The Road to Decarbonisation: Urban Mobility and EV Supply Chains with Lina Fedirko

Hi everyone, Tom Raftery here with another episode of the Climate Confident Podcast. This time, I'm joined by Lina Fedirko, Associate Director on the Road Transportation team at ClimateWorks Foundation. Lina dives deep into the complexities of decarbonising road transportation and highlights innovative urban mobility solutions, like congestion pricing and low emission zones, that cities are adopting globally.

We also explore the critical role of responsible mineral supply chains in the energy transition. Lina explains how sustainable practices in mineral extraction and recycling are essential to support the growing demand for EVs and renewables. She shares fascinating insights on how policy, behaviour change, and strategic collaborations can drive a cleaner, greener future.

Tune in to understand the multifaceted challenges and opportunities in creating a sustainable transportation system and the importance of a holistic approach to managing mineral resources. Whether you're a policy wonk, an EV enthusiast, or just curious about sustainable practices, this episode offers valuable takeaways for everyone.

Transcript

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I think I would like to first preface by saying that there's a lot that cities can do to manage traffic and pollution. And unfortunately, the things that are the most effective tend to be the most politically challenging. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Climate Confident podcast, the number one podcast showcasing best practices in climate emission reductions and removals. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 179 of the Climate Confident podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, and before we kick off today's show, I want to take a brief moment to express my gratitude to all of this podcast's amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping the podcast going, and I'm really grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community like-minded individuals who are passionate about climate. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable with option starting as low as just three euros or dollars a month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee and your support would make a huge difference in keeping the show going strong. To become a supporter, simply click on the supporting and the show notes of this, or any episode or visit tiny url.com/climate pod. Now in today's episode. I'm talking to Lina from climate works. I'm going to be talking all things EV. And in coming weeks, I'll be talking to Larry Seltzer from the conservation fund. Elizabeth Thompson from visions 2030, and Gagen Dillon from Synop. So some great episodes there to look forward to. Do not touch that dial. Okay. Now back to today's episode. And I mentioned, I've talking to Lina. Lina welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Tom. I am Lina Fedirko. I'm an Associate Director on the Road Transportation team at Climate Works Foundation. Here at Climate Works, we focus a lot on global decarbonization of greenhouse gas emissions across energy sectors. I specifically working on the road transportation team have spent a lot of years focusing on decarbonizing road transportation across all modes. And nowadays I lead two of our initiatives here at Climate Works, one focusing on EV battery supply chain sustainability angle. And then the other one focusing on minerals for the energy transition, which means that nowadays, I spend a lot of my time thinking about the physical material needs of the energy transition. And the last thing I would say is that my backgrounds in transportation policy and a lot of my job entails talking and learning from partners across the globe about these issues. Okay. And how did you get into all this? Oof, really good question. I actually, This is a, this is a bit of a long story, but I'll, I'll give you the abbreviated version. I started my, my journey in the art world, actually. I studied design for undergrad, obviously. And I very quickly became discouraged with the material use that I saw across the design spaces and wanted to do something different and better for the world. And so I had this idea to to go to grad school for policy, because I thought that if I had a policy degree, I would be able to tell these design companies how to design better products, how to think about designing not for waste, but for recycling. And my one of my very first courses in grad school was on climate change. And then I was like, okay, there's nothing else more important that I could be doing other than climate climate change kind of policy. And it sort of changed the trajectory of my life and work. And I got into transportation policy through a mentor of mine at grad school that was very passionate about this topic and sort of pulled me in and let me see the, the wonders of all the modes and what you could do with them. Nice, nice, nice. And in the transportation area, it's, I mean, it's a very broad area. Is there any particular modes of transportation that you're looking at? Are you looking across all modes of transportation? Great question. So my expertise in the area actually started looking exclusively at urban transportation and urban policy that supports high occupancy movement of people and goods across cities. And so that really focused on public transportation non motorized modes of transportation. It also looked into land use, the way land use can be used for public transportation systems to be profitable, so on and so forth. I did a little bit of work on that in New York, in New York area, and then it wasn't until I started working with ClimateWorks, the road transportation team, that I started to broaden my sort of expertise and, and purview in looking into national level and global transportation policy. And so once I switched from more local to state, and national level, I really started to look into policies that would influence the shift from internal combustion vehicles to EVs. We also looked into did a lot of work looking into fuel efficiency standards and sort of how do we, how do we get the transportation modes off of oil? And so, because the largest portion of road transportation emissions comes from trucks and passenger light duty vehicles, it was sort of the main focus that we've had on the road transportation