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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, the ugly truth about electric vehicles.
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Basu, Narrating: There's a lot of interest in electric vehicles right now. More charging stations are being built, there's new federal tax credits to make buying an EV more affordable, and we're seeing more options hit the market with significantly lower lifetime emissions, costs and maintenance needed compared to traditional gas-powered cars. Climate scientists say making the switch from a gas-powered car to an EV is one of the best ways to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet. But "going green" doesn't necessarily mean they're totally clean.
Evan Halper: There's a lot of greenwashing going on as consumers try to navigate what an EV is and the extent to which it is helping the environment.
Basu, Narrating: Evan Halper is with "The Washington Post." He and a team of colleagues recently created a series called "Clean Cars, Hidden Toll." It's sort of a buyer's guide to EVs. But what makes it especially thorough is the original reporting they've done on the human and environmental costs of the electric vehicle revolution.
Halper: It's important that there's some accountability for the manufacturers, for governments on what exactly are we doing as we create this whole new industry. Are we making the same mistakes that have been made in the past? And there's human consequences to those mistakes.
Basu, Narrating: "The Post's" team traveled around the world to places where minerals are sourced to make EV batteries. Because while EVs don't need gas, they do need about six times more minerals by weight than a conventional vehicle for the roughly 1,000-pound battery block powering them.
In their reporting about what it takes to get those minerals, "Post" reporters describe forced labor, co-opted Indigenous land, toxic waste and environmental spills, and in some cases, lots of emissions from coal-powered refineries. Many car manufacturers say they're abiding by environmental rules, but Evan says fact-checking their claims isn't so easy.
Halper: You know, it's kinda like a black box.
Basu, Narrating: Another reporter in the series is Rebecca Tan, "The Post's" Southeast Asia bureau chief. She went to Indonesia, where nickel refineries are taking off to meet global demand.
Rebecca Tan: It's valuable reporting, certainly for the consumer, for the person who's looking to buy an EV, but it's also, I think, valuable reporting for people along the supply chain. The millions of people in Indonesia where the government is reorientating its entire economy to serve this new industry. What are the costs of that for them?
Basu, Narrating: I spoke to Evan sitting in D.C. and Rebecca sitting in Singapore, and I asked them to help me, as a person who likes the idea of buying a car that's better for the environment but wants to understand the full picture. We started with Rebecca telling us about her reporting trip to Indonesia.
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Tan: In Indonesia, there's a long-standing tradition of mines or industry pushing out Indigenous communities, pushing out people who have lived there for generations. And this is a big concern, apart from the waste, apart from the carbon emissions that might come, that might accelerate [CHUCKLES] global warming. They're a lot less concerned with that. They're a lot more concerned with being pushed off their land. These are communities that have lived in very remote islands. Many of them don't have title deeds to the land that they've been living on for generations and generations. So, when someone in a hard hat comes over and says like, "Hey, we own this land now," you don't have much to stand on in terms of saying like, "No, my grandfather's grandfather has had this farm for as long as our family's been around." So, there's a lot of that going on in Indonesia.
Tan: Our first story that was published in this series, written by a correspondent in West Africa, touches on bauxite mining. Bauxite goes into aluminum, which is important for EVs. And there are human rights violations going on over there. And I think maybe the first wake-up call for people to do more reporting into battery minerals was the entire issue to do with cobalt. Cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where labor laws are too lax. There were several investigations that basically uncovered that child labor was being used to mine and process cobalt. So there, again, because the supply chain for what goes into these batteries is spread out across the world, and it's so far away from the consumer in California [CHUCKLES] that the kind of rights violations, the kind of environmental externalities, I think, are still not very well understood.
Basu: Yeah. Rebecca, I know that you've been reporting from Indonesia. Indonesia's the world's largest producer of nickel, which is one of the key minerals for creating EV batteries. So, can you tell us more about how demand for nickel is changing Indonesia?
