Interview with Gaia Osborne, graduate student and documentarian

Sierra Nevada Ally

Electric vehicle sales are expected to grow significantly over the next decade, with Goldman Sachs estimating EVs will make up more than half of all global car sales by 2035. More electric vehicles on the roads means more batteries needed to power them.

Right now, lithium-ion batteries are the standard for electronic devices from smartphones to vehicles. Extraction of this metal is expected to grow tenfold over the next decade, according to one estimate. Millions of tons of this material lie underneath Nevada’s sea of sagebrush, and new lithium mines have been proposed to get the material.

Gaia Osborne is a graduate student at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, who produced a mini-documentary looking at one of these mines, the Thacker Pass mining project in northern Nevada. The Sierra Nevada Ally’s Noah Glick recently sat down with Osborne to talk about the film, the mine and the people fighting it.

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