team. Over the years we have also engaged in looking at decarbonisation of public transportation, non motorized modes. And so we've really had our hands in across the modes, but I would say the focus has been more where there's more emissions to be saved. Okay. But not for example shipping, not aviation not rails, specifically road. So very good question. I should have actually explained that we have two other team that cover the other modes. So we cover land. We have a team, an aviation team that covers air travel, and we also have a maritime shipping team that specifically looks into decarbonizing ports, ships, and all of those things. So. Lina, cities around the world are struggling with traffic congestion and pollution. What are some innovative solutions for urban mobility that you've seen have a real impact? Great question. I think I would like to first preface by saying that there's a lot that cities can do to manage traffic and pollution. And unfortunately, the things that are the most effective tend to be the most politically challenging. So, Kathy Hochul has seen that recently, hasn't she? Mm yes. Mm on the New York politics of congestion pricing, which is so, so, so disappointing to see. And that is exactly the policy lever that I was going to speak about. One of the most effective ways to manage traffic pollution, to incentivize public transport use, and to even re shift funding going more to expand public transportation further can all be accomplished by congestion pricing or low emission zone as you've seen in places like London. As we've seen both in London and places that have tried to implement similar policies, it's incredibly difficult. I have a kind of a, a, a quick side anecdote to share, which is that the first, I don't know if many people know this, probably New Yorkers do, but the, the very first time congestion pricing was introduced in New York City was in 2007. Okay. 2007, it was introduced. They tried to get it passed through state government in 2009. It failed. It didn't get all the votes. And when I was in grad school, a few subsequent subsequent years afterwards, I studied why it failed. So it's so, so deeply disappointing for me to see that now, when it finally passed a decade later, it's been stalled yet again, and my sense is that it's largely due to political reasons because it's just, you know, it's just difficult. One other piece that I wanted to share about what, what are kind of some urban mobility measures that cities can undertake and somes that are testing them are 1 is a zero emission zone. So this is something that L. A. has been testing and a couple of other cities over the last several years. So the goal of a low, of a, either a low emission or a zero emission zone is that vehicles that are zero emission that don't have tailpipes get preferential access into the zone. And by doing so, you sort of, first of all start with a zone where the air quality can see rapid improvements over time, and then you could sort of build that zone to expand to greater areas in the city. You are also signaling to commercial delivery vehicles that they, you're signaling to the companies that operate commercial delivery vehicles, that they need to be electrifying in order to have preferential access, curb access to continue to deliver, their goods and to maintain sort of business as usual. You are also signaling to other city departments like the transportation department that they need to be thinking about a, a plan to transition their buses to an electrified fleet. You're also creating an opportunity. For for citizens that are considering purchasing vehicles or are kind of weighing the options on the market out there to think twice about just buying another internal combustion vehicle and to start to kind of subliminally send them messages about what kind of benefits they have to gain if they switch over to a non polluting vehicle. And lastly, it is a great way to also build out and reinforce the, the, the flexibility of getting around by bikes or e scooters or kind of a a smaller motorized or non motorized vehicles through that. Okay, and for these low emission zones, I mean, I know the one in London quite well that that's all done with cameras and people are charged the, the ultra low emissions zone ULEZ. For other cities that are starting this out, do they go down a similar technological route with cameras everywhere? Or is there, does it depend from city to city? You know, how is it implemented? Are there always charges involved? That kind of thing. So I'm, I do not have the technical deep expertise on what are the best ways to implement the congestion pricing. So from my point of view, I think cameras with whatever's work, whatever has been done in London seems to be working quite well. And I think cities should be looking to replicate that. Basically not much more to say on that particular piece. In terms of fees, though, I do have, I do have an opinion there. And that is congestion pricing is a great way to signal to the market about the need to transition off of oil based transportation by differentiating the fees. So this is something that London does quite well. It was not on queue to be adopted by the New York congestion pricing, but essentially what you're doing is you're charging everybody and folks that are using electric vehicle get charged less. Right. Okay. Yeah. I know there's a low emission zone here in Seville where I live. And it has been implemented very recently in the last year, I want to think. But. nobody's been told about it. It shows up on your GPS when you're driving into the city and it's only a particular part of the city, which is like an industrial zone where very few people go except to go to work at, you know, 8 in the morning, they go home and 4 in the afternoon or whatever the times they work are. And it's, I think it was just rolled out to, to say, yeah, we've got a low emissions zone because the way it has been rolled out and implemented means it's having zero effect on emissions. I, I would have to suspect. It's, it's low emissions zone when people are not working there and it's not a residential area. So people only go there to work. So it, it's, I think, I think they did it to tick a box somewhere. Yeah. Its, it could be of things. I think what I've seen from the few cities that I've spoken with or have observed and trying to adopt low emission zone, I know that it's a journey. And a lot of cities actually in the U S I'm not sure about Europe are also struggling with what would you call it? Like a a legal mandate to be able to regulate entry to specific zones in the city based on fuel type. So that has actually prohibited a number of cities to try to even pilot a zero emission zone. What I suspect in the case of Sevilla is they are It's probably a kind of a, a two year process, you know, they launched and now there's going to be a series of things that they're going to do to tinker with what they've done. And then, you know, it sort of has, has to have phases, right? Because otherwise you you can inevitably shock the system in a way that would lead to, you know, a huge pushback by citizens or industry or, you know, commercial vehicles that are trying to access that. So maybe, maybe you'll be hearing about it. