- The video discusses the importance of cobalt, particularly in relation to electric car batteries
- It highlights China's control over cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo
- The video also delves into the geopolitical implications of China's control over cobalt and its impact on the future of energy
- The video is sponsored by NordVPN and briefly discusses its benefits
- Overall, the video raises concerns about China's influence in the cobalt industry and its potential impact on the green energy revolution

- China is strategically controlling the cobalt market for electric vehicles
- Cobalt mining in China leads to worker exploitation and environmental harm
- Alternative battery technologies and improved recycling offer hope for a more sustainable future
- Investing in public transportation and addressing human suffering caused by mining are important considerations for a greener future

China is snatching up the key ingredient for EV batteries. 
Follow this link to get an exclusive deal with NordVPN: https://nordvpn.com/johnnyharris

Car batteries are the new blood diamonds, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Check out Cleo's new channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC415bOPUcGSamy543abLmRA

Big thanks to excellent reporting by the New York Times who did a deep dive into the human tragedy and exploitation in the DRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/world/china-congo-cobalt.html

Thank you to Guillaume Debrier and the International Peace Information Service (IPIS)

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- press - 
NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-states-legislation.html
NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007358968/covid-pandemic-us-response.html
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NPR Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1072164745

Is that 1 of those fancy coffee cups that stays warm?

That's my friend Cleo, who is a newly independent journalist making stuff on YouTube.

There aren't a lot of journalists slash YouTubers out there.

And now that there's another 1, I'm gonna ask for her help.

It's this giant country in Central Africa that used to be called Zaire.

And what's crazy about this that I've never seen before is if you map all of the mines in Congo, it looks like this.

It's a thing that used to not be important at all, but it's now very important.

And that's what I'm like sort of fixating on right here.

These are cobalt mines and 15 of them are run by China.

But wait, this isn't another just China moves into Africa story.

made a video on that, this story feels bigger.

Like We're going through some shift in how we make and use energy.

We are going to transition this country into the future.

Which means we're using new materials, new materials like cobalt.

So the question is, who's going to control these new valuable minerals in the future, and how will they use that control?

Oh, because cobalt is in electric car batteries and a bunch of

Yes, bingo, electric car batteries, the thing that everyone is racing to figure out and make more of.

I mean, look at this chart of the demand for EVs over time.

So the reason I'm showing you all of this is because you're a technology person.

You think about this stuff and you tend to have a more sort of optimistic view than I do on a lot of the future.

And I kind of want that perspective here.

Because what I see here is just another instance of like a big superpower China racing into an underdeveloped country to steal its resources so that it can control the supply chain.

And to be honest, I thought the clean energy revolution would look, I don't know, different.

I think that there's a world in which there's a green energy revolution that doesn't look like the same old story of all the other fossil fuels and minerals that we've mined before.

I don't think it's gonna be easy, but I think there are ways to pull it off.

I wanna show you what I've learned here on Cobalt because I've sort of been down a rabbit hole on the cobalt China situation.

And then I want to like have a discussion about what this means for the future of energy.

That children were mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC.

Cobalt is 1 of the world's most coveted resources.

Its value has nearly tripled over the past year.

This most precious of minerals is often extracted and sorted by tiny.

the cobalt and sold it mainly to 1 Chinese company.

Okay hold on 1 second I need to thank today's sponsor who is NordVPN.

A VPN is a tool that allows you to connect to the internet, but not through the place that you're at.

You can do it through a different country.

Well I use NordVPN when I'm traveling, when I'm in different countries and I want my internet connection to route through the United States so that my email and all my like logins don't think I'm like someone from a different country trying to log into my stuff.

But I also use it when I'm in the United States and want to log in via other countries so I can access way more content, way more stuff that I don't have access to in the U S but I do if I connect through Britain.

Nord VPN is a very easy, smooth, quick way of doing all of this.

Nord also has a major focus on security and encryption so that your internet connection is always secure.

Clicking that link supports this channel, but it also gets you an exclusive deal.

Oh, and if you decide that it's not useful to you for any reason, within 30 days you can get all of your money back.

Go see if this can expand your entertainment options, help you connect to the internet more securely, et cetera.

Thank you NordVPN for sponsoring this video.

So first let's understand what cobalt is.

It's this blue mineral that's become really important in the past few years.