Tan: Demand for nickel is surging, in large part because of EVs. The type of nickel that Indonesia has in its reserves is a low-quality limonite ore, and that just means that there's actually very low percentage of nickel in the ore that is retrieved from the earth. And to extract it, to refine it, to make it usable in an EV battery is a huge task. And in Indonesia, as well as in some other parts of the world, they're starting to use what's quite a pretty risky technology to do that. It's quite wonky, but it's called "high-pressure acid leaching," and it's basically using sulfuric acid under conditions of extremely high heat and high pressure. It's a technique that was pioneered back in the 1960s in Cuba, but it's rarely been used until now because it's quite an unstable process. It's quite difficult to control. A lot of companies have tried it and they've had accidents with managing the massive amount of waste or "tailings," as they're called, produced from this process.
Basu: And just to be clear, that's hazardous waste, right?
Tan: Yes. If it's not properly managed, it's hazardous waste. So, Indonesia, for the first time in 2021, opened a refinery like this. And this is the refinery that we visited in a remote part of eastern Indonesia. And the reason why a lot of even mining experts are watching it very closely is because this technology has never been tested before in Indonesia. So, on top of its geological conditions producing a lot of minerals, it's also a place with a lot of volcanoes, with monsoon rains, with earthquakes. And that makes storing and refining waste kind of dicey, as you can imagine.
Basu: Yeah. Can I ask you to tell us a little bit more about… you introduced us to many people whose lives have been affected by nickel mining becoming such a huge industry there now. One person is a farmer who's lived there his whole life and says that things are changing really drastically now. Can you tell us a little bit more about him?
Tan: Sure. Yeah. So, we visited six villages in and around these nickel-rich areas in North Maluku, which is in eastern Indonesia. And we spoke to, I think, dozens of villagers. One of them, his name was Liyus. We begin the story with him. He lives in Kawasi Village, which is right at the foot of the nickel refining facility. His family has lived there for four generations. For as long as he can remember, they've lived off the land. They rely on the fish that populate the island around it, they drink from the water. And since the refining facility was built and since the mine started to expand its operations, a lot of those natural resources have gone away. They no longer are able to use the rivers that go by their village. There's fewer and fewer fish in the coastline that's just surrounding them. And meaningfully, it's hard for them to get around. He used to be able to walk from A to B basically, and now it's kinda fenced off and guarded.
Basu: And I should say that he's walking from A to B - I remember this detail from your reporting - because he doesn't own a car. Right?
Tan: The vast majority of people that I spoke to don't own a car. It was a bit of a ridiculous question, honestly, when I asked them.
Basu: Sure, these are villages. Yeah. Sure.
Tan: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And it was bizarre because I wanted to ask them, but by the end of my reporting it was a bit of a silly question to ask them. Most of them don't have a motorcycle. They've been inside a car a handful of times in their lives. So, they have no idea. They have no conception of why there's been a sudden demand for nickel. They understand that there's a mineral on their island that people want, but they're completely kind of removed from the global demand for what's there.
Basu: Yeah. And I have to say, the images that went along with this reporting are pretty stark to see. I mean, you're seeing coastal lines where the water has turned a rust color. Where is that coming from? Why is it turning rusty?
Tan: So, like I said, this particular refining process produces a ton of waste that's very hard to manage. The companies originally said that they were gonna pump it into the sea, and they officially backtracked on that when there was a big public outcry. So, it's hard to say whether what's going into the water is toxic waste that can be harmful to people and to animals or if it's runoff from the mines. We took a bunch of videos and photos, and we brought it all back to four mining experts and asked them to tell us what they were seeing there. And a lot of them said that, yeah, we need to do an audit. We need to test the water to figure out what it was exactly there, but it shouldn't look like this. A mine or a nickel refining facility, if it's responsibly managed, should look nothing like this.
Basu: Hmm. You know, while we're talking about some of these sort of knock-on effects, I think some people might be surprised to learn that a lot of these processing plants or refining plants for various minerals needed for EV batteries are coal powered. They're powered by coal, right?
Tan: That's right. Yeah. So, Indonesia, specifically, has started a process of phasing out coal. But it's made a nice little carve out and exception for that for industries that it sees as critical to its future. EVs being one of them, and EV minerals, battery minerals, being one of them. So, along with all these refineries that are being built, a lot of them in like remote parts of Indonesia - again, these are islands that are hard to get to - they're building coal power plants to provide the energy and the power needed for all these extremely intensive processes. So, yeah, it's a significant problem, I think, in Indonesia, but in other battery-mineral-producing countries.