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully it improves because well, let me ask you, London seems to be quite successful and Stockholm as well in their rollouts, but that's just my impression. Do you have any actual numbers or data around successful rollouts in any city? Not at hand. I don't have hard data on these at hand. Okay. I will say kind of a tidbit information that there are, so there is data about air quality improvements in London, and that is how the advocates there have been able to secure an expansion of the ultra low emission zone. So that was, so that was the initial zone. There was one expansion and then a few years ago they went after a third expansion of the zone, which was, which proved to be the most challenging despite the air quality improvements. And that, that's where we go back into, you know, the political will and kind of making sure that the citizens understand how they would benefit from such an, from such a policy that really kind of prohibited London in getting to, to a larger coverage area. Sure, sure. I mean, behavioral change is always challenging and getting people to change. Easy to swap out technology, but in terms of changing people's attitudes, that's always tough. What strategies do you think of are the most effective in encouraging this kind of change? That's an excellent question. I spent quite a bit of time thinking and even supporting some projects and with funding from Climate Work side on this particular topic. One thing that I'll say is that whatever, any any advocate in the space. whether you're working at the system change level or at behavior change individual level needs to understand that individual change and system change are two sides of the same coin. And what that means is that the system change work will only get us so far before you start to have to shift behaviors and vice versa. And so the way I see that effectively moving forward is you have to both invest in movements and culture creation. So one particular case example I have for this is a organization in the Netherlands called BYCS B Y C S. And they are working across the globe to support and grow the culture of biking. And working with different geographies to unpack what biking means, what are pre preconceptions around that mode of transportation, how it can benefit people in communities, or what are kind of challenges they're working with about that. And so that is, that is a way to kind of pull people in and build the culture, which will then sort of incentivize behavior change. At the same time as you're doing that, you're also, you also have to be advocating at the city level for the infrastructure that can support this behavior change, right? Just because I am so invested in, I decided to get on the bike. You know, I might be riding for a day, but as soon as I get into an issue of unprotected bike lane, my behavior change will immediately be reversed because I'm fearing for my physical safety. And so it kind of has to be hand in hand. And there's a lot of literature that sort of debates what needs to follow. Do we need to actually have the right infrastructure and conditions for the behavior change to happen, or do we need to have the culture and it's somewhere in between. And one other example of why, why you kind of need both of those things is a number of years ago, a city, I believe it was in Estonia, a city tested moving to making all public transportation free in order to incentivize more people to use public transportation. At first glance, sounds like a great idea, right? Who doesn't love free rides? What they have observed is that the change had very little effect on ridership. And so it's and the reason is because the policy change or the, you know, free public transport transit wasn't as successful as they had anticipated is because they had only accounted for kind of the infrastructure side of the behavior change, but they didn't couple it with other kind of forcing mechanisms that would make people want to switch. Right. And so, you know, that that's sort of where you leave lean a little bit more into the individual behavior campaigns or kind of engagement. Right. So it was instead of carrot and stick, it was just carrot and no stick. Exactly. Exactly. I, I did badmouth Seville earlier on the low emissions zone. Now maybe it's time to say some good things about the city because you were talking about bike lanes and bike infrastructure. And I remember I moved here in 2008 and at the time they were rolling out the bike lanes throughout the city and they've expanded out into the outer towns now as well. But they were rolling out a bike sharing scheme at the same time and they wouldn't light up the bike sharing new station until it had a protected bike lane on either side of it for, and the bike stations had to be, I think it was 200 meters or 500 meters between each one. So there was plenty of them and they were all interconnected by protected bike lanes. So all of the bike lanes in Seville are physically separated from the road. And so if you were driving a car and for whatever reason you wanted to hit someone on a bike, you would actually destroy your car in the attempt to do so. So it has, it's made cycling here very, very attractive. I have heard about the case study of Seville bike share or a bike lane network. I think it's something that many cities look to as an example of how to do it, how to do it right. And I think bike advocates in general, you know, have a deep understanding that unless bike lane is protected, You will never ever be able to capture the same ridership you know, as, as a protected bike lane. yeah, yeah. I mean, parents have zero fear of bringing their kids on protected bike lanes. So, and that's how you get the, the uptake of cycling is getting the kids into it. