With India also discovering a very large amount of lithium reserves very recently, lithium might end up being abundant and accelerate the EV transition even faster.
If I had a nickel mine for every time I've pointed out to someone that the "proven reserves" of lithium on a USGS two page PDF are completely uncorrelated to the amount of lithium that will soon be discovered, I'd be extremely wealthy with cobalt. (Cobalt is a common byproduct of nickel mining.)
Even looking at the year-after-year increases in known lithium resources over the past decade shows massive increases.
Lithium will not be a scarce material. The only difficulty in a speedy transition is planning: deploying capital at the right places so that there's not too much mining nor too little. Making enough battery production capacity, but not too little.
There is a ton of money to be made in batteries, but there's a lot of risk due to uncertainty of size of market and timing.
Exactly. Lithium scarcity is a similar mindset to what peak oil was in the 90s. It seems like an issue given our current understanding, but there's a huge economic incentive to discover new deposits and make their extraction economically viable.
Some of the the largest oil fields currently known were only discovered in the past decade or two. I wouldn't be surprised if battery materials follow a similar discovery curve.
Peak oil was both right and wrong at the same time. Higher prices slowed demand growth, and made tight-oil financially feasible at the same. This combination made the peak much closer to a plateau.
I also believe (but could be wrong), that a not insignificant amount of the success of oil alternatives today (which helps to slow demand growth) is due to a flurry of research that started with the price shocks of the 70s that were definitely not due solely to supply-demand issues.
I'd say peak oil was 99% wrong. The main argument against it was simply that market forces would find a way to deliver more oil if conventional oil started getting expensive. That's exactly what happened. As it turned out, the main solution the market has come up with is fracking, but if fracking had not been invented, it could have been tar sands, coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, more ultra-deepwater drilling, political accommodation with pariah states, etc etc.
It all depends on whether we define fracked oil to be actually the same energy resource as conventional. Which, in EROEI terms, it isn't - it gets a compatible result at a higher cost.
In that framing, peak oil happened - we just proceeded to reframe reality around a substitute and choked down a decade of stagnation in the energy economy.
IMO that was another problem with the peak oil theory -- the obsession with EROEI. They would say that Saudi oil was, say, 30 EROEI and shale was 5. If you flip that upside down though 30 EROEI = 97% efficiency, and 5 EROEI is 80% efficiency. Of course you'd rather have 97% efficiency, but 80% works fine.
Yeah, I don't buy the EROEI argument either. I do think that non-demand based price shocks spurred research into more expensive (usually lower EROEI) sources of petroleum much sooner than a purely open market would have. 1975-1985 was about as expensive (inflation adjusted) as the early 21st century, and we didn't have a huge shale boom then.
Petroleum reserves are basically tsr sands and fracking which is low EROEI, even with the industry externalizing costs like methane leakage, vast freshwater consumption / pollution.
For example it used to be you burned a barrel of oil to get 20 or 30 out back in the easily accessible light sweet crude days.
EROEI: the metric deployed against solar and wind in the past, that was quickly erased from public discourse once it became apparent that modern fossil fuels did worse on it.
All those people complaining about EROEI no longer seem to have the slightest concern, despite it being a significant hurdle for future fossil fuel use.
I haven't tracked any of the peak oil stats and petroleum stuff since it became apparent that BEVs / Solar / Wind are the strategic winners.
And the EROEIs get even worse if any sane carbon taxation / sequestration costs are applied, if any widespread damage from fracking is charged (as in set-your-tapwater-on-fire stories), or the horrific environmental destruction of tar sands (which use ungodly amounts of freshwater to try to get the oil out of the mined sands).
I guess that claimed EROEI on fracking is 5-10x. No idea what it is like in practice, I assume there should be a distribution that could be analyzed.
Tar sands peak at 5x, and I bet that is only in the best case. Why tar sands is still a thing, does any Canadian know? Is this because oil/gas has penetrated the Canadian government lobby and made it too big to fail?
>Is this because oil/gas has penetrated the Canadian government lobby and made it too big to fail?
You're almost certainly onto something here. Much like why water cooled nuclear reactors are still a thing, despite molten salt reactors having been around for about 60 years (as in, before any of those water cooled reactors melted down with a catastrophic hydrogen explosion, caused by you know, all that water).
We don't have an energy shortage. We have political obstructionism.
The EROEIs give for solar and wind appear to be mostly propaganda. Factoring in infrastructure costs like transmission lines and storage makes it apparent that solar/wind are enormously expensive:
"True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh"
Interesting I see an opposite trend but that's a 7 year window. AFAIK discoveries are slowing and the general trend is for newly discovered fields to have lower returns on energy.
Iirc, lithium is abundant, it just is enough of a pain (and water consuming) to purify and extract that you want to bootstrap with a high purity source.
More than total lithium, I would want to know how pure it starts and what the access to water is like at any given site.
