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electric vehicles
Can We Design a Green Transition That Doesn't Turbocharge Extraction?
Three years after I had first hypothesized that different transportation choices might require less mining, I stopped waiting for someone else to produce the data to put my hunch to the test. By that point, I had begun working with a climate think tank. I reached out to environmental engineers, transit wonks, and battery experts and asked if we could build a model from scratch. We were guided by an approach called “industrial ecology,” which studies industrial systems in terms of their material and energy flows. In this case, we were looking for the amount of lithium required to meet the needs of fully electric mobility. We pitted a scenario in which all traditional cars had been replaced with electric ones against a scenario in which more Americans rode to work, school, or shopping centers in clean energy buses or got around by bikes or by walking. In other words, and in sharp contrast to prevailing models, instead of comparing a zero-emissions world with one in which we continued to rely on fossil fuels, we compared multiple zero-emissions worlds with one another.
We didn’t stop there. Having set our imaginations free to roam, we tinkered with additional features of the worlds we were building. We imagined denser cities and suburbs, with less sprawl enabling less car use; cars with a range of battery sizes (American EV batteries are twice as large as the global median); high rates of mineral recycling and recovery. The futures we mapped out ultimately ranged from an electrified status quo to a fundamental shift in how Americans live and move. We did try to temper our dreaming with a healthy dose of realism. We only tested changes in the cities and suburbs, understanding the obstacles to rapidly building out mass transit in rural America. Even in our most transformative vision, the energy transition would still require tens of millions of EVs.
Achieving a globally just energy transition requires understanding supply chains in reverse, starting from what we produce and consume and working backward to their material inputs, and further still, to the relentless scramble for new extractive frontiers.
I expected these different green scenarios to entail distinct material footprints, measured in the total volume of lithium mining. But the results shocked me. The best-case scenario—smaller batteries, more recycling, denser cities and towns, and more mass transit use, walking, and cycling—requires 66 percent less lithium than the worst-case scenario (batteries get even bigger, suburbs stay sprawled, recycling is nonexistent).That percentage difference was based on a cumulative assessment across all the years we modeled (2023–2050). If instead we just look at 2050, the final year, the spread was more dramatic: the difference in lithium demand between the best- and worst-case scenarios was 92 percent. That’s in large part because recycling takes time to have an impact on reducing mining, with recycled feedstock increasing as the batteries from EVs purchased in the 2020s, ’30s, and ’40s reach the end of their life and become available for material recovery.
These findings put the supposedly zero-sum trade-off between climate action and protecting landscapes and communities from extraction in a new light. The futures we conjured showed that it is, in fact, possible to achieve climate targets without the alarming amount of mining predicted by all other forecasts. And there’s more: Increasing mass transit use and housing density will get us to zero emissions much faster than swapping every traditional car for an electric vehicle. To put it bluntly, a path to zero emissions that relies on electrifying individual cars is not only the most resource-intensive route to zero emissions, but also the slowest route to that urgent goal. We fully recognize that the political and even cultural obstacles to realizing our most ambitious scenario are formidable. But the prevailing approach not only requires much more extraction than socially necessary. It also runs afoul of climate science.
The implications of this modeling exercise completely changed the way I viewed mining. It suddenly dawned on me that extraction is not a problem that can be addressed solely at the sites of mining alone. It is absolutely vital to govern extractive frontiers better, improving environmental regulations and enforcing Indigenous rights. But some of our most potent tools to reduce the harms of mining reside elsewhere, all the way at the other end of far-flung supply chains. These tools take the form of the policy choices, investment decisions, and built environments that shape how we cut emissions from polluting sectors like transportation. The responsibility for protecting the Atacama’s watersheds does not rest only with Chilean bureaucrats, nor should Atacameño communities have to shoulder the burden of standing up to multinational mining firms on their own. We in the United States are also implicated in the supply chains that start in Chile’s northern reaches. Achieving a globally just energy transition requires understanding supply chains in reverse, starting from what we produce and consume and working backward to their material inputs, and further still, to the relentless scramble for new extractive frontiers.