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense, but let's talk a little bit about EVs because that's a topic that I'm quite passionate about. I have been driving a full EV as my main car since 2018. Several different ones, but yeah and I've got solar panels on the roof as well, which is even better because I can drive on sunshine. Nice and nice and free, free power for the car. It's great. And I want to think that there's got to be so right at the moment, we're hearing a lot of negative press around EVs as people are pushing back against them, as vested interests are pushing back against them. And there is this attitude in the press saying that the sale of EVs is falling, which actually, if you look at the stats is untrue. But talk to me a little, a little bit about how do we encourage more people to shift to EVs? That's a very good question. And something that. We at ClimateWorks phone or on the road transportation team, believe it or not, don't spend that much time talking about, and let me explain why Mm hmm. We firmly believe in the power of regulation. So a lot of the work, a lot of you know, things that we fund and the work that we support, very specifically focuses on regulatory change. And our view is that with the right regulation, the, that is kind of design with a well designed regulation, you can shift the market in such a way where the, it will be an automaker's best interest to appeal to consumer and to make their product competitive for the consumer to buy. So in some ways, if you kind of change that market mechanism, then the EVs will come to the consumer rather than having to continuously incentivize or encourage consumers to make the switch. I want to kind of unpack that a little bit because it's, it's something, you know, we, we talk a lot about with our partners, kind of the, the dynamic of engaging the general public or trying to convince the general public versus kind of using the regulatory approach to shift change. So one of the things that we, and mostly now my, my colleagues that work a lot on this, since I stepped away a little bit in the battery and minerals world. But so one of the things that we advocate for are this thing called the supply side regulations. And so, a supply side regulation, the beauty of a supply side regulation is that effectively, it asks the industry to deliver a percentage of a certain product and to sort of increase that percentage over time. So at some point in the future, they only deliver the product that is mandated by the government. So in case of the auto industry, a supply side regulation is an example of one is, for instance, advanced clean trucks rule that was adopted in California. And so what it does, it, it asks truck manufacturers to produce a certain, produce and sell, a certain percentage of trucks by a certain date. And that, that percentage sort of escalates up until a hundred percent. There's a similar policy for vehicles as well. And so if you're mandating the automakers to not just produce, but to also sell these products, what happens is they are incentivized to shift their marketing budget, which is incredibly, incredibly high from exclusively marketing their gasoline vehicles to also marketing EVs, right? And so if you, if you you know, you follow EVs, you have been following EVs for a long time. You might've noticed that all of a sudden we have a lot of commercials about EVs, right? And it's, it's sort of the, the you know, it's, it's the thing that will drive, I think, the consumer more so than just advocacy campaigns, which I know some of our partners do as well. The other important thing to note here is because automakers or truck manufacturers are are mandated or they have to sell the product, right? It's they have to sell the EVs, not just produce them. They are then also required, well, not required. They're sort of incentivized to price their product competitively with gasoline vehicles. And so you, what happens is you avoid the cost being shifted onto the consumer. And you kind of, close the gap. Now, obviously on the industry side and what they'll tell you is, you know, that's really hard to do. We're, we're going to be running a loss. It's, you know, really hard to make a profit if we're, you know, not pricing products fairly and so on and so forth, but ultimately that is kind of the ratcheting mechanism that we found works extremely well. Now, granted this works well if it can be implemented, and monitored adequately as well, which is obviously the, the core components of regulation. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, we, we had similar regulation here in Europe that came into effect in 2020, I think it was. If I remember correctly for EVs, for, for all auto manufacturers, their sales in Europe, their, the average grams CO2 per kilometer had to be less than 120 grams CO2 per kilometer across the entir fleet that they sold for that year and that ratcheted down and for people who might be unaware what 120g CO2 per kilometer means my car before 2018 was a Prius, a Toyota Prius and that car produced 117g CO2 per kilometer. So the average for the manufacturers selling in Europe, starting in 2020 had to be just a little bit above a Prius across their entire fleet, you know, so if they were selling big SUVs, they then had to sell, you know, far more EVs or hybrids to try and bring that down. So it, it's been quite effective and that number ratchets up and we're, we're seeing a similar thing now with buses and heavy goods vehicles in Europe, where if I remember correctly, I probably don't, but I'll be in the ballpark by 2030, something like 90 percent of municipal buses have to be zero emissions and by 2035, it's something like 65 percent of heavy goods vehicles have to be zero emissions, ratcheting up to like 90 to 100 percent by 2040. So, yeah, those, those kind of mandates obviously are going to be, we hope they have, they have been quite successful here so far. And as it ratchets up, it, it, it, it only gets more effective. Absolutely. And I just wanted to do a quick plug to all of our European partners that have been working tirelessly for over a decade to get to a point where you could have CO2 standards regulation that actually phases out combustion