matter?
And so there is, yeah, there is a lot of.
There is a lot of pushback in a lot of places there, you know, the local folks, indigenous groups in many places are really fighting hard against new mines opening up in places like Peru, they have huge copper mines there that have been shut down over and over and over again in the last couple of years by locals who are just like, no way. We don't want this mining in our backyard either.
And it's a real, it becomes a real balancing act, right? Because of course, you know, you can't argue with that, right?
[00:41:00] Speaker C: Who.
[00:41:01] Speaker D: Nobody wants a giant strip mine in their backyard. But at the same time, these metals have got to come from somewhere. And this is Going to sounds kind of crazy to environmentally minded folks here in the US or Canada where I live, but I really believe part of the answer is we should really be allowing more mining to happen in this country. There are loads and loads of metals here and it will cause damage. Mines inevitably cause harm, but mines in North America and in Western Europe, they're held to a much higher standard. Right. We have much stronger environmental regulations, labor standards, all the rest of it. So it means that, you know, if you really care about these issues, if you want to see if we, if you want to make sure we have the raw materials to build all the renewable energy we need and the electric cars that we need, and you're concerned about the unfairness of making all the costs fall on people in Zambia and Indonesia and wherever else, you should really think about taking a second look at allowing, at opening up or reopening some of the mines. Here in the United States, copper theft.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: Has been linked to violent crimes and social upheaval, particularly in South Africa.
Could you talk about what's driving this phenomenon?
[00:42:25] Speaker D: Yeah, this is one of the craziest things that I had no idea about until I started working on this book. But basically we need lots and lots of copper for the energy transition. We're going to have to mine more of it in the next 20 years than we have in all of human history. And we've been mining copper for thousands of years. So there's this huge demand for copper, which of course drives the price up. And when the price of anything goes up, basically people are more tempted to steal it. Right? Theft of it goes up. So this is happening all over the place. There's a wave of copper theft in the US and in Canada. But where it's really happening on an industrial scale is South Africa. And there you have heavily armed gangs that are just stealing on a massive scale electric cables, train equipment, you know, all the, all the pieces of the electric grid, basically, which are mostly made out of copper. Right. That's what power cables are made out of. So the result is that like in the city, in Johannesburg, one of the biggest cities in South Africa, parts of the city are blacked out every few days regularly because so much of the copper infrastructure is getting ripped up. Hospitals get shut down, train lines have been closed down completely, and people are getting killed over it because there's so much money in it. There's so many people doing it that, like I say, these gangs are armed. And when security guards or police try to get in their way, often they get gunned down.
[00:44:02] Speaker B: What strategies do you propose for minimizing the reliance on primary copper extraction while meeting the demands of the digital and energy transitions we're expected to have in the next 20 years?
[00:44:14] Speaker D: Yeah, that's a great question, because really, you know, I know I've been talking a lot of doom and gloom here, but there really are solutions. There are ways we can do this stuff better, and copper is a really good example.
So, and this kind of goes across the board, what I'm about to say, not just for copper, but really, to one extent or another, for all metals. Recycling, of course, is better than.
Than, you know, digging up raw materials and building something new. That said, recycling is not a complete solution all by itself. It also has its costs, right? Recycling is very energy intensive. It creates a lot of pollution, and it's often done on the backs of the poorest people on Earth. So, yes, we should be doing more recycling, but it's not going to save us all by itself. Better than recycling is to just continue to try to get more use out of the things that we already own instead of buying a new phone every year or a new laptop every couple of years. You know, if you can stretch that and just keep using the thing for longer or get it repaired rather than, rather than tossing it. But the number one thing that we as individuals, just you and I as consumers can do to really limit the damage that's caused by this whole shift to renewable energy is this.
If you can, don't buy a car, not even an electric one. All right? And I know that sounds. That's really hard pill to swallow in the United States and in Canada. And I'm not saying nobody should own a car. I'm not saying you're a terrible person if you own a car. I own a car, too.
But what I am saying is most people live, most Americans, most Canadians, most people in the world today live in cities, right? We live in dense urban areas where it's possible, with a little careful city planning, to live your life without needing a car or without needing so many cars, Right? If we can promote things like bicycling, public transit, getting around by foot, car sharing, all these solutions that are, we know about already, such that we don't need quite so many cars that will reduce our need for metals and our need for energy more than anything else we're talking about. I'll give you a quick example of how that can work from my own experience. So I used to live in Los Angeles with my wife and our two kids, and of course, we had two Cars there, right? Mom, dad, we each needed a car to get everywhere. A few years ago, we moved back to my hometown, Vancouver, Canada, and right away we were able to get rid of one of those cars. Why? Because Vancouver, the city has really put a lot of energy and effort into building up bicycle infrastructure so you can ride around safely, easily, decent public transit, all the rest of it. So the result is, you know, yeah, we still have a car, but now we only have. We only need one car. And I will tell you, it makes my life so much better. Not, you know, that's one less car that I've got to, you know, worry about parking and insuring and repairing and all the rest of it. It's a big losing a car, it's a big quality of life. Upgrade.