The task of achieving a just energy transition is daunting. But this holistic view also opens up possibilities for action, revealing multiple and dispersed levers for reducing mining’s harms. Policies that promote alternatives to car use, reduce sprawl, encourage more compact batteries, and require recycling would all reduce the scale of mining needed for carbon-free transportation.
Confronting emissions as a holistic problem, rather than a purely technical question about the fastest way to electrify an ever-growing fleet of personal automobiles, entails a leap of political faith. New models and forecasts like the ones my colleagues and I built at our think tank, the Climate and Community Institute, can help us tell galvanizing stories about the future we want. If we can see and feel that alternate future, desire and describe it, then we can commit to creating the foundations for it in the here and now. Forecasts chart a path from our present to the world we want to build. But seeing something and building it aren’t the same. Better research or data can only carry us so far; concrete, bold, even risky actions are the stuff of real change. What practical steps can we take today to call forth a different tomorrow?
We can start by demanding supply chains organized around justice for everyone they touch, rather than profits for just a few. Just as any workplace is simultaneously a site of exploitation and locus of worker power, and any mine is at once a setting for extraction and a potential scene of community resistance, the supply chains of green technologies are both a means of domination—of people and of nature—and fertile ground for making the world anew.
Supply chains are currently organized for profit, but they can nonetheless become arenas for grassroots organizing and unexpected alliances. Lithium battery supply chains don’t just link mines to factories to consumers, or upstream to downstream corporations. They also connect Indigenous land defenders and urban transit users, workers manufacturing e-bikes and battery recycling advocates, bus drivers and avid cyclists, and climate activists and promoters of dense, walkable cities and towns. These communities, workers, and advocates are already bound together by the global operations of green capitalism—and in many cases, are already organizing locally. What would it take for them to join hands and fight for globally just supply chains, together?
Today, a coalition like this may feel impossible. Electrifying the status quo to stave off the scariest warming scenarios already seems hard enough. Electrifying while also changing engrained habits, like car dependency and suburban sprawl, seems far-fetched, if not utopian. But fear of radical change is misplaced: Radical, turbulent, accelerating, and yes, frightening, change is already baked into the carbon in the atmosphere and in the reign of sclerotic elites, predatory corporations, and moribund institutions.
There is no escaping the harsh reality of mounting instability—political, economic, ecological. This turmoil touches everything, including the material underbelly of the energy transition. This is the paradox of extraction: It is at once the most enduring feature of the world order and among the most prone to disruptive conflict, whether between Global North and South, between geopolitical rivals, or between local communities and huge corporations. Such contests are asymmetric, yet over the past century have provided openings to challenge the entrenched power relations of our global economy.
Extractive frontiers are so sedimented that they may feel like second nature, but it is precisely from these frontiers that we must begin again, from the underground on up.
Adapted from Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism by Thea Riofrancos. Copyright ©2025 by Thea Riofrancos. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Trump’s Roll Back of Vehicle Standards Will Boost Big Oil at US Drivers’ Expense
This action flies in the face of overwhelming evidence of climate harms and the legal basis for the determination, as my colleague Dr. Cleetus pointed out in her blog when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin first noted his interest in targeting the finding. This, like so many other recent administrative actions, will be challenged in court and may eventually be determined to be illegal, as it most certainly is.
Congress established EPA to protect public health and welfare—and since climate change pollution is clearly endangering these things, EPA has a responsibility to do something about it. By eliminating the endangerment finding, EPA is trying to avoid its responsibility to act. This isn’t just bad news for reducing climate emissions and the worsening impacts of climate change that Americans are dealing with on a daily basis from intensified storms to extreme heat, but it’s going to mean spending more at the pump and fewer choices at the dealership.