I mean, just look at the price of cobalt since 2010.

It's like popped off in these last few years because of 1 thing.

Electric cars are expected to double the world's demand for cobalt by the year 2025.

I want to continue to explain cobalt in China and all of that, But like first we have to understand the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this massive country in the middle of Africa that honestly should be 1 of the richest countries on earth because it is sitting on top of so many valuable resources.

Unfortunately, this is a place that for centuries has not been able to actually take advantage of this wealth because it has been pillaged by outsiders.

Whether that's the people being literally stolen and shipped across the Atlantic as forced labor, or this brutal Belgian king who came in and forced the Congolese people to work to harvest rubber, or more recently the blood diamond rush.

I mean this place has been pillaged for years because of its resources.

The new hot commodity is not rubber or diamonds.

This blue mineral that used to be just like for making ceramics turn blue.

But now it has a really useful purpose in the growing world of electric vehicles.

So I know something about how electric car batteries are made.

I kind of know the things that go into them.

How did a substance that made ceramics blue end up being so important to electric car batteries?

Well, at first, lithium is like the main ingredient and like that was the most important.

But as more and more car companies are trying to make their cars go longer and further without exploding, Cobalt is this amazing material that helps regulate the heat and volatility of an EV.

So Cobalt is super important for electric cars to be able to go long distances without needing a recharge or exploding.

We're in this phase where every car company is competing on these sort of nuanced marginal improvements.

Like my car can go 400 kilometers, mine can go 410 and so cobalt is becoming more and more important for these long-range features that are becoming important in this like cutthroat competition.

Turns out that the Congo has 70% of the world's cobalt.

Like I'm not kidding when I say this place is like resource rich.

So this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, but guess who read the tea leaves like 20 years ago and started investing in cobalt mines in the Congo?

The Democratic Republic of Congo struck a big deal with Beijing.

Chinese traders here bought all the cobalt and sold it

This is where I start to get pessimistic about the whole green energy revolution and let me tell you why.

I made this video a while back about how China has been rushing into Africa to build up a bunch of infrastructure and to win the hearts of African nations, but also to kind of assert control and leverage over them.

But as a part of all of this Chinese investment into Africa, China has been pouring loads of money into mines, specifically focusing on the DRC, where all these minerals are.

They set up all of these mines and started mining and processing cobalt.

If you look at a chart of EV demand, it goes way up in the 2000s.

Why would China show up and start mining cobalt if it wasn't particularly valuable yet?

Yeah, and that's a really important question and the answer just sort of blew my mind.

The first one's easy, which is that cobalt became useful for other things like cell phone batteries and things like that, so there already was sort of like some nascent demand there.

But it's also because of how China's economy works.

Because China's a communist country where the state and the economy are intertwined, they have different incentives than the capitalist West.

Like in our economy, we have independent corporations who focus on delivering short-term profits to shareholders.

They can say, like, in 20 years, we think that this is gonna be really valuable, so we're gonna pour tons of money into this because we don't need to deliver profits next quarter.

So it gives them this unique ability to make big bets that could potentially be huge.

And in this case, it was the absolute best bet that could have made.

So all of this explains why China controls 15 out of the 19 cobalt mines in the DRC.

Okay, so you got electric vehicle demand going up, cobalt is necessary for electric vehicles,

you've got China with their foresight buying up all of these mines in the Congo to control the supply of cobalt which we're going to need for EVs.

And this gets into the strategy and the geopolitics of all of this.

There's this 1 quote from an expert that Politico interviewed.

He says that China is not processing all of that cobalt to export it to the United States to support your electric vehicle revolution.

They're going to make cheap cars themselves.

And the best that you can hope for is that they'll export those cheap cars to you.

Like, it's just so clear that like they're doing this to control what they see as a massive burgeoning market that they wanna have a corner on and they're doing it.

And here we go with why I feel so disappointed as I learn about all of this.

Like here you have China racing to control this valuable mineral so that they can have leverage and power as the world transitions to cleaner energy.

Oh, and not to mention that as China shows up and does all of this cobalt mining, you'll see no regard for worker safety, you'll see super dangerous mines, you'll see children doing backbreaking work, you have people routinely dying on the job.

And perhaps the biggest contradiction of all is that this is a finite resource once again.