The tensions don't exist because of its oil. They exist because of their natural resources which may or may not include oil. Look all over africa for examples.
Being rich in natural resources is a bit like being a really hot girl around a bunch of abusive predatory men. They'll shower her with gifts and tell her how amazing she is until she says: "no, I don't want to sleep with you" and all hell breaks loose.
Saudi Arabia is hardly a desirable model, though enough money admittedly papers over a lot of human rights abuses. In the above example it's like a hot girl with severe mental health issues.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund is a strategy to escape the resource curse. It's like a hot girl with high self esteem and a handgun in her purse.
Alaska is one state in a country that has other things going for it. It's like a hot girl with a protective older brother.
Less discussed than Alaska, Texas uses it's oil money per its constitution to fund its university which seems pretty shrewd mitigation to the resource curse at a high level. Also no income tax for its citizens.
If Alaska would be a separate state maybe there would be a reason for concern /s
I think 'resource curse' got it a bit backward although effect is straightforward and obvious - it allows a-holes aka bottom of society to rise, gives them extra booster rockets to rise fast (ie capture diamond mine, or oil fields like ISIL and sell via Turkey which was their primary income).
Norway got it right because well its Norway, similar would happen if it was found ie in Switzerland. Some basic human decency ingrained deep in population and thus also in politics and those who set things up for future. If that's not present and society is more everybody-for-themselves, then yes it becomes the curse and more burden than benefit.
This is not the resource curse. It's basic economics actually: when there is a natural resource to be exploited, most investment, human capital and attention goes to that resource. This is because that's where the biggest returns are. Furthermore, the country's currency will get very strong, so it will make exporting anything else very difficult.
Combine these factors and you end up with a country trapped in producing mainly only that one natural resource.
This is also why Saudi Arabia is building seemingly insane megaprojects: to lure in enough production and construction to kick start a on industry unrelated to oil.
Alaska doesn't count because it was part of the US, which was already a developed (for the time) economy.
Saudi Arabia, Norway and a few Gulf min-states (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain) are the rare counterexamples that kind of prove the rule. There's a great FT article[1] about the Iraqi man who helped lead Norway's oil revolution in the proper direction, and it was really not obvious. Why Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain managed to use their resources successfully (of course to an extent a matter of debate, human rights being a big problem in most of those places) and other dictatorships failed, even in similar scenarios (same religion, royals) is a tough one to answer.
norway is the only example of someone who broke the curse.
Saudi, gulf monarchies and all other examples that you can come up with(except maybe russia, but it's a very big and not that simple to analyze), either already fucked by the curse, or still in the process(which is pleasant enough, so most people think it's ok), the metric is that other parts of the economy have meaningless growth rate compared to resources extraction, at best. Sometimes it's negative. Add growth of corruption and inequality to that as well.
Their economy is pretty much exclusively oil-based, very few other industries.
If you run the numbers their fund will fund current expenses for only a decade or so if oil stopped completely. Which isn't really enough time to start other industries for their citizens to have jobs.
So they're basically completely dependent on oil, with maybe a short runway for afterwards. They did not break the curse.
you argue that the curse is to have majority of your economy oil/resource extraction related businesses.
But my point is that the curse is that there is a stimulus to stop doing any other businesses. And it seems that Norway has largely avoided that by forcing as much oil money as possible out of the economy(oil fund)
Pretty cool examples bro, Saudi Arabia had a bloody history, where the brits helped the current monarchy take over in the 18th century. The US has 5 military bases there btw. One might consider that a (now) peaceful occupation.
I didn't know Alaska was a country.
I don't really know much about Norway's petrolium history, but I can't say I'm surprised that they weren't invaded for their oil, which is in the sea to begin with.
Oil arguably started the tensions (particularly, oil was the impetus for the CIA/MI6 orchestrated 1953 Iranian coup, which arguably set the ball rolling with all that followed.) But I don't think oil is the reason tensions presently continue; if oil suddenly somehow became a total non-issue that interested nobody, I think tensions with Iran would continue because at this point it has become a grudge match between Iran, Israel and America, with America strongly siding with Israel. These grudges would not be automatically resolved if the matter of oil were no longer a concern.
I believe even ocean water is a potential source of Lithium if we ever get constrained on more direct sources. Unfortunately it's not really Lithium holding back EVs, it's Cobalt and a few other rare earth metals. Also not sure how much having Lithium locked up in a heavily sanctioned country will help the big battery manufacturers. Edit: typos
If you were to electrify all the vehicles in the world today (and the developing world hasn't even got lots of cars yet), it would take 1/2 the world's known supply of lithium. and those batteries only last about 8 to 10 years.
Lithium become abundant, no way. Not with the amounts we're using up per capita and the enormous population on this planet. the green revolution is just getting started and there's definitely not enough to go around.