Basu: I wanna make sure that I ask and name the two companies that own that particular processing plant. One is called Harita and the other is called Lygend. How have they responded to allegations that they're not handling this toxic waste properly?
Tan: Pretty much saying that they're doing enough. We spoke to them for an hour, bringing to them all the different allegations. And they've said that everything we do is consistent with government law and regulation. That was their main response. Basically, that they weren't doing anything illegal. There are a few layers to unpack there. First of all, environmental-protection regulations in Indonesia are not the strongest, and the government has actually started to roll them back in order to incentivize more companies to come into the country to do nickel mining and nickel refining. The second thing is that the companies themselves, just a year earlier, had published an article in a science journal acknowledging that managing the waste on Obi Island is very difficult because of its natural conditions, because of earthquakes, because villagers live downstream. So, they're aware, certainly, of some of these externalities. And they're aware of the risks.
Tan: A lot of experts who work in the Indonesian mining sector say that you'll see if the management techniques are good when there's an earthquake, and you'll see what happens to the waste then. And that's a pretty… I mean, it's a pretty scary thought to wait until then to understand what the real implications have been. If you look in other parts of the world where they have tried this particular refining technique, there've been lots of leaks and accidents. And so, the confidence, I think, that they have everything managed very well is certainly… there are layers of skepticism I think that you can cast upon that.
Basu: Hmm. I'm seeing some of those layers of skepticism on Evan's face, actually, [CHUCKLES] as you're talking about your reporting, Rebecca. Evan, is there anything that you wanna add to this?
Halper: The only thing I would add is it's hard to overstate the kind of enormity of Indonesia's goals when it comes to nickel. I mean, this country sees itself as the Saudi Arabia of the EV industry. They're looking at how can they control this market and control it the way that OPEC controls oil. And so, because we're gonna be looking at many millions of more EVs being produced, what is happening here, this is just the start.
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Basu, Narrating: The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress and President Biden last year, now means that consumers can get up to $7,500 in tax breaks for buying certain kinds of EVs. They need to be made in North America and meet specific requirements for where their materials were sourced. One of the main countries America wants to cut out of the supply chain is China.
Halper: The idea behind all these subsidies that were passed in the Inflation Reduction Act was that, okay, if you want to get these credits, it has to be certified as the battery materials and the assembly happened within certain countries. But it's so expensive and it's still so scarce, the materials from some of these countries, that I think we're seeing some carmakers that are looking at this and saying, "It's cheaper for us and it'll be cheaper for the consumer for us to keep doing business with China and keep China in our supply chain," even though a major point of the Inflation Reduction Act was to get China out of the supply chains. It's just the cost differentials between some of these countries and some of the places Congress is aiming to move manufacturing to are so big, it really remains to be seen whether they'll be able to achieve those goals and move some of this production back to the U.S. and to other countries that have at least stronger protections for their workers and for the environment.
Basu, Narrating: Currently, some of the biggest makers of EVs say they're making batteries in countries with strong human rights and environmental protections. But, as Evan says, it can be extremely hard to verify what they're telling us.
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Halper: So, there was a recent Tesla shareholder meeting…
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Shareholder Group Spokesperson: Good afternoon, Tesla board members, management, employees and shareholders.
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Halper: A shareholder group came out and said, look, you know, Tesla says it's auditing its supply chain for human rights and says it's doing this and that, but these audits are not that strong. They're not third-party audits. These are industry groups that you're using to say everything's okay. And we're looking at evidence here that shows a lot of parts are coming through Xinjiang in China where there's forced Uyghur labor. And there's a high probability that a lot of parts in Teslas are being manufactured… somewhere along the supply chain, forced labor was involved.
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Shareholder Group Spokesperson: The human rights risks that permeate throughout Tesla's value chain, when not adequately addressed, harm shareholder value and undermine Tesla's ability to lead the just transition.