completely by a certain date. And it was a huge achievement. And as you know, Tom sitting in Europe, it's still being debated and potentially pushed back on, which is kind of excruciating to watch, but Talk to me a little bit, a little bit, though, about the battery supply chains, because you mentioned you're working now a lot in minerals and supply chains. So what's happening there? Yeah, I'm happy to share. So, maybe I'll start with the work that we've, we've been doing on the road transportation team. Effectively. You know, a lot of our priority on the team has been focused on fuel efficiency standards. Globally we work across highest emission emitting regions of the world. So US, EU, China and India and are now building out deep work in emerging economies of the geopolitical global South. And we've also been working a lot on EV policy that we've literally just talked about. About a couple of years ago, we, once EVs uptake really started to pick up. And so this is, you know, 2017, 2018, we started to hear bits and pieces from our partners that there's something around EV battery supply chain that might be that is of concern. And that might impede accelerated EV uptake. And so at that point, we're like, oh, there's something we haven't accounted for. We've been like fighting oil interests and all these different unproductive interests. And now there's something else. And so, from that grew our, EV battery sustainability initiative and essentially what it did in early days was to try to understand what is it about the EV battery supply chain that might be an issue for EV uptake. What is it that we can do about it from philanthropic point of view? And, what, How do we need to be, how do we need to think about and approach this issue area? And so it became quite clear, a couple of things became quite clear out of that work stream. One is that you can't really talk about EV batteries without also talking about minerals. Without essentially talking about the stuff that the batteries is made from. You also can't really talk about EV batteries without also talking about the incredible lack of transparency in those supply chains, but also pretty much every supply chain in the world is not very transparent which is not a great result of our kind of a globalized Increasingly globalized world. And out of those two recognitions, we sort of realize that a, we need to be working across issue areas and understanding other perspectives as we try to tackle the EV battery supply chain work, and I'll talk about what that means in a second. And then the second is that we really need to be talking about and thinking what conditions need to be in place in order to efficiently recover anything that the EV batteries have inside that is valuable, right? So we, you know, kind of started our conversation talking about design and circular design, and I'm sort of right back at it because effectively we need to be thinking about how to recycle these EV batteries before we have a huge surge of them coming to the end of life. And so a lot of the EV battery sustainability work focuses on end of life practices and recycling. And I would also like to just highlight that it sits within our Drive Electric campaign, which is an initiative, a global initiative housed at Climate Works Foundation that seeks to end the tailpipe before 2040 across modes. And it's a huge kind of a collaborative effort between NGOs and philanthropic partners. And so as part of that work, battery sustainability is very much about, you know, recyclability designing for optimal recycling. With that work, we try to advocate for regulation, of course. So one example would be the EU battery law that passed recently. So we've supported a number of partners advocating for the strongest possible EV battery regulation. And for folks that are hearing about this for the first time, the regulation essentially sets mandated recovery targets for four minerals that are comprised in lithium ion batteries. It also mandates human rights due diligence as part of an effort to make the supply chain more transparent. And so that's sort of one policy lever that we've advocated for. And from our point of view, the optimal future is where all major auto markets have a similar policy. And even countries that have a lot of maybe second second use EVs in their market used EVs also have and are have the policies on the books and are prepared to handle the high and growing volume of EV batteries. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the mining piece of it here and sort of the minerals piece which is for us, it kind of falls into a separate and complementary initiative, and which is called the Minerals for the Energy Transition. So that initiative really starts to look into the question of what do we actually do about the fact that many, many raw materials, many more than we have today, are needed to be, to build enough clean technologies in order to allow us to transition from fossil fuels? And so it's sort of very broad and, or much broader and gets into these more kind of extraction questions. What do we need to do? I mean, if, if I look at the minerals requirements for the transition any data I've seen on that says we need far less extraction and mining than we do, then that's being done currently for fossil fuels, for example. And the other side, I would say, of the the, the extraction and mining that's going to be required for the energy transition is that the vast, vast majority of the minerals that are being extracted will be recyclable, whereas fossil fuels are single use. Absolutely. And absolutely. And I actually want to offer a quick data point here that I do have, Cool. That will be interesting. So there's a report by Energy Transitions Commission that I really, really like. It sort of does a great job synthesizing the material needs of the energy transition, kind of slicing and dicing the needs in a slightly better way or a slightly more, I think, readable way than even the IEA's numbers and they're, they're, the ETC report is a little bit more grounded too. So in that report last year, they did this interesting calculation that I really like, which is they estimated the material needs of all clean energy technologies from now to 2050. And they landed at a number of about 6. 5 billion tons. So basically they're saying 6. 