Your numbers prove the exact opposite of your conclusion. If, with the tiny amount of lithium that we have bothered to look for, we can already provide for 2x our current car needs, then we are golden.
Batteries last far longer than 8-10 years, I'm not sure where you are getting that bad number. But even if you were right, our very first attempts at recycling already recover 95% of input metals:
And every year we discover massive new amounts of lithium resources, because until the mid 2010s, nobody really bothered to look for lithium.
FUD about amounts of lithium should be abandoned as a stall tactic; they no longer pass basic sniff tests arms are easily shut down hard. Other stall FUD needs to be invented if the energy interchange is to be stopped.
The total energy cost of producing and using the Tesla Model S Long Range battery pack for example, including battery production, lithium extraction, transportation, the energy cost of building the Gigafactory, battery transportation, battery recycling, diesel fuel required to generate electricity to charge the battery, and the environmental costs of battery disposal and battery fires, is equivalent to about 3,088,431 barrels of oil.
This analysis is off by orders of magnitude. Tesla shipped 1.3 million vehicles in 2022, each of which contained a battery pack [1]. 3 million barrels of oil contains 6.1 * 10^15 joules of primary energy [2]. World primary energy production in 2021 was 5.95 * 10^20 joules [3].
Combining these numbers, Tesla's 1.3 * 10^6 battery packs shipped in 2022 would have taken 7.93 * 10^21 joules to manufacture. This is more than 10 times annual global energy production and is clearly in error.
Another way to spot-check and reject this number is to note that 3 million barrels of oil would cost in the neighborhood of $240 million. Getting that much energy from coal might cost only $75 million per vehicle but it's still a proposition that would see Tesla losing approximately $100 trillion dollars per year on sales of 1.3 million vehicles.
I'm so sick of these articles. The amount of 'lithium discovered' articles are crazy. Nobody cares, lithium is plentiful, it exists in lots of places and we haven't even looked for it much. If people really search for it, it would show up in many more places.
The problem with lithium is not finding a resource, but doing the necessary chemical process to get it to be battery quality lithium. Lithium is not like base metal mining at all. Lithium is more like a specialty chemical, each resources and purification process has to get separately designed, and has to be individually verified by each battery (or battery materials company).
There are only very, very few companies who actually sell battery grade lithium, and lots of junior minors with lots of lithium in the ground and very little chance of developing it.
Iran will not be developing its own battery grade lithium anytime soon, no matter how large their resource.
Iran and Russia have never really been friends. Just because they both don't like the US, doesn't mean they like each other.
China and Iran aren't friends, but of course China is willing to trade with them, and they might mine some lithium, but the refining would be done in China. No way will China give Iran what it needs for its own lithium industry. Maybe if Iran really pays for a lot for it, but even then, this would be a very long process.
Pop quiz: name the world’s largest producer of lithium.
Lithium production is important but lithium is not the next oil. It’s not going to dominate the world economy. There aren’t going to be wars fought over it. And we will ultimately extract plenty of it to build EVs.
Thanks for the emphasis, but production isn't defined the way you want it wishfully to be defined. Lithium ore is not very useful at all. It's refined lithium everyone cares about and China is responsible for ~60-70% of the world's lithium production:
Which brings me back to my point - big lithium deposits in countries with unfriendly relationships with the US and its allies isn’t as big a deal as people think.
If it were so simple then oil refineries would exist everywhere, yet they don't. This suggests that major investments in refining infrastructure pays huge dividends for the nation.
Oil refineries exist where they do largely as a function of technical complexity and shipping costs (ie pipeline infrastructure).
Just because it’s called “refining” doesn’t mean that lithium refining is anywhere near as complex as oil refining.
The component of the oil analogy that does correlate is the fact that oil refineries are generally situated close to where the end products are consumed. Which in the case of lithium is batteries, the production of which is indeed largely sited in China as well.
That is to say, China doesn’t control the supply of lithium, rather they control the supply chain of lithium based goods.
That may seem like a minor difference, but the resolution to that is categorically different.
Large scale protests like this are frequently externally influenced. I really wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years time when top secret documents are released to archives we don't find that these protests are being financially supported or organised by USA/Israel/the west.
yeah like an example from centuries ago a world away is relevant. Situation in Syria or "democratic" Iraq is probably more illustrative of what's in store for them.
> yeah like an example from centuries ago a world away is relevant.
"I don't like where this is going so I'll just arbitrarily disqualify the line of argument even though it's logically valid."
> Situation in Syria or "democratic" Iraq is probably more illustrative
Cynicism is a hinder to progress. Reality is messy, but if we tell people to stop aspiring, things can only get worse. Tunisia after the revolution has had its problems but it's still freer than it was, for example; same for Algeria. Chances are even going from a theocracy to a secular dictatorship on the Egyptian model, for example, would be a significant step forward.