[00:47:33] Speaker B: The chapter Holding Power explores the critical role of batteries in the energy transition. What are some challenges of sourcing metals like nickel, cobalt, and lithium for battery production?
[00:47:47] Speaker D: Yeah, so that's a great question, because batteries are really kind of at the heart of it. They're the biggest consumers of just about all these metals that we're talking about. So, like you said, they're mostly made modern. The batteries in all of our electronics and in most electric vehicles as well are some version or another of lithium ion batteries. And those are mostly made with lithium, nickel and cobalt. There's other stuff in there, but those are the ones we're mostly concerned about. So lithium, the world's number one source, or one of the world's biggest sources of lithium, is a remote desert in northern Chile. And the concern there is there are these huge lithium mines there that suck up lots and lots of water from underground. And there are many scientists and many of the indigenous people living there who are really concerned that that's essentially drying out the desert. It's going to endanger everything that lives there. I mean, it is a desert, but it also has these really unique lagoons that are home to flamingos. There's other kinds of birds and wildlife that live there, and there's these indigenous communities that have been there for thousands of years. All of that is potentially imperiled by the lithium mining going on there.
Nickel. Like I said, the world's biggest supply of nickel comes from Indonesia, which that's just a new thing. In the last 10, 20 years, they've built up. They have huge amounts of nickel under the ground, and they've been moving very fast and very aggressively to start mining it and refining it.
Hundreds of square miles of rainforest have been bulldozed to the ground to mine that Lithium. And they've also built enormous industrial facilities to process the nickel, sorry, nickel, you know, once it's dug out of the ground, you got to melt it down and separate out the nickel from the rock and all that sort of thing. Those things are incredibly polluting. Just belching, you know, pollutants into the water, into the air, and then cobalt. Most famously of all, almost 70% of all the cobalt in the world comes from one country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Smack in the middle of Africa. It's one of the poorest, most corrupt, most miserable countries in the world. There's, you know, it's had countless civil wars over the last few decades.
Most people are living on, you know, two or three dollars a day. And hundreds of thousands of them are working in cobalt mines in the most appalling conditions you can imagine. No safety equipment, you know, just going down into these deep hand dug tunnels. Just a flashlight strapped onto their heads in flip flops and shorts, chipping out cobalt with hand tools. And perhaps most shocking of all, thousands of children are also working in these operations. Kids sometimes as young as seven years old working there.
All those things, all three of those things may very well have gone into the battery in the computer that you're talking to me on right now, or in your microphone that I can see right there, or any digital device that you can name and any electric car.
[00:51:02] Speaker B: Are there any potential breakthroughs in battery technology that could alleviate the dependence on conflict zones for rare earth metals?
[00:51:11] Speaker D: Yeah, there's some really interesting research that's going on and some, and some really promising developments around that. So there's another type of chemistry where you basically substitute the nickel and the cobalt in the battery for iron and phosphate. So they're called lithium iron phosphate batteries. You still need the lithium, but you get rid of the nickel and the cobalt.
They are not at all popular in this country yet because they're not quite as energy dense as lithium ion batteries, meaning you can't get quite as much of a charge, you can't go quite as far on a single charge with them. They've got other drawbacks and this and that. But almost half of all the new electric cars being sold in China today are using those lithium iron phosphate batteries. So I think those are definitely we're going to see more and more of those because they have a lot of advantages. Now, that said, you know, those things, great, we don't have to depend on Indonesian nickel or Congolese cobalt. However, like anything else, those things too have their own costs. So phosphates, for instance, we mine a lot of phosphates in the state of Florida, and people there are starting to get really concerned about the damage that phosphate mining is doing to farmlands and waterways in Florida. So I think at the end of the day, it's probably less harmful, it's less stressful on the earth than nickel mining. But the thing to bear in mind is just that everything has a cost. There's no silver bullet solutions to any of these issues.
The important thing is to just be trying to do, to minimize that damage, to limit the damage as much as we possibly can.
[00:53:01] Speaker B: You describe China's dominance and rare earth metals as a national security threat. I know you mentioned before that it would be beneficial for the US to open additional mining operations.