5 billion tons of all types of raw materials will be needed to build this clean energy future. And there's two, two points related to that. One is that 75 percent of that is steel. We forget how much steel we use and how much steel is actually also a backbone of our, the new energy system we're trying to build. Okay. And the other thing to say is that, so we have this like 6. 5 billion over, you know, from 2022 to 2050 compared to 8 billion tons of coal that is extracted annually. annually. And that's just coal. Okay. That's not taking into account the oil that we pump, the gas that we pump, and kind of all these other pieces. So absolutely on that piece. And if you look at, you know, I encourage folks to definitely take a look at that report because they also do quite interesting comparisons around water needs land use, and even a comparison in emissions sort of what what level of emissions we need to spend in order to get the savings of moving away from fossil fuels. And it's sort of, you know, fascinating. What I wanted to to pick up on in terms of, you know, what do we do about that? And kind of how do we think about this issue? The mineral space is incredibly messy and complex for a number of reasons. And now having worked on it for a couple of years, I'm by no means an expert, but I'm learning, learning every day and trying to find different ways of understanding this very complex issue. And so I wanted to share kind of five different points about this issue that we need to consider before then I kind of segue into what do we do about it? Or what do, what do, what does ClimateWorks think we should do about it? So the first thing to note is that there, the reason we're talking and thinking about minerals today is because of incredible progress that we have made on renewables uptake and EV uptake. Okay, so just a quick kind of a stat reminder for folks. Is that renewable energy sources are now projected to overtake coal for electricity generation by 2025. That's huge. And then in a couple of a couple more years by 2028 renewables are expected to account for 42 percent of global electricity generation. That's huge. That's way, way, way more than we've achieved, you know, in kind of, since we first learned that climate crisis is an issue in the seventies, right? The other thing is we now have 40 million EVs on the road. I remember still working at ClimateWorks, you know, eight, seven years ago, when we were keeping an eye out as we were hitting our 1 million of EVs on the road. And that was huge. It was a huge moment. And so we've, we're having, we're having this amazing progress, right? Of course, more is needed and we have to go faster and no one's debating that. But so all of a sudden we're building all this stuff. And there's a point in which there's a, there's kind of a, a collective awareness that, wait a minute, in order for us to keep building the stuff, the clean technologies, we need to make sure that we're manufacturing them fast enough, right, to be then put in use. And then we also need to make sure that we have enough stuff of which clean technologies are made from, which is all these minerals, right? And so I, sometimes I really want to point this out because sometimes there's a, there's the sense of like, You know, how come we haven't, how come we didn't think about this 10 years ago? Or why aren't we thinking about this 10 years from now? Well, it's literally, it wasn't top of anyone's mind because we haven't had as much progress as we've had on, you know, renewables uptake. So, okay. So we have all these raw materials that we need in order to keep building clean technologies. The second thing that I wanted to point out is that this heightened awareness has created what I call is sort of a, an advocacy convergence. It's, it's a convergence across advocacy communities around the question of minerals and it's massive. Okay. So up until now, or up until recently, you know, even within the climate advocacy community, you have your transportation people, you have your steel people, you have your coal people, you know, and everyone's just kind of doing their thing, right. But as soon as you have. measurable uptake in renewables, everyone's starting to realize how all of our work intersects, and it's no different for mineral space. And the intersection really comes from a number of different thematic areas, such as conservation, human rights, resource governance for minerals, obviously indigenous rights and kind of the history there obviously climate advocates ocean conservation folks, land rights folks, deforestation folks, there's just a lot and to kind of put this into into a little bit more of an example. So, for instance, You know, conservation and forest preservation advocates might be worried about pressure for new mineral extraction because they have been working for decades to try to conserve nature, right? To conserve the very last places that we have around the world and same with forests. And so some of those advocates are fighting deforestation in places like Indonesia, Brazil, are now seeing that forests are, in some cases, being cleared for mining, which is a huge issue. In the same way, there's also kind of this recognition from the climate advocates, which are like, wait a minute, we need to lower these emissions. So we need the staff. And so, you know, they're like trying to understand what is the issue here. And so you have these like communities coming together that are starting to have to learn each other's language and have to understand how to work together because no one wants a green on green you know, standoff because obviously the fossil fuels will just keep winning. So let me just go to a few other points very quickly. So, the other piece to keep in mind here is the, the geographic geopolitical north and south dynamics and specifically sort of the, the, the recognition of embedded inequality. The reason why this really matters in the minerals discourse is is kind of the simplified way to describe it is that the wealthy nations such as US and EU are sort of driving the demand for these minerals in a way, right? Of course, China is too. They're a huge manufacturing hub for clean technologies. But so because they are in this demand structure, they are looking to mineral rich countries, which tend to be in the geopolitical global South to provide these resources for them, right? And so there, there's this recognition from mineral rich countries, some are low income, some are middle income that are like, wait a