USA isn't a democracy, it's a republic. And "the people" was defined to exclude native Americans, people with dark skin, poors, etc. Altogether a very weak flavor of "democracy".
> There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.
Forming the United States also took a lot of compromise. If nobody was willing to budge on these archaic issues we wouldn't be here today. It doesn't change the vision that all men are created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
> Large scale protests like this are frequently externally influenced
They are often externally helped, but considering the casus "belli" in this case was an extremely natural one (a popular reaction against a brutal abuse of power that resulted in the violent murder of a woman for not properly wearing the mandated veil), it's very doubtful the protests were started by foreign-affiliated/financed parties.
Uh, wut? "Agency" isn't magical omnipotence. There are always people in every country with interests and views that align with some foreign interest that is capable of bankrolling or otherwise supporting and making possible what previously was not.
You frame it like its a bad thing when it very much isn't; the Iranian people deserve to be freed of the current tyranny under which they struggle. A more western-aligned Iran would be best for its people and for the entire Middle East. It also doesn't negate the brave efforts of the people there protesting the regime.
You forget that the Iranian revolution of the 70s was a direct result of the Iraninan government and the shah being a western puppet state, and that the people actually overthrew that government in support of their own religious government, no external politics involved. In fact the West pretty much stood helpless as they really didnt want that happening, hence why the hostilities now. Since ancient times, Persia always went their own way, even after the Arab domination in the 8th century they emerged as a reshaped Islamic Persia, rather than just a province.
The problem is that the previous regime (which was more or less installed by the US in 1953) was tyrannical in its own way. It's not an endorsement of the current regime to say that the 1979 revolution was founded on a lot of legitimate grievances.
The govt of Iran has savvy foreign policy, and it's remarkable that it had stayed afloat despite being targeted by monstrous crimes like Stuxnet and assassinations.
Why would it be doomed? What reasons do you see for this to happen?
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran has a long and recent history of being a highly orderly society.
How democratic it would be is another question, but very likely it at least is not going to be as oppressive. Even if the resulting state were closer to Singapore than to Switzerland, it would still be a serious relief for the population.
Iraq is not Afghanistan, it had similar conditions to Iran and ended up a disaster. In fact, can you name even one thriving democracy in the Middle East? Except Israel of course, which has history and culture that is very different for that region.
As much as I can tell, Iraq as a powerful independent state was destroyed by Mongols in 1300s, and never restored.
Since then, Iraq was controlled by various foreign powers, as a colony: partly Persian, partly Ottoman / Turkish; since late 19th century, it was increasingly under British control, and since 1970s, under Saddam Hussein: independent but rather undemocratic.
Iran was independent and powerful since 1500s, and it even converted the previous waves of invaders to its culture (somehow similar how the Manchu invaders gradually converted to the Chinese culture). While obviously not democratic, Iran was not a cultural backwater, up until the Islamic revolution in 1979. Even under the power of ayatollahs Iran's urban societies feature strong citizen movements demanding more liberty and equality, e.g. women equality: women had much more rights under the last Shah regime, and people remember that.
In general, I suppose that Iran, had the current theocratic regime been overthrown, would not turn into a failed state, much like Russia hasn't become a failed state after the Communist regime fell. (Regarding perspectives of EU / US-style liberal democracy there, I'm much less certain, though chances are.)
Probably not. The US has huge and readily accessible lithium reserves in the Salton Sea in California, the issues with extracting it are the availability of water and the cost of environmental management around the site. We don't need other countries' lithium, as such.
“We can't extract it because of availability of water in a region that doesn't have enough water for existing needs” certainly sounds a lot like we need to get it from elsewhere.
We could just build a desalination plant and a pipeline for the water. Seems a lot more sensible to me to eat the actual costs for extraction than to keep buying it from other places where they either don't care about the environmental impact or it's just folded into the price, and we become wholly dependent on those suppliers.
Extracting it isn't really the problem, it's literally bubbling up to the surface in the form of mud. The water is just needed for dilution as part of separation.
Two weeks from now, we are going to discover that those reserves are basically inaccessible, and all of this was a publicity stunt to bait naïve investors.
It's not sickening, it's a poignant reflection of history, especially since the current status of Iran was effectively caused by a previous western coup to capture the oil production.
Of course it’s hard to say what course history would have taken without this but I fail to see how the current theocracy / securocracy could have had a foothold without it (revolutions always just swap elites).
That was 70 years ago. It has been 44 years since the Shah's government was overthrown in the Revolution.
How long will people continue to pretend the entire modern history of Iran is the deterministic result of Western actions? That in the Shah and even in the Revolution, Iran possesses no agency of its own, a passive object only of Western force?
But to the point: there is absolutely zero chance of the US going to war to secure lithium reserves. And that is leaving aside, in the first place, the fact we are on the cusp of a Li->Na transition. It is the laziest kind of armchair commentary, pattern matching ("foreign country", "resource", "America liberate") with zero grounding in reality.