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Halper: And so, the shareholder group said, "We want Tesla to commit to a third-party audit. You're not doing it. So, we have the shareholder resolution, and we want shareholders to vote for it." The company urged voting against it, didn't say anything much about it. And then Elon Musk came up and sort of surprised everyone by saying…
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Elon Musk: You know what? We will do a third-party audit.
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Musk: In fact, we'll put a webcam on the mine. [LAUGHS]
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Musk: [LAUGHS] And if anybody sees any children, please let us know.
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Halper: It was hard to tell, in the usual Elon Musk way, whether he was being sarcastic or whether he was being serious. But the crowd just ate it up. And we'll see where things go from here and whether Tesla actually does do this third-party audit. But I'm suspicious that the concerns being raised by the shareholder group were really met with Elon Musk's few comments that just batted them away as meaningless and not important. These companies, when they're confronted and asked about, okay, what about this, that, and the other thing in their supply chain, in a lot of cases they say, "We're doing our best, but we can't have full visibility of the supply chain. It's just too hard. There are too many places, there are too many subcontractors and subcontractors along the way, and you're just asking too much of us." But the question is, are you asking too much of them? There are technologies out there where they can trace everything on their supply chain. It's just a matter of do they want to do it and are they putting the resources into doing it?
Basu: Hmm. Hmm. So, with all of these things in mind, [CHUCKLES] what is the wanting-to-be-ethical consumer supposed to do right now? Someone who's thinking of buying a car and thinking that maybe it's smart to buy an EV. How are they supposed to hold all these things in their head, really?
Halper: So, some groups are starting to try to help consumers navigate this and trying to look as deeply into their supply chains as they can. This organization called Lead the Charge, for example, it's a coalition of environmental groups that just made this their issue. They tried to come up with a rating guide of how sustainable is this company, that company and the other company that's marketing EVs. And they did start to rank them. They'll at least say, "These are their policies on human rights, these are their policies on workers' rights, environmental rights, this is how much traceability and transparency they have in their supply chains." And so, it's a start. In Europe, for example, they're creating this battery passport program where you'll be able to, as a consumer, if you buy a car in Europe, they'll give you a document. It'll show where the minerals for everything in the battery came from.
Basu: Oh, that's really interesting.
Halper: Yeah, I mean, that's a big step. Some of the NGOs are saying, "Well, the way they're doing the guidelines, industry may be too involved, and there may be some greenwashing involved," but still, it's a government initiative and it's forcing some accountability. So, I think we're going to see more of these kinds of initiatives, and we're going to see consumers have more of an ability to see what's going into their car. But it's going to take a lot of reporting, like the reporting Rebecca just did, for the auto companies to feel the pressure and to keep providing that transparency and moving forward along those lines.
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Basu, Narrating: So, what to make of all the industry reports and the environmental and humanitarian questions? These all factor into the buyer's guide put together by "The Washington Post." It looks at traditional car-performance stats and price, as well as EV-specific metrics, things like travel distance on a full charge and estimated environmental impact of making and driving the vehicle over its lifetime. And just like with gas-powered cars, you'll notice that heavier electric trucks and SUVs have more negative impacts. The guide distills data from some of the environmental groups that Evan mentioned, like Lead the Charge and greencars.org. It even ranks vehicles by class and brand.
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Halper: So, not surprisingly, the companies that really focus on sustainability and ethical supply chains have six-figure price tags, and that's obviously a problem. So, I spent some time talking to the company Polestar, which was kind of a spinoff from Volvo. And they make these great cars, but they're like super expensive. But they're really focused on, okay, what can we do to improve supply chains? Mercedes, again, like, I can't afford a Mercedes, probably most people listening to this can't afford a Mercedes, but at least this company, which has this very high-scale clientele, is trying to set a standard and set something that other car companies can aspire to. And, again, if you look at the Lead the Charge rankings, Mercedes ranked highest, but they'll still find that even the highest-ranking ones left a lot to be desired. There are so many things that the NGOs say could be done that are not being done, but at least Mercedes ranks the highest.
Halper: BMW gets mentioned a lot as a company that's trying to be a pioneer in sustainability. So, again, these are cars most of us can't afford. But these companies, like with all technologies, it's those who are selling the most expensive products that can sort of create the path for the industry that others will maybe eventually follow.