minute, We don't want to just sell our raw minerals. We have been doing that for decades and we are struggling to develop and to secure economic prosperity for our citizens. So if we're going to do this transition and if you need our minerals, you kind of the, the wealthy countries, we need to think about how you help us move up the value chain and how you know, the mineral rich countries really want to develop and expand their industrial capacity and they You know, it, it's sort of that conversation doesn't always square with the perspective from, you know, the wealthy West. The two other pieces here that are really important. One also is the just transition. So again, heightened discussions about minerals for the energy transition is putting to the forefront, the framework of just transition. Now there's a lot of different definitions of what it means, but inherently what it says is that are we setting the conditions in place to make sure that everyone benefits from the transition, not just the people that are already benefiting from it. Right. And so of course that plays into the minerals discourse because of frontline mining communities and mineral rich countries that are sort of struggling to retain value from their resources and the very last piece is kind of massive and, blankets all of these other recognitions is sort of the geopolitics of everything. You know, the resource nationalism, the resource motivated armed conflicts that are kind of surrounding some minerals discourse, trade restrictions, and a lot of different sort of geopolitical levers that are increasing the complexity of this mineral space and are just making it more difficult for folks to figure out what to do next. So what do we do next? Ha ha ha ha ha So the way that we see, there's a few things that we see are core components of moving forward in this space. And it's something that, you know, ClimateWorks is pursuing and doing so with the a lot of support from our amazing partners that are in the field every day. So first and foremost, we really need to be thinking about what does responsible mineral supply look like. There has to be a clear understanding across communities of climate advocates that it is not possible or even acceptable to go after any mineral supply for clean technologies. We very specifically need that supply to be responsible supply. Okay. And there's a lot of disagreement about what that means. But in very simple terms, responsible mineral supply is not the status quo. It's not what we have today, you know, it's, it's supply that is where the resources are extracted in with less harm to the communities, to the environment. And not only that, there's a benefit. Right. There's a, there is a benefit system that is benefiting the communities. There's a, some sort of restoration system that restores the surrounding habitat. So it's not just the minimum of reducing harm. It's like, how do we make it better? Right. Because that is what effectively over long term is going to make this more sustainable. And the second piece of this is how do we set the conditions in place to continuously capture the supply that's already in circulation, right? So it's the primary supply of extraction and the secondary supply that is sort of recycled, right? And so you have to tackle those two in tandem. And doing so, we will, over time, reduce the reliance on extraction only goes to the point that you mentioned earlier, which is with minerals we really have the opportunity to create something that's truly circular and over time have a, you know, minerals have a clean energy. System that is more circular than not right. So maybe we do. We still have a little bit of extraction, but it's really to fill some gaps or account for growth. But the vast majority of inputs comes from From this recycled content. And so that's sort of on the supply has to be responsible. And there has to be streams to feed the supply that are both primary and secondary in order to over time have a sort of a resilient use cycle of these minerals. and really benefit from their properties, right? Which the fossil fuels don't really have. Yep The second piece of this work is really thinking about how to support mineral rich countries that are looking to move up the value chain and how does, you know, how do we do that in a way that is kind of durable over time? So one quick example of that could be a place like Chile. Chile is a major producer of copper and lithium, and they are really looking to benefit and build out and, and, and benefit from their resources to develop further. And Chile is also incredibly constrained due to their water situation, which is that they are kind of located at a or they have a lot of places where they extract that are extremely, extremely dry. And so water management becomes a huge issue here. And so the question is, what can philanthropy or can advocates do to help Chile meet their vision, but also do it in a way that thinks about the long terms of sustainability of the supply, meaning that we can't go too fast, too soon, if it means that it will put the country at a place of running out of water in the future. Sure Sure sure sure sure If I give you a magic wand now that allows you to make one change What would that change be? This feels like a trick question. Ha What would that change be? Hmm. I think the change would have to be related to the mining industry Okay in some way. I think that we are really in need of a new mining company, like a new new extraction model or new way a mining company can have a social benefit, which is, which is effectively what we desperately need if we are to transition to clean technologies using minerals. We just, we can't do it with the status quo of the mining industry today because we will never get to the energy transition that we're looking for. And so I think with a new mining company and a new way to do business and engage and really be, you know, core partners, equal partners to the communities that are impacted. If we have that, I think we have a much stronger foundation to build off of and to see how, what, and where we can replicate this Nice Thanks Nice. What would be some actionable steps our listeners can take to support the transition? Excellent question. For folks that are looking to. donate or kind of, monetarily support the energy transition, I would recommend into looking a couple, into a couple of NGOs that we work very closely