So it's not about robbing Iranians of agency (who are among the most distinguished and ancient cultures), just stating that 1953 meddling gave rise to a regime that possessed these characteristics, and without the coup, different dynamics would have been at play.
I totally agree, there is zero chance of war over lithium.
there's nothing strange about a country going to war over a resource. Has been happening for a long time in history, and there's no reason that anything in the modern world changed human nature.
Except that lithium isn't valuable enough to go to war over at the moment.
Now, the threat of being able to develop and fire nukes, on the other hand, is something that might be war-worthy.
We've grown up in our latte sipping bubbles, far removed from geopolitical competition for resources.
America's postwar boom years resulted in a hegemon that largely avoided conflict. Now that power is more widely distributed amongst peer competitors, we're going to see the resource hungry animals we evolved as come to the forefront. There will be a great deal of contention, and some of it will be heated.
If I had to bet, we'll see more war this century than in the last. Ukraine is just a harbinger of what's to come.
I'm sorry but this ignores the history. Vast swathes of Africa, Latin America and Asia were in conflicts and turmoil, sometimes due to the same hegemon and her allies. The only region that was mostly conflict free in the post WW2 era was Europe and North America.
He clearly means on our doorstep. There are almost no Americans left alive who have ever lived through war coming to America. The worst we've had was 9/11 where 3000 people were killed. It lead to us flipping out, starting multiple wars over, and cheering on the government broadly restricting civil rights in a bout of mass fear, anxiety, and paranoia.
By contrast about 3% of all humans alive were killed in WW2, over 6 years. 3% doesn't sound too bad, so let's contextualize that. In the United States alone that would be more than 10 million people. That's about 4,620 people killed every single day for 6 years. The amount of suffering that actual war brings is something almost none of us living today in the West can even begin to imagine. I mean can you imagine multiple 9/11 scale events, every single day, for almost 2200 days?
Being honest, I actually had to double check my math because my god that's just an unimaginably vast amount of suffering and death. And WW3 will almost certainly be vastly worse because the first bloc to start losing is going to go nuclear - which will result in a comparable response from the other bloc. This whole hegemony thing has really got to end, or we as a species are going to end.
I didn’t read that in their comment, and since I’m not American I assumed that they are talking about the world. Everyone knows USA is a hegemon in a global sense and not a regional sense. The past 70 years were not some conflict free utopia for rest of the world.
But I agree with your general point that we need to avoid further conflicts else we’re doomed.
Nuclear proliferation is considered an antipattern for a reason. It's not about fairness, it's about reducing the chances of an accidental nuclear war. Yes, one factor is the power balance of incumbent nuclear states, but it does no invalidate the argument for avoiding proliferation.
> Now, the threat of being able to develop and fire nukes, on the other hand, is something that might be war-worthy.
No it isn't. The US helped plenty of bad regimens get their hands on nuclear weapons and did nothing to prevent it. In fact, if its about nukes, then maybe Israel is the clear problem. They are non signatory to the NPT and almost certainty have secret nukes (likely developed partly with stolen data from the US). So if a 'thread of war' is appropriate, Israel should be the target, not Iran.
Iran on the other hand is a signatory to the NPT, they also have never attempted to develop nuclear weapons. Their program was always monitored under the NPT. A bunch of fake evidence for nuclear weapons was 'discovered' on a laptop in Egypt by Mossad. This evidence was widely reject by literally everybody outside of the Mossad, including the CIA. The whole global intelligence community agree, Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons.
That didn't stop Israel right-wing to try to use it to get the US to attack Iran for them over it. According to them, Iran is 'one year away from nukes' literally since 1990 so this was just the latest in a long series of such claims.
Iran was not even developing its own enrichment, they had a deal with France to handle the fuel production and France would be responsible for monitoring and taking the nuclear waste back to France. This deal was then killed by the US (Bush) who basically threatened sanction on France. Only in response to that did Iran set up enrichment facilities.
This was then used around 2008-2010 to start a panic about Iran nuclear weapons in a blatant attempt to repeat the Iraq war against Iran. All the right wing think-thanks (with lots of money from Israel, Ratheon and Loockeed and friends) were busy publishing mostly fake nonsense base on manufactured evidence to push the narrative. Thankfully everybody was sick of that shit because of Iraq.
This lead to Obama years of extreme pressure and results in Iran implementing a monitoring regime specially developed just for Iran just they could prove that they were not developing nuclear weapons. Of course all that didn't stop Trump from instantly leaving the deal.
War with Iran is literally an insane concept. Like delusional level of insanity. Even if they developed nuclear weapons, it would be insane to go to war over them. Its a nation with 90 million people, horrible geography and the ability to blockade the most important oil export route in the world.
