The Daily: The Fight for the Future

March 18, 2022

Welcome to the weekend. This week, Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which U.S. officials called "war crimes," dominated the news. But we also covered the effects of another, more subtle invasion: the takeover of cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo by investors intent on winning the race to our electric future. Below, we explain how the two are linked.

Then, we share some listening recommendations for your weekend from Sabrina Tavernise, our new, official second host of the show. You can shout a warm welcome to Sabrina here.

The big idea: The fight for the future

The Daily strives to reveal a new idea in every episode. Below, we go deeper on one of those from our show this week.

Continue reading the main story

A resident living near the Kisanfu mine in Mayeba, Democratic Republic of Congo, showed off rocks he found there that contain cobalt.

The war in Ukraine — the optics, the actors, the lies used for justification — feels like a flashback. With his invasion, President Vladimir V. Putin is trying to resurrect the past, a time when land grabs were brazen, the concept of empire wasn't canceled and military might determined superpower status.

That's a worldview global leaders have united to reject. But now the question remains: What do they stand for, really?

Continue reading the main story

The rush to repudiate Russia has accelerated a reckoning with collective values and commitments. Specifically, Western governments are now re-evaluating their reliance on Russian oil and gas — and asking what they can do to expedite the green transition to divest in Russian energy. Below, we explain just how much has changed and examine why maintaining these stated commitments to a green energy transition will prove challenging.

What has changed?

To trace the period before and after Russia's invasion in the worlds of geopolitics, business, culture and sports, is to see how Putin's attack made the inconceivable suddenly inevitable.

Diplomatically, socially and economically, Russia became a pariah. Previously polarized parliaments and strained alliances were revived. Governments issued stringent sanctions, strangling Russia and causing the ruble to crash and the country's stock market to close.

Overnight, oil giants like BP, Shell and Exxon walked away from significant investments in Russia, one of the largest producers of fossil fuels in the world. Technology companies like Apple halted sales in the country and Google pulled Russian media off its networks. Sports bodies like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee barred Russians from competing.

Continue reading the main story

But this didn't stop Putin. The war is dragging on, with civilian casualties mounting and a refugee crisis straining Europe. Now, world leaders are asking how to sustain pressure on Putin — and discovering the answer will require continued divestment in Russian energy sources.

Dependence on Russian oil and gas

Russia is highly dependent on its energy trade, with fossil fuels accounting for almost half of its exports and 28 percent of its federal budget in 2020.

After the invasion of Ukraine, Western countries moved quickly to cut off these exports. As punishment for waging war, President Biden announced the United States would cut off Russian oil imports.

But unlike the United States, the European Union has not banned imports of Russian oil and gas. According to our colleagues at The Debatable, Europe relies on Russia for about one-third of its oil and 40 percent of its natural gas. (The United States, by contrast, gets none of its natural gas and only about 3 percent of the oil it consumes from Russia.)

Germany is especially dependent on Russian fossil fuels; it is Europe's largest energy consumer and Russia's most important customer. That dependence deepened after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, in 2011, when Chancellor Angela Merkel committed to closing all of Germany's nuclear plants. Russia now supplies more than half of Germany's gas, half of its coal and about a third of its oil, according to Bloomberg.

But now, world leaders like Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland say that the West is "financing Russia's war" by buying the country's gas and oil.

"The world is paying Russia $700 million a day for oil and $400 million for natural gas," Oleg Ustenko, an economic adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told The New Yorker this month. "You are paying all this money to a murderous leader who is still killing people in my country."

The green transition

World leaders know maintaining sanctions will require a long-term ban on Russian energy sources. How to do this seems clear: Transitioning quickly to renewable energy sources would reduce reliance on Russian oil and gas. Problem solved? Not really.

Beyond political opposition and partisan gridlock, the transition to renewable energy sources has been slow in some places for a few reasons. First, changing habits is challenging and getting rid of fuel-burning appliances, like gas-powered cars and stoves, is expensive. And second, sourcing the materials for renewable technologies, and producing them at scale, often requires creating new infrastructure.

The transition is "going to be much slower and much more expensive than people realize," said David Howell, the former British secretary of energy.

As we highlighted today in the show, the green transition also has a dark side. The materials necessary for the shift (like cobalt, used in batteries) are caught in an international cycle of exploitation, greed and gamesmanship — with superpowers vying for economic control of minerals in African countries. It's a fight that extends back to the Cold War, and now has expanded to include China as a key influence peddler.

Mining these resources is time-consuming, extractive and often violent — the opposite of an easy solution to skyrocketing gas prices at American pumps. Now, many climate activists are concerned that more fossil fuels, not renewable energy, could end up filling the void of Russian oil and gas exports.

As energy prices soar, some fossil fuel executives have seized on the crisis as a business opportunity. But ramping up domestic production would take time — and could set the world up for more oil and gas shocks in the future. Not to mention a dangerously overheated planet.

LISTEN TO OUR SHOWS

To learn more about Putin's endgame — and the global energy transition.

Jose Bumba, left, pulled a 220-pound bag of cobalt from a 26-foot-deep hole in the makeshift Kasulo mine. Working conditions on such sites can be extremely dangerous. Photo: Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

The Global Race to Mine the Metal of the Future

The quest for cobalt, which is essential for electric-car batteries, has fueled a cycle of exploitation, greed and gamesmanship.

By Michael Barbaro, Michael Simon Johnson, Eric Krupke, Kaitlin Roberts, Patricia Willens, Marc Georges, Paige Cowett, Chris Wood and Marion Lozano

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Four Paths Forward in Ukraine

How might the war in Ukraine unfold in the coming weeks or, potentially, months?

By Michael Barbaro, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Michael Simon Johnson, Stella Tan, Patricia Willens, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop and Chris Wood

From The Daily team: Sabrina Tavernise's favorite Daily episodes

A high school in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, in May. Despite claims, the Taliban are likely to severely restrict education for girls and women.Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

Over the last few months, you may have heard Sabrina Tavernise, a Times reporter, stepping in as host on a number of Daily episodes. She has helmed episodes exploring the impact of the Texas abortion law, the assassination of Haiti's president and, more recently, has reported heart-rending dispatches from the war in Ukraine.

Earlier this month, Sabrina was named as the second host of The Daily. To mark her official entry into the Daily family, here is a selection of three of her favorite episodes of the show.

"The Decision of My Life": This is the story of N, an 18-year-old girl from Kabul, Afghanistan. N's life was transformed last year after the fall of the Afghan government and her family tried to marry her off to a member of the Taliban. The episode is the first of two parts; listen to our follow-up conversation with N here.

The School Board Wars: School boards have emerged as a new battleground in American politics. In our two-part episode, we visited a school board meeting in Bucks County, Pa., where the fissures in American society are evident (you can listen to the second episode here).

The Great American Resignation: Last year, we spoke to workers and managers about why it had become so hard to get staff back through the doors as lockdowns came to an end. "I had never seen it like this before in my career," one owner of a gourmet burger restaurant in Texas told us.

On The Daily this week

Monday: As the conflict in Ukraine intensifies, a look at how the Russian government has taken steps to shield its people from information about the war.

Tuesday: We spoke to Lynsey Addario, a photojournalist, about the image she took that captured the new reality of the fighting in Ukraine.

Wednesday: A look back on the lessons learned about inflation in the 1970s and how it informs today's policy.

Thursday: David E. Sanger walked us through four possibilities for what comes next in Russia's war on Ukraine.

Friday: How the global competition to dominate the business of clean energy is playing out in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

FOR FANS OF THE TROJAN HORSE AFFAIR

A closer look at key takeaways from our yearslong investigation