Reducing Climate Emissions From US Cars and Trucks Is a Big Deal
Transportation—including the cars, trucks, and buses plying our roads everyday—is the LARGEST source of human-caused climate pollution in the U.S. accounting for 28% of the annual total. And globally, the U.S. is second only to China in overall annual climate pollution. So yes—our cars and trucks and the gasoline and diesel they burn DO contribute to climate change. And reducing those emissions is important for getting global emissions—and global temperatures—under control.
I don’t know anyone who wants to spend thousands of dollars more on gas—but that’s the path we are headed down by eliminating standards.
Alongside the endangerment finding action, the administration also announced it was eliminating all EPA vehicle greenhouse gas standards for passenger cars and heavy-duty trucks. Despite the most recent passenger car and heavy-duty truck EPA standards regulations being less ambitious than our analysis suggested was feasible, they represent the largest climate action the U.S. has ever taken, Combined, the latest greenhouse gas standards for cars and heavy-duty trucks would eliminate a total of approximately 8 billion tons of heat-trapping emissions—more than one year of total U.S. climate emissions. EPA’s Draft Regulatory Impact Analysis, released alongside the announcement to eliminate the standards, completely ignores the value of these benefits noting, “The EPA does not attempt to monetize the value, if any, of changes in GHG emissions that result from the proposed action.” We’ll be taking a closer look at what other logical and analytical gymnastics the administration is including in their assessment as we prepare comments on the proposal.
Performance-Based Vehicle Standards Deliver Results
History has shown that vehicle standards are extremely effective at reducing pollution. Smog-forming pollutants, carbon monoxide, and dangerous particulates from tailpipes have all declined substantially from the 1960s and ‘70s and led to improved air quality and public health. This progress on pollution, along with steadily growing vehicle sales, occurred despite constant cries from the auto industry over the past half a century claiming vehicle pollution standards were bad for business, unachievable, etc. etc. Vehicle standards have been an essential tool to achieving lower tailpipe emissions and more efficient gasoline models as well as bringing an ever-increasing variety of electrified models to market.
(Photo: EPA)
The proof is in the pudding. Take this chart from EPA’s latest “Trends Report.” While fuel economy standards accelerated emissions reductions after the oil crisis in the 70’s, in the absence of further regulation (resulting from automaker and oil industry opposition) the emissions from new vehicles rose in the 1990s and early 2000s. Why? Because contrary to what the EPA argues in its proposal, the market does not work to innovate and cut fuel in the absence of regulation. Over the last 20 years, new fuel economy and emissions standards, currently being eliminated by this administration, have pushed new vehicles to the lowest level of emissions on record.
The data don’t lie: Vehicle standards work. Freed from binding fuel economy and emission standards in 90’s and early 2000’s, vehicle pollution increased as well as gasoline consumption. Recent fuel economy and emissions standards being eliminated by this administration have pushed new vehicles to the lowest level of emissions on record.
When Trump offered to payback oil industry donations with political favors, I don’t think oil executives themselves could have even dreamed up that this wishlist would be granted within seven months of his reentering the White House.
This latest attack on vehicle standards specifically covers EPA’s greenhouse gas standards for cars and commercial medium and heavy-duty trucks. The first of these EPA standards went into effect in model year 2012 for passenger cars. The figure above illustrates the declining emissions that have occurred for the average vehicle since their implementation. But here’s a more specific illustrative example of what that means in the real world.
The Toyota RAV4 is the best-selling SUV in the U.S. Before EPA standards, it went 15 years with essentially zero improvement in fuel economy or emissions. Thanks to EPA standards, buyers now have options that are 29-46% more efficient. These more efficient options are saving consumers hundreds of dollars at the gas pump every year while cutting emissions in half for the cleanest models. I don’t know anyone who wants to spend thousands of dollars more on gas—but that’s the path we are headed down by eliminating standards.