Oh and the process of mining and refining this stuff is the same old story of deforestation, polluted rivers, and just general exploitation.

I mean I thought the sustainable green revolution was going to be like clean and just for people.

I thought electric cars would actually mean a cleaner way of doing business, like a cleaner future.

But instead we're seeing the same old earth destroying great power resource race that got us here in the first place.

I just, this has like gotten me really worked up and I'm ready to chill out now.

When I used to imagine a clean energy future, I had this image in my head, right, of That moment in every sci-fi where they go like, once we lived in harmony.

And there's Wakanda and there's that 1 Chobani ad where everyone is using technology and living in a beautiful farm.

Here we are in the real world where, right now, it totally is the same old story of exploitation and harm to the environment in different ways and harm to people.

I think 1 thing that's important to realize is that when we talk about a cleaner future, we're specifically talking about less CO2.

And so though it conjures up all of these images of clean in other ways, it's on us to do that also.

If there's nothing about the technology, then inherently we'll bring that about.

The first is we can change the kinds of batteries that we're using.

There's a lot of development in new kinds of batteries.

1 of them is a lithium iron battery, not a lithium ion battery, there's an extra R in there, and that battery uses different kinds of minerals.

That might help this specific example, but the reality is that most of these minerals have their own stories of exploitation, so it's not...

So here's where I start to feel pretty optimistic.

There's a big difference between fossil fuels and minerals.

You're right that the difference between electric vehicles and gas combustion vehicles is that 1 uses fossil fuels and the other, we're swapping out fossil fuels for minerals.

But there's a big difference between fossil fuels and minerals.

Namely, fossil fuels are being incinerated every time that we drive.

If we're using more minerals to power our cars, we also have the opportunity to get a lot better at recycling.

This is end-of-life recycling rates for select metals in electric car batteries.

Oh, so we're already recycling a lot of these materials, including cobalt.

And the other thing to keep in mind here is you don't need to recycle these minerals and metals in cars themselves.

You could have a clean energy future where we're recycling metals and minerals from batteries that store wind and solar energy into electric cars that are then re-recycled back out into other forms of storage and batteries.

Yeah, that is a like optimistic view of batteries because it just feels so finite But if like the lifespan is dramatically higher like that becomes a much more useful and less resource intensive Proposition

There's also 1 more possibility and I think that people will call me a little bit pie in the sky here but I'm okay with that.

I think it's possible that it may not just be about fixing the problem with cars but also about fixing the problem of cars.

There's a high-tech version of this where self-driving cars there's some research and speculation that they might reduce the amount of cars that we're using total.

There's also a lower tech version of this where we just invest more in public transport.

That might sound unsexy But it really does seem to me like the most promising option.

I think also if you zoom out for a second and think about why we care about climate change, yes we care about animals and we care about the planet itself, but we also care a lot about human suffering.

1 of the reasons why so many people care about climate change is because it will cause human suffering, it already is.

And so if you take this story and you look at the human suffering caused by mining and you then say, oh we're not gonna try and solve this problem, we're just what, gonna let more climate change happen?

We have to solve these things at the same time because both will will hurt more people basically.

I think that's a I think if there's like 2 major takeaways that I take from from your research into this it's like number 1 a greener future is not inherently a cleaner, more idealistic happy future.

It just is like a less CO2 future, which is like, again, obvious.

It's like so obvious when you say it like that and make that differentiation, but like I had those so deeply bound together.

But I think the more important idea is like even though I have a pessimistic view of like great power rivalry, there's not an option here.

Like There's no scenario in which throwing up my hands and being like, the world's F'd is like gonna do anything.

And it's like, in fact it's the easier way out in a lot of ways.

And so it's good to know that there is real work being done to try to solve this, and that it's not just like bound to go down the same route.

In my mind, this story isn't a cleaner future is just as bad.

It's a cleaner future is a cleaner future with problems that we still have to solve.


Speaker 0: Hey. Is that 1 of those fancy coffee cups that stays warm?

Speaker 1: It heats it from the bottom.

Speaker 0: That's my friend Cleo, who is a newly independent journalist making stuff on YouTube.

Speaker 1: I'm going to call it, huge if true.

Speaker 0: There aren't a lot of journalists slash YouTubers out there. And now that there's another 1, I'm gonna ask for her help. Okay, so I wanna show you a map. Do you see this map? Yes.