Do people really have to say that jokes about war which inevitably lead to the death of many in order to have bigger and better phone batteries at a reduced cost is sickening?
You can't fix the problem, period, certainly not by talking about it. The internet offers catharsis, not praxis. Americans have no more ability to affect their government's imperial capitalist agenda than they do to command the tides, others outside of the US even less so.
I disagree. I think you are close to the truth, but Iraq war was not seen in a very negative light by US citizens, or people in EU for that matter. Which was what media pushed. But people can think on their own. Somebody in the thread may want to argue that the war was a good or necessary thing, somebody will say otherwise and maybe the first one will check Wikipedia, and learn new facts that may change his mind in the future. Bit idealistic, but if each person can make 2 people more educated, the we have an exponential function.
> but Iraq war was not seen in a very negative light by US citizens, or people in EU for that matter.
Millions of Americans protested the Iraq war[0]. Globally it resulted in the largest protests in the world at that time. It didn't matter.
Of course you're correct about the zeitgeist of the US at the time, the government, the media and the American right were pro-war and they controlled the narrative. And I have to concede in hindsight there have been times where popular collective action has been effective, just never against starting a war AFAIK. When the US decides it wants a war it seems like there's really nothing anyone can do about it.
Not sure what made you think I was talking about how the US felt about it. They obviously loved it very much. As luck would have it, the US became net exporter just a few years after the conquest
A very large part of this is because of literally outright lies about how Iraq was connected to 9/11. The administration knew that this was the only way they could convince anybody.
The hardest part of my job is connecting Iraq to 9/11
- Bush
You're trying to portray people that joke about war as though they are trying to bring a thoughtful discussion. They aren't and you aren't being helpful by muddying the discussion by presenting them as such.
These are reddit quality comments that don't belong here.
I think the target of the jokes is the hypocrisy of the ghouls behind those wars, who insist they are about freedom and democracy. No one is laughing at the suffering of the victims.
Humor is one way of dealing with things we can't control, my guess is that most of those commenters would love to not go to wars every few years. We don't exactly have co from over what the government t does whether we like to believe it or not
While it might be sickening, more importantly it's against the guidelines[1] of Hacker News because it does not contribute to the conversation. As a result, I've flagged this thread.
> According to a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Industry, Mine, and Trade (MIMT), the lithium deposits could contain some 8.5 million metric tons (MT) ready for extraction, which would make it one of the largest global discoveries.
Could? This article title implies they have, but the text implies they are searching still and have not actually found it.
The text implies they know exactly where it is but have not yet sufficiently measured it in order to create rich 3D volumetric maps laying out the various zouns of mineral concentrations at what PPM \ PPB 's ( parts per million | per billion ).
Technically this makes it a "resource" (ie. guesstimate) rather than a "reserve" (drill mapped with a solid plan on extraction methods, costs, estimated profits etc. to a JORC (or equiv) standard).
And besides that Lithium is even harder to transport than oil is. You need blue team to occupy the mines and secure a perimeter so that red team cannot disrupt not only extraction but also transportation to the nearest port.
He made an insensitive joke tweet when people were accusing him of getting lithium from Bolivia. Last I checked, Tesla denied sourcing any lithium from Bolivia, and no external investigators have managed to show a connection.
He deleted the tweet as soon as his ambien/amphetamine cocktail (or whatever tf he's been on lately) wore off.
For the record, I agree it was probably a joke, albeit one that reveals something true about how he and people like him view the world. But if the idea is that Musk personally supported the coup because the Morales government wouldn’t hand the rights to Bolivia’s lithium reserves over to US firms, Tesla not using batteries made with Bolivian lithium would be expected.
Bolivia doesn't really have a serious lithium industry and they are and were a long way away from having it. The whole idea that any of this has to do with lithium is just a lie made up by Bolivan politicians to play on the old (true) stereotypes. And it clearly worked, that story always sells well and of course the American leftist picked it up and just ran with it, weather true or not.
Musk or Tesla has literally 0 reason why they should be interested in Boliva. They have never before or after had any interest in Boliva. Boliva is not special, its just one of many place that have lithium and have politicians making a bigger deal about it then it actually is. Musk has been telling people for 20 years now that lithium is plentiful and that anybody who thinks it isn't, is a fucking idiot.
This is just on of those stories where a bunch of fake claims, and few jokes (or comments in bad taste) lead to a one of these viral stories that since then has been taking on a mythical status ever expanding status. To the point where I read people actually believing Musk himself was basically organizing the coup himself (amazing that he can lead multiple companies and overthrow governments at the same time).
From what I understand the lithium bottleneck seems similar to the lumber bottleneck in 2021. It's not the lack of trees but the lack of processing facilities.
But instead of lack of workers or technical know-how it's the pollution produced.