(Photo: EPA and DOE)
EPA’s standards haven’t only delivered more choices of lower polluting, and less fuel consuming gasoline cars and trucks. These standards have pushed traditional vehicle makers to add more hybrid and electric vehicle models to their lineups and encouraged new EV-only companies to bring products to market. The increased availability of hybrid electric (HEV), plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV), and Battery Electric (BEV) models driven by vehicle standards (as shown in the figure below) has given consumers more choices to cut their gasoline bills or eliminate them all together.
(Photo: EPA)
Global warming emissions from new vehicles, no matter the type of vehicle, are at record lows, largely through the use of hybrid and plug-in electric technologies deployed by manufacturers in response to EPA standards, exactly the technologies that this administration is now attacking.
While the above examples are about passenger vehicles, the story is similar for the heavy-duty trucks. As pointed out in our report on electric truck progress, Ready for Work 2.0.
“A few years ago, electric vans, buses, and trucks were essentially concept vehicles—today, more than 70 models of zero-emission MHDVs are being put to work around the country thanks to investments spurred by EPA greenhouse gas emission standards and state zero-emission vehicle requirements.”
“The momentum behind zero-emission trucks has swelled over the past several years, with registrations of electric trucks reaching record levels each year. In 2019, there were fewer than 1,000 new zero-emission trucks, buses, and vans registered in the United States.”
Now there are 150,000 thousand electric medium and heavy-duty vehicles ranging from large pick-up trucks and delivery vans to a growing number of big rigs.
(Graphic: UCS/S&P Global Mobility 2025 including class 2b through class 8 vehicles.)
Reductions in heavy-duty truck emissions, fuel consumption, and the increasingly common sight of electric delivery trucks on our streets is no accident. It’s the result of policies like EPA’s vehicle standards.
Instead of trying to continue this success on reducing emissions, lowering consumer costs, and helping American automakers lead the global transition to clean vehicles, the Trump administration has moved to eliminate EPA actions that reduce climate pollution.
Oil Companies Win. You Lose.
While some vehicle makers are guilty of fighting against state and federal vehicle standards so they can continue to wallow in global mediocrity, the oil industry is the one laughing all the way to the bank. For decades the oil industry has used fraud and deceit to avoid the realities of climate pollution, so it is no surprise they want to prolong the life of combustion vehicles as long as possible. They just scored big time in Trump’s tax bill, as my colleague details in their recent blog, and were already basking in the glow of Congress’ decision to pull the rug out from under the state clean car and truck standards and neutering the Department of Transportation’s fuel economy standards by eliminate compliance fines. Now they get another gift in in the elimination of EPA rules that would result in U.S. car and truck drivers spending billions more on gasoline and diesel than they would have otherwise. When Trump offered to payback oil industry donations with political favors, I don’t think oil executives themselves could have even dreamed up that this wishlist would be granted within seven months of his reentering the White House.
How much will the rest of us be paying to the oil industry, you ask? If all of these rollbacks take effect, there’s nothing stopping the auto industry from backsliding on the progress that’s been made. But just looking at the benefits of the rules that have yet to take effect gives a good idea. Owners of new passenger cars subject to the standards between 2027 and 2032 would have saved an estimated $6,000 over the life of the vehicle. Eliminating the Phase 3 heavy-duty truck GHG standards for model years 2027 through 2032 will increase net costs to truck drivers by $2 billion. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg.
A Farce, With Consequences
The attack on logic, reason, and just plain common sense might be comic, if it wasn’t so serious as pointed out in my colleagues “danger season” blog post. The irony of this past week’s extreme heat event impacting more than 150 million Americans happening at the same time as the administration’s latest climate-denial move was painfully apparent in this Fox News clip.
This is the time to accelerate, not throw us into reverse. Instead, the White House is seeking to trash these vital protections, using the flimsiest and most self-serving of rationales, showing yet again it is willing to sacrifice public protections for polluters’ gain. For U.S. drivers, it means less choices at the dealership and more pain at the pump.
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