Posted on 03/25/2022 8:22:56 AM PDT by rktman
Yep, and I wonder who has mucho stock in lithium.
LOL! Yup! The end product is the only thing they can see. No thought given to what is required to reach the end product. Deliberate? Maybe. Just plain ignorant? Highly likely. Simply deniers. Yup. Same with patagonia and columbia and rei and all those other self serving eco wokenistas.
You are trying to apply logic to this situation. No logic is needed; electric vehicles are what the politicians and bureaucrats want. It’s that simple.
Except for the gentle guiding hand of government and army of bureaucrats deciding on everything right down to how much water a toilet uses per flush or what light-bulb you get to buy.
Collectivist ideology has become main stream and adopted by both parties trying to buy voters. Big corporations have realized the real way to become rich is with a form of corporate-government collusion (example: big pharma, agriculture, etc.).
The only difference between he parties is who gets the kickbacks and what the priorities are. For the Democrats it's some sort of social justice and the environment. For the Republicans it's national security and if given a chance they will bring their morals into legislation.
Both parties are completely fine with having other people pay for their ideology/theories, robbing people of their privacy, controlling what should be free markets, robbing people of their basic rights (free speech, movement, right to redress...), creating pseudo private government monopolies. Look at Covid as an example where it was mostly pushed by the left, or the Patriot Act on the right. No one thinks in terms of what is "constitutional," not even those government bureaucracies that are sworn in to protect it!
The American experiment is dead/history. We are a Euro style social democracy with a highly centralized federal government, government run economy, a nanny state providing from cradle to grave.
The American experiment is dead/history. We are a Euro style social democracy with a highly centralized federal government, government run economy, a nanny state providing from cradle to grave.
You can extract lithium from fracking flowback.
The US could actually produce oil and lithium at the same time.
“ electric vehicles are what the politicians and bureaucrats want. It’s that simple.”
That’s such an easy one and it goes beyond even the dirty money that politicians are getting from it. Petroleum products for fuel are produced and sold by private companies. The electrical grid and electrical production and distribution is controlled by…politicians and bureaucrats, through heavily regulated monopolies. You are going to absolutely love your new electric bill, the profits from which which will cut out the middle man and go directly to…politicians and bureaucrats. And you are going to absolutely love the constant outages brought to you by the constant and endemic lack of supply…brought to you by politicians and bureaucrats who will be pocketing all those Rich Green donations to the cause.
50 years ago in my first engineering design class the instructor walked through the economics of using aluminum in autos. With less weight the fuel economy would increase. The car would last longer, etc. The savings would more than pay for the added cost of aluminum. Then about 5 minutes before the class ended he wrote on the board the number of tons of aluminum that would be needed. Below that he wrote the total number of tons of aluminum produced worldwide. Of course there was not enough aluminum produced. The lesson being that an engineer needs to look as a project from all angles.
Electrically-powered, of course. ;-)
Take a wild guess who produces a lot of lithium.
Oh.
Microchips are going through the roof if we can even get them. Microchip production requires Industrial Neon gas for laser etching. Almost all of the Industrial Neon is produced by just three countries, China, Russia and ..........Ukraine. All production in Ukraine is centered in Odessa and Mariupol. If the Russians capture those two cities, they will control over 75% of the world’s Neon gas with China controlling almost all the rest. Russia/China will be able to call the shots as to who and for whom, microchips are manufactured. The free world’s largest chip manufacturers only have about 30-60 days worth of Neon currently on hand.
There’s a paint supply shortage, too. White or Black...Pick one!!
I thought as bad as the lithium situation is I was thinking cobalt is the critical link in manufacture of li ion batteries…
“Lithium is no longer available on credit.”
Hey, I was working at that age. The folks,in Africa though must work young for their famolies to make it though most likely.
When I was that age, I was washing police cars!
The best source would probably be North Carolina. The Federal government owns most of Nevada -- meaning they have a tighter grip on restricting mining there (much like with oil on public land).
I already was thinking about this problem. The limits of the supply, that will be the wall that will be hit in trying to convert to total EV’s. They are going to have to find a new energy source and it can’t be batteries.
Chances are there are great Lithium Deposits in Afghanistan but to mine anything will require 10’s of Billions in investment and a standing army to protect the mining companies. The infastructure required will be tremendous before any mining can even take place.
Also necessary in the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
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