I was wondering if you could also speak to if Western countries could realistically reduce their dependency on these resources in other ways.
[00:53:24] Speaker D: Well, so there's a lot of work going into reducing our dependence on those sources and especially on China. So the main national security threat in all this comes from our dependence on China. So China, basically all these metals, everything we've been talking about, China dominates the entire supply chain. They dig a lot of these metals out of the ground in their own country. They own lots of foreign mines. And all these places I've been talking about, Indonesia, Congo, even in part of that rare earth mine in Southern California is partly owned by a Chinese company.
But no matter where those metals come out of the ground, almost all of them get sent to China for processing and refining. And then once they've been processed into, refined and refined into, into pure metals that can be made into those products, it's Chinese companies that take those metals and crank out the majority of the world's solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars. So China's got a real and incredible amount of leverage there. Not only economic leverage, but also geopolitical leverage if they choose to use it. And they have in the past. So back in 2010, China and Japan got into a kind of a diplomatic dispute over sort of maritime rights. And to punish Japan, China cut off supplies of rare earths to Japan. And Japan needs those rare earths for their consumer electronics industry.
So all of a sudden there was Japan. With no raw materials coming in for their number one industry, it sent shockwaves throughout the whole world economy. And it was really the thing that made policymakers, military leaders, corporate execs in the US all over the Western world really sit up and take notice and suddenly realize, like, holy smoke, China has really taken an incredibly powerful position Riyas and we should really start Doing something about it. That's something, actually, the Biden administration was putting a lot of money and energy into, was trying to build up more of a domestic supply chain for this stuff. And we'll see what happens when Trump takes office.
[00:55:44] Speaker B: I have more than 10 questions I wanted to ask you, but I only have time for one more.
[00:55:50] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: Looking forward.
[00:55:51] Speaker D: Hope I give you a good answer.
[00:55:54] Speaker B: Looking forward. How optimistic are you about humanity's ability to navigate the electrodigital age responsibly? What gives you hope, and what are you worried most about?
[00:56:06] Speaker D: You know, I have to say I'm pretty optimistic most of the time. Right. I mean, we're in a. We've got huge problems to confront, for sure, but there's a lot of. You know, there are a lot of people in lots of different places who are working on all this stuff in lots of really inventive and ingenious ways. And what I tell my kids is the human race, we're really good at creating problems, but we're also pretty good at creating solutions to them.
And the energy transition is actually happening a lot faster than most people realize. That switch to renewables, we don't really see it in the US So much because we're actually really behind the curve. But, you know, in China, they already get about half of their energy from renewable sources.
You know, about half their cars are electric vehicles. Europe, same thing. Even in this country, the switch is really happening. Solar will soon be the number one source of energy in the United States. So it's not happening as fast as I would like, but that switch is happening. So I think we've got a good shot at beating out at getting. Escaping the worst of climate change. And in the process, I do think we've got a good shot at also escaping the worst consequences of the shift to the electrode digital age. I'm not. Not guaranteeing it, but, you know, I think. I think we've got a reasonable shot.
[00:57:33] Speaker B: This has been my time talking with Vince Beiser about his new book, Power the Race for the Resources that Will Shape the Future, available now from Riverhead Books. Vince, thanks for being on the show.
[00:57:44] Speaker D: Hey, thanks for having me. Really enjoyed it.
[00:57:46] Speaker B: And now this.
[00:57:50] Speaker E: At kfai, we know that part of what's plentiful about the Thanksgiving holiday is the cornucopia of important decisions you have to make.
[00:57:57] Speaker D: Mmm. Turkey or ham?
[00:57:59] Speaker E: That's why we've developed this handy guide to help you with these critical choices.
[00:58:03] Speaker C: Mmm.
[00:58:04] Speaker D: Potatoes are stuffing.
[00:58:05] Speaker E: We can all use a little help to make sure that we're selecting the best options for our vegetables interests.
[00:58:10] Speaker C: Hmm. Pumpkin or pecan?
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[00:58:19] Speaker B: Hmm. Should I go to kfai.org and make a donation?
[00:58:23] Speaker E: The answer to all these questions is yes. See how simple that was. This has been a public service message from your friends at kfai. Non commercial community powered. It's all good radio.
[00:58:49] Speaker A: You have been listening to Write on Radio on KFAI 90.3 FM in Minneapolis and streaming live online at KFAI.org I'm Eric and we would like to thank Augustina Pag and Vince Beisner and all of our listeners. Without your support, KFAI would not be possible. Now stay tuned for Bonjour Minnesota.