This is the Congo. It's this giant country in Central Africa that used to be called Zaire. And what's crazy about this that I've never seen before is if you map all of the mines in Congo, it looks like this. Wow. And all of these are the

Speaker 1: cobalt mines. Cobalt.

Speaker 0: Cobalt, yes, cobalt. It's a thing that used to not be important at all, but it's now very important. And that's what I'm like sort of fixating on right here. These are cobalt mines and 15 of them are run by China.

Speaker 1: I know where this is going.

Speaker 0: But wait, this isn't another just China moves into Africa story.

Speaker 1: If you

Speaker 0: made a video on that, this story feels bigger. Like We're going through some shift in how we make and use energy.

Speaker 1: We are going to transition this country into the future.

Speaker 0: Which means we're using new materials, new materials like cobalt. So the question is, who's going to control these new valuable minerals in the future, and how will they use that control?

Speaker 1: Oh, because cobalt is in electric car batteries and a bunch of

Speaker 0: other stuff? Yes, bingo, electric car batteries, the thing that everyone is racing to figure out and make more of. I mean, look at this chart of the demand for EVs over time. Like it's just exploding. So the reason I'm showing you all of this is because you're a technology person.

You think about this stuff and you tend to have a more sort of optimistic view than I do on a lot of the future. And I kind of want that perspective here. Because what I see here is just another instance of like a big superpower China racing into an underdeveloped country to steal its resources so that it can control the supply chain. And to be honest, I thought the clean energy revolution would look, I don't know, different. Different than this.

Speaker 1: I really do think that it can. I think that there's a world in which there's a green energy revolution that doesn't look like the same old story of all the other fossil fuels and minerals that we've mined before. I don't think it's gonna be easy, but I think there are ways to pull it off. I like your

Speaker 0: optimism. Well, let's get into it. I wanna show you what I've learned here on Cobalt because I've sort of been down a rabbit hole on the cobalt China situation. And then I want to like have a discussion about what this means for the future of energy.

Speaker 2: That's it. That children were mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC.

Speaker 1: Cobalt is 1 of the world's most coveted resources. Its value has nearly tripled over the past year.

Speaker 2: This most precious of minerals is often extracted and sorted by tiny.

Speaker 3: The Chinese traders here bought all

Speaker 2: the cobalt and sold it mainly to 1 Chinese company.

Speaker 0: Okay hold on 1 second I need to thank today's sponsor who is NordVPN. A VPN is a tool that allows you to connect to the internet, but not through the place that you're at. You can do it through a different country. Why would you want to do this? Well I use NordVPN when I'm traveling, when I'm in different countries and I want my internet connection to route through the United States so that my email and all my like logins don't think I'm like someone from a different country trying to log into my stuff.

But I also use it when I'm in the United States and want to log in via other countries so I can access way more content, way more stuff that I don't have access to in the U S but I do if I connect through Britain. Nord VPN is a very easy, smooth, quick way of doing all of this. Nord also has a major focus on security and encryption so that your internet connection is always secure. Oh, and it doesn't cost very much money. There's a link in my description.

It's nordvpm.com. Clicking that link supports this channel, but it also gets you an exclusive deal. Oh, and if you decide that it's not useful to you for any reason, within 30 days you can get all of your money back. So go try it out. Go see if this can expand your entertainment options, help you connect to the internet more securely, et cetera.

Thank you NordVPN for sponsoring this video. Let's get back to it. So first let's understand what cobalt is. It's this blue mineral that's become really important in the past few years. I mean, just look at the price of cobalt since 2010.

It's like popped off in these last few years because of 1 thing.

Speaker 2: Electric cars are expected to double the world's demand for cobalt by the year 2025.

Speaker 0: I want to continue to explain cobalt in China and all of that, But like first we have to understand the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this massive country in the middle of Africa that honestly should be 1 of the richest countries on earth because it is sitting on top of so many valuable resources. Unfortunately, this is a place that for centuries has not been able to actually take advantage of this wealth because it has been pillaged by outsiders. Whether that's the people being literally stolen and shipped across the Atlantic as forced labor, or this brutal Belgian king who came in and forced the Congolese people to work to harvest rubber, or more recently the blood diamond rush. I mean this place has been pillaged for years because of its resources. So here we are in 2022.