There is quite a lot of lithium in Europe already, e.g. in Serbia [1]. However lithium mining is extremely environmentally destructive, and those sorts of things usually aren't accepted by Europeans.
It did in 1953 when Prime Minister Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil. The US and UK launched a coup to stop that and installed a dictator (who was initially reluctant to go along with this and had to be convinced). Then SAVAK cracked down on domestic secular left opposition for decades, aided by the CIA.
Yup, and the fascinating part was, that the US actually admitted doing that (well.. declassified some documents regarding this, 60 years after the fact).
So yeah... who know what they're denying now, and what we'll find out in 60 years
I have pics of my grandfather standing and talking with the Shah, and then sitting next to him at a large banquet as if the two of them were the important people in the room. It's still a mystery to me what he was doing there or what their relationship was. My grandfather was a professor of economics at Columbia University who was a leader of relief efforts such as in Armenia after the genocide there. He definitely did good in his life, but whatever his involvement was with the Shah makes me wonder.
UPDATE: more information makes its way onto the internet over time, and while I've done searches on him in the past, this tidbit is now available via Google that wasn't before; he was "Director of Relief for the American Persian Relief Commission in Teheran, Iran in 1919" and I guess he was still involved there when the Shah took over and they developed some sort of relationship.
Just a small clarification, you're talking about a different Shah - Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the guy who was in full control after the 1953 coup, took initial power in 1941 with foreign help (to help out with WW2 due to the strategic location of Iran for oil and supplies to the USSR) from his father, Reza Shah, who took power in 1925 from Ahmad Shah Qajar, who would have been the Shah your grandfather has pictures with.
Which means China will buy it. And that might be good: right now China is the largest carbon emitter in the world, so everything that helps them transition rapidly helps us too.
China's emissions are the largest not because they are behind in transitioning. They are largest because they have the largest population.
It would probably be better to help the countries that have a combination of high per capita emissions and large populations that are being slow about transitioning.
For example, suppose we wanted to cut total CO2 emissions by 2.5 billion tons of CO2. There are 3 countries that could in theory cut their emissions by that amount: China, US, and India.
For China to do that, they would need to cut back to where they are similar to Spain, Italy, or Great Britain when it comes to how green their energy sources are and how much of what they do depends on emitting CO2.
For the US to cut CO2 emissions by 2.5 billion tons of CO2, we'd have to cut back to where we are where China is now on green energy and processes. That's how far the US is behind in transitioning. (Largely because the US is the only high emitting large population first world country that regularly changes its mind about whether or not there is any need to transition). (There are countries way farther behind like Qatar and Kuwait, but their populations are small enough that it doesn't really matter at this stage).
For India to cut 2.5 billion tons of CO2 they would pretty much have to stop doing anything that emits CO2 because their total emissions are just a bit over 2.5 billion tons.
Yep, US sanctions were working in the past, when US economy dominated the world. Right now sanctioning a country just means that you are giving China a free reign over it.
It also helped in that past that if a country stopped doing whatever it was that drew US sanctions the US would lift those sanctions.
Take Iran. The US and several others sanctioned them over trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran stopped the weapons program, agreed to inspections to verify compliance, and the sanctions were lifted.
Then the US put back sanctions for domestic political reasons, and so now when Iran does something the US does not like (such as supplying Russia with weapons to use against Ukraine), the US doesn't really have a way to deal with that because (1) they've already got Iran nearly maximally sanctioned, and (2) even if they could find something else to sanction Iran over there is no reason for Iran to believe that changing their behavior would lead to removal of that sanction.
No, by "sanctions" I do not mean any of those things. I mean the economic prohibitions against trade with Iran meant to dissuade them from continuing their nuclear program. The ones that Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [1] negotiated between Iran and China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the US in order to have lifted.
Anything that takes resources from Putin is worth it. China does not currently wage war in the center of Europe and neither it use terrorist attacks against civilian population in countries that compete with them.
That's because they do all of the above, and more, indirectly, using Russia as their puppet. They are too smart to do this openly. But you know, Putin would not start the war if he wasn't sure of China's support.
A strong argument for the existence of a diety is hilarious-if-true outcomes like the Ayatollah getting to have both oil & lithium to remain fully hedged through the EV transition.
Too improbable for a fictional movie, but here we are. Life, as always, is stranger than fiction.
The degree to which we’ve been blessed with resources and opportunity to do the right thing (and have consistently chosen to do the dumb thing) never fails to amaze me. Infinite power from the sky that’s cheaper than fossil fuels; vast reserves of lithium to help oil-producing nations smoothly transition us away from oil; huge and unusually-enriched Uranium deposits we could use to build power (but instead used to build bombs) etc. It’s easy to see where the Garden of Eden parable came from.
Nah the garden of eden comes from an extinction event where almost all humans were wiped out. The only survivors were trapped in a small piece of fertile land at the equator and everything else was solid ice.