Basu: Well, let's talk about the affordability issue for a moment because I think this is the big problem with any kind of early adopting wave is affordability. Making it more affordable, more accessible to more people to make that choice. And yet, I can only imagine that doing it the right way [CHUCKLES] and doing it ethically is probably more expensive. So, how do we square these things?
Halper: Yeah, there's no question about that. I mean, there was some data that came out recently that suggested the price of an EV could reach parity with the price of a gas-burning car within a few years, which surprised me. But the problem is, the price of a gas-burning car is now like, averages close to $50,000, which is crazy. Right? There are cheap EVs you can get out there. The Nissan Leaf, for example, is a very well-performing car, but it doesn't have the range that a $100,000 Lucid does. But if you want to get into an EV, that's a place to start. Unfortunately, Chevy decided to discontinue its Bolt crossover, which I'd actually had a chance to drive one like two days before they made that announcement. I thought, this is the car I want.
Basu: Oh, really?
Halper: It wasn't crazy expensive. It was just… it was really fun to drive. I still have my old gas-powered Honda CR-V and I'm thinking, okay, what would I want next? And I was like, okay, this isn't gonna cost me $70,000, and I can see my family in this car. But like they do with gas cars, part of this has to do with the automakers. They just wanna sell these big SUVs and pickup trucks that they make a ton of money on. And government can play some role in pushing them toward making smaller cars, but the consumer demand for cheaper cars is not as high as you would think. And that's part of what is driving this. It's a strange phenomenon.
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Basu, Narrating: Now, if hearing all of this has you feeling conflicted about electric vehicles, Evan and Rebecca say they don't want you to feel discouraged. There are plenty of EV options out there that will lower your emissions compared to gas cars. They just want you to consider everything that happens before these cars make it to the dealership.
Halper: You know, we have gotten some criticism from people who say, "Look, we need more people to get in EVs. We need people to embrace this. And you're out there writing about 'EVs are bad,' and it just makes people feel helpless." I don't look at it that way. I don't think that's what we're doing.
Basu, Narrating: Evan told me he hopes to get an EV soon. Meanwhile, Rebecca says things are a little different where she is in Singapore, where there's a big focus on public transit. And in fact, maybe the rest of world should take note.
Tan: There's been this overemphasis and over-interest in cars. I think it's a valid question to ask, like, whether pushing into EVs is the right kind of modality or if there's a way to use urban planning and new transplant networks to kinda find a different way to live.
Basu, Narrating: For us here in America, a country that loves our cars, both Evan and Rebecca agree that EVs are part of the future.
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Halper: This reporting on how EVs are made and the supply chains and the people that are getting hurt along the way, this should not be your excuse that, okay, I'm just gonna keep driving my gas-powered pickup because an EV's no better. That's not the point of all this. I mean, the point of all this is that we're making this transition. It's an important transition. Replacing the gas-powered fleet with EVs is something that will be very helpful for climate action. But along the way, industry can be doing a much better job, and people need to be paying attention to the winners and losers, who's getting hurt by this and demanding accountability and demanding that this transition be done in a more just and sustainable way.
Tan: A lot of our reporting takes us, in this series, to that deeper question of, what is the real solution here? And I think a lot of energy transition climate reporting ends up there, which is, how big is the change we actually have to make? How far back do we have to walk? Because with nickel, specifically, you're extracting something from the earth. You see that very viscerally. And I think there's a kind of wider debate of, how sustainable can an extractive process be in the longer term? What happens when the nickel runs out? What happens when all these other minerals run out? How do we bring ourselves around? How do we live? And these are big [CHUCKLES] philosophical questions that we don't really dig into, I think, necessarily in the series, but I think we hope people will start to think about in some of the stuff that we're sketching out.
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Basu: Rebecca, Evan, thank you both so much for this conversation and for this guide.
Halper: Thank you for having us.
Tan: Thanks for having us.
Basu, Narrating: "The Washington Post"'s series "Clean Cars, Hidden Toll" is available on the Apple News app. We'll include a link for you on our show notes page. And if you've been listening and enjoying this podcast, please rate and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts. It helps us reach more people, and we like knowing what you like.
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