The new hot commodity is not rubber or diamonds. It's cobalt. This blue mineral that used to be just like for making ceramics turn blue. Like that's what it was useful for. But now it has a really useful purpose in the growing world of electric vehicles.

Speaker 2: Electric vehicles.

Speaker 0: A lot of people love Tesla. This is the EV sales forecast.

Speaker 2: Electric vehicles are the future.

Speaker 1: So I know something about how electric car batteries are made. I kind of know the things that go into them. How did a substance that made ceramics blue end up being so important to electric car batteries?

Speaker 0: Well, at first, lithium is like the main ingredient and like that was the most important. But as more and more car companies are trying to make their cars go longer and further without exploding, Cobalt is this amazing material that helps regulate the heat and volatility of an EV.

Speaker 1: So Cobalt is super important for electric cars to be able to go long distances without needing a recharge or exploding.

Speaker 0: Absolutely. We're in this phase where every car company is competing on these sort of nuanced marginal improvements. Like my car can go 400 kilometers, mine can go 410 and so cobalt is becoming more and more important for these long-range features that are becoming important in this like cutthroat competition. Turns out that the Congo has 70% of the world's cobalt. Like I'm not kidding when I say this place is like resource rich.

You're rich. So this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, but guess who read the tea leaves like 20 years ago and started investing in cobalt mines in the Congo? China.

Speaker 1: China.

Speaker 0: Yes, obviously. China. The Democratic Republic of Congo struck a big deal with Beijing.

Speaker 3: Chinese traders here bought all the cobalt and sold it

Speaker 2: mainly to 1 Chinese company.

Speaker 0: This is where I start to get pessimistic about the whole green energy revolution and let me tell you why. I made this video a while back about how China has been rushing into Africa to build up a bunch of infrastructure and to win the hearts of African nations, but also to kind of assert control and leverage over them. But as a part of all of this Chinese investment into Africa, China has been pouring loads of money into mines, specifically focusing on the DRC, where all these minerals are. And again, this is like the early 2000s. They set up all of these mines and started mining and processing cobalt.

Speaker 1: If you look at a chart of EV demand, it goes way up in the 2000s. How did they know? Why would China show up and start mining cobalt if it wasn't particularly valuable yet?

Speaker 0: Yeah, and that's a really important question and the answer just sort of blew my mind. The first one's easy, which is that cobalt became useful for other things like cell phone batteries and things like that, so there already was sort of like some nascent demand there. But it's also because of how China's economy works. Because China's a communist country where the state and the economy are intertwined, they have different incentives than the capitalist West. Like in our economy, we have independent corporations who focus on delivering short-term profits to shareholders.

In China, they can take long-term bets. They can say, like, in 20 years, we think that this is gonna be really valuable, so we're gonna pour tons of money into this because we don't need to deliver profits next quarter. We can deliver profits in 20 years. So it gives them this unique ability to make big bets that could potentially be huge. And in this case, it was the absolute best bet that could have made.

We hit the jackpot here. So all of this explains why China controls 15 out of the 19 cobalt mines in the DRC.

Speaker 1: Okay, so you got electric vehicle demand going up, cobalt is necessary for electric vehicles,

Speaker 0: and

Speaker 1: you've got China with their foresight buying up all of these mines in the Congo to control the supply of cobalt which we're going to need for EVs.

Speaker 0: Yes, that is exactly right. And this gets into the strategy and the geopolitics of all of this. There's this 1 quote from an expert that Politico interviewed. He says that China is not processing all of that cobalt to export it to the United States to support your electric vehicle revolution. They're going to make cheap cars themselves.

And the best that you can hope for is that they'll export those cheap cars to you. Like, it's just so clear that like they're doing this to control what they see as a massive burgeoning market that they wanna have a corner on and they're doing it. And here we go with why I feel so disappointed as I learn about all of this. Like here you have China racing to control this valuable mineral so that they can have leverage and power as the world transitions to cleaner energy. Oh, and not to mention that as China shows up and does all of this cobalt mining, you'll see no regard for worker safety, you'll see super dangerous mines, you'll see children doing backbreaking work, you have people routinely dying on the job.