with. And I'll just name three. So one is earthworks based in the U S working globally around extractives and issues both on minerals and fossil fuels. Another one is Earth Justice. They're also based in the U. S. They do a lot of work with indigenous and native peoples in the U. S. and helping them bring lawsuits against various extractive companies when the communities have been bypassed. And then the third one is Transport and Environment, which is an NGO prolific NGO in the EU that we work very closely with. I would recommend, you know, if you want to know more information about any of the topics that Tom and I talked about, I would say Transport and Environment has a wealth of information, very readable, great reports that they put out and the other partners do as well. I think the other thing that I would like to say maybe and come back to, you know, the behavior change, I think behavior change is very difficult. Having personally been navigating that and kind of working in the realm of climate, climate mitigation kind of climate work, it's something that I constantly think about and I know how easy it is to get discouraged from making small changes in everyday life. But I can't overstate the importance of that work. Not only because it is your personal contribution to, you know, the energy transition, but it's also, there's a, Infectiousness that comes with it. You know, when you make a change, your friends notice your, your neighbors notice your family notices. And a lot of times, even without encouraging them to make the change as well, they themselves have a moment in which they can reflect on whether they can do this change as well. So that to me is, is very, very important. And it, it there's a whole range of things, and I'll just quickly list them. Obviously, public transportation switching to EVs, switching to renewable power regeneration for your home or advocating within your building for the same switch. If you're able to composting, if you have the means food is a major, food waste is a major source of emissions. It's, super difficult to do sometimes in cities, but there's always, there's always some community garden or kind of a great set of you know, NGOs or advocates that I think can help. And then another major one is. shifting away from plastic as much as possible, especially single use plastic. And that was, that has been my kind of journey and focus in the last couple of years. And I can tell you that it's very difficult because plastic is everywhere, but it's not impossible. And when you find those, those alternatives that are also cost effective, it's, it just feels so much better. And ultimately it is the direction we're heading at. I know in the EU, EU is looking to phase out plastic for food, I believe by 2030 or something like that, which is great. And so you'll be already ahead of the curve, but it's just I, I think, yeah, I can't overstate how much those personal behavior changes matter. And then the last one obviously is trying to have a little bit less meat in your diet, which also goes a very, very long way. Actually, I just learned yesterday or the day before yesterday that oysters, clams, and mussels employ some of the most sustainable farming. So they're, they're some of the most sustainable seafood that you can eat. Good to know. I like them all. That's great. Fantastic. And I haven't eaten beef since about 2008. I want to think so, or 2009 maybe. Yeah. But quite a while anyway. So that's all good. Lina, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about? Yes, there's. There's probably one more thing I wanted to say. And it's, it's a little bit around, I wanted to highlight that while we are kind of progressing in the energy transition, climate policy across the world is very much under attack, right? And so what we think a lot about is not just the changes that are achievable and that will be better for the climate, but changes that are durable over time. And I think the more, you know, 2004 was, is a year of elections. We've already seen many elections happen and many more are still slotted for this year. And as we see kind of pendulum swings from, you know, slightly more right leaning to left leaning, vice versa. Every time that there's a swing, there's a set of risks that come related to climate policy. And I think that it's just really, really important to keep in mind. And I think for, for philanthropy, what we're thinking a lot about is how, how do we get smarter on political policy? Because the case for climate policy is going to be more and more difficult over time. So in some ways, you know, the, the achievements that we've attained in this last 10 or so years have been easy because now that the fossil fuels see the threat really materializing in, in a dent in their demand in their full demand, they are going to shift into a whole other gear of pushback and disinformation and misinformation. And so I really wanted to highlight that because you know, you reach a lot of people and I think this applies to everybody and not just folks working in the climate field. I would encourage folks to maintain kind of a focus and commitment towards the energy transition and the, the idea of what it is that we stand to gain when we do this, which is a world that is not dependent on fossil fuels, because it is going to take a long time to get there. Oh, a while. It's going to take a while. And we are going to need the same and increasing level of energy and enthusiasm across those years. Cool. Great. Fantastic. Lina, it's been really interesting. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? Yes, of course. So I would have folks come visit the Climate Works page. So if you Google Climate Works Foundation, Lina Fedirko, you can find my bio. And on that page, you should have a set of linked blogs that I've produced over the years that speak to a lot of the things that Tom and I have discussed today. The other thing I wanted to quickly highlight is that we are getting ready to produce a series of minerals focused blogs. So these will be upcoming in the latter half of this year, and they will be talking more in depth about the mineral specific issues that I've touched on with, with Tom today. Great. I look forward to seeing them. Fantastic. Lina, it's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me, Tom. And I look forward to speaking to you again sometime. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.