And perhaps the biggest contradiction of all is that this is a finite resource once again. Oh and the process of mining and refining this stuff is the same old story of deforestation, polluted rivers, and just general exploitation. I mean I thought the sustainable green revolution was going to be like clean and just for people. I thought electric cars would actually mean a cleaner way of doing business, like a cleaner future. But instead we're seeing the same old earth destroying great power resource race that got us here in the first place.

You good? Yeah, my rant is over. I'm sorry. I just, this has like gotten me really worked up and I'm ready to chill out now.

Speaker 1: We need to kill. When I used to imagine a clean energy future, I had this image in my head, right, of That moment in every sci-fi where they go like, once we lived in harmony.

Speaker 0: People lived in harmony.

Speaker 1: And there's Wakanda and there's that 1 Chobani ad where everyone is using technology and living in a beautiful farm. I know you. Record scratch, Fritz Bergen. Here we are in the real world where, right now, it totally is the same old story of exploitation and harm to the environment in different ways and harm to people. I think 1 thing that's important to realize is that when we talk about a cleaner future, we're specifically talking about less CO2.

And so though it conjures up all of these images of clean in other ways, it's on us to do that also. If there's nothing about the technology, then inherently we'll bring that about. Oh dear, what can we do? We have a few things that we can do. The first is we can change the kinds of batteries that we're using.

There's a lot of development in new kinds of batteries. 1 of them is a lithium iron battery, not a lithium ion battery, there's an extra R in there, and that battery uses different kinds of minerals. It doesn't use any cobalt. That might help this specific example, but the reality is that most of these minerals have their own stories of exploitation, so it's not... It's not great.

So here's where I start to feel pretty optimistic. There's a big difference between fossil fuels and minerals. You're right that the difference between electric vehicles and gas combustion vehicles is that 1 uses fossil fuels and the other, we're swapping out fossil fuels for minerals. But there's a big difference between fossil fuels and minerals. Namely, fossil fuels are being incinerated every time that we drive.

If we're using more minerals to power our cars, we also have the opportunity to get a lot better at recycling. This shows how much we already recycle. This is end-of-life recycling rates for select metals in electric car batteries.

Speaker 0: Oh, so we're already recycling a lot of these materials, including cobalt. Like it's almost 40%.

Speaker 1: Yes. And the other thing to keep in mind here is you don't need to recycle these minerals and metals in cars themselves. You could have a clean energy future where we're recycling metals and minerals from batteries that store wind and solar energy into electric cars that are then re-recycled back out into other forms of storage and batteries.

Speaker 0: Interesting. Okay, wow. Yeah, that is a like optimistic view of batteries because it just feels so finite But if like the lifespan is dramatically higher like that becomes a much more useful and less resource intensive Proposition

Speaker 1: There's also 1 more possibility and I think that people will call me a little bit pie in the sky here but I'm okay with that. I think it's possible that it may not just be about fixing the problem with cars but also about fixing the problem of cars. There's a high-tech version of this where self-driving cars there's some research and speculation that they might reduce the amount of cars that we're using total. There's also a lower tech version of this where we just invest more in public transport. That might sound unsexy But it really does seem to me like the most promising option.

I think also if you zoom out for a second and think about why we care about climate change, yes we care about animals and we care about the planet itself, but we also care a lot about human suffering. 1 of the reasons why so many people care about climate change is because it will cause human suffering, it already is. And so if you take this story and you look at the human suffering caused by mining and you then say, oh we're not gonna try and solve this problem, we're just what, gonna let more climate change happen? We have to solve these things at the same time because both will will hurt more people basically.

Speaker 0: Yeah that's a really good point. I think that's a I think if there's like 2 major takeaways that I take from from your research into this it's like number 1 a greener future is not inherently a cleaner, more idealistic happy future. It just is like a less CO2 future, which is like, again, obvious. It's like so obvious when you say it like that and make that differentiation, but like I had those so deeply bound together. But I think the more important idea is like even though I have a pessimistic view of like great power rivalry, there's not an option here.

Like There's no scenario in which throwing up my hands and being like, the world's F'd is like gonna do anything. And it's like, in fact it's the easier way out in a lot of ways. And so it's good to know that there is real work being done to try to solve this, and that it's not just like bound to go down the same route.

Speaker 1: In my mind, this story isn't a cleaner future is just as bad. It's a cleaner future is a cleaner future with problems that we still have to solve.

See all Johnny Harris transcripts on Youtube

The Dark Side of Electric Cars