It would be easy to see that garden as a gift from god after you’ve seen everyone else freeze to death. Then you just need a reason to leave e.g overhunting or overpopulation or some dispute.
Then the myth would be that someone living there did something and our group had to leave paradise and go into the thawing wasteland. Pass that on for generation after generation and it becomes metaphorical.
I'd guess the 'Garden of Eden' as referenced in the Abrahamic religious traditions might have been in today's Sahara:
> "Paleoclimate and archaeological evidence tells us that, 11,000-5,000 years ago, the Earth's slow orbital 'wobble' transformed today's Sahara desert to a land covered with vegetation and lakes."
If you're referencing the likely near-extinction of humans ~74,000 years ago, it's not clear anyone in the relatively recent past would have remembered that:
Speculation: The Eden parable came "probably" from the mesopotamic delta which thousand of years ago was in the middle of persian gulf (average depth: 50m) as sea levels were lower and whatever civilization/population was there had to migrate to norther and drier places when sea levels raised (even quickly with waterpulse-1a/b/c)[0]
> > The degree to which we’ve been blessed with resources and opportunity to do the right thing (and have consistently chosen to do the dumb thing) never fails to amaze me
It’s the curse of natural resources.
When you have “the stuff” you feel like you don’t need to talk to others, spending time and human resources on talks and diplomatic relationships.
In the context of global politics, military and intelligence where everyone’s ego is all the way up their ass, not wanting to talk is interpreted as disrespect and hostility. And so tension ensues, add the language barrier, culture barrier etc. and pretty soon you are stuck with the old USvTHEM
Another country similar to that is Venezuela, they too have plenty of fossil fuels and sun and lithium.
Thorium is literally in the ground all around everywhere and incredibly cheap to extract, basically free. And yet we don't use it. If we did, we wouldn't really need that much lithium.
This is a lot like saying, in 1995, that if the internet was going to be a useful thing to society, then everybody would already be using it.
Utilities are slow. And not so bright. They are using old technology that hasn't changed for decades, has reached its peak, and doesn't advance. Utilities are conservative.
If something new comes out and is better, it's going to take them a decade to even realize what's happening. Then it's going to take decades for the old multi-decade existing equipment to age out.
And if the technology is cheaper, there's a very good chance that utilities will heavily resist providing cheaper electricity because in many markets they are regulated monopolies, with a fixed rate of profit. Cheaper energy prices mean less profit.
In reality, solar is cheaper energy today. Providing 99% of our energy by solar, wind, geothermal, and storage is cheaper than our current energy mix in California:
And year after year, solar, wind, and storage get cheaper, and we have not yet reached the inflection point of the logistic curve yet. The genera form of Moore's law is Wright's law, and it applies to renewable energies, and is no longer in effect for fossil fuel tech.
Utilities are huge financial organzations that have to provide secure generation and transportation over decades. Just because solar is cheaper now doesn't mean you can replace everything in just a few years. Also Solar might work great in California but Nebraska not so much.
> Also Solar might work great in California but Nebraska not so much
If you think that solar doesn't work fantastically in Nebraska, then I think you need to reevaluate the data, and start holding your utility to account.
Solar works great in Minnesota, with lower solar resources than Nebraska. The key difference is whether the utility will allow a financially beneficial decision to made, not the fundamental economics of the technology.
Contrast the planned 2023 solar additions in yellow dots on this map:
So while you are right that utilities are slow, which was the main thrust of my original comment, we must also acknowledge the financial incentives of utilities to distort a setup that can not even result be called a market.
Electricity decisions are made based on what the utility perceives will give it the greatest profit, with all their biases, and without regard to what will deliver the best overall cost-optimal solution for reliable power.
The main point is people in Northern lattitudes needs most of their energy in the Winter, especially winter nights. Its a very different problem to Southern states where peak energy use is hot sunny days.
As for distortions the biggest problem with retail users is that panels have changed the market but people still expect to use the old rules. Eg be self sufficient 320 days a year but expect eletricity on demand at the same low rates on the few days they need the grid. That isn't scalable and home solar people are getting an unfair advantage from the system, which is why utilities (rightfully) dont like it.
Seriously, check out where solar is getting installed on that map.
Cold wonders are not a reason to avoid solar. Look at where they are getting installed around the north east and the Great Lakes. They will laugh at your Nebraska winters.
These are mostly generic tax reductions for energy, and would apply equally to solar or any other energy source.
For example in the UK, "fuel and power for domestic use" is subject to the reduced VAT rate of 5%, instead of the standard rate of 20% charged for most items.
This is the kind of thing that gets labelled a "fossil fuel subsidy".
it is a special(well I wish) kind of thinking where EVERYTHING belongs to the government, so the notion that someone gets to keep more of their own produce can only mean subsidy. It is really quite sick when one thinks about it
Correct--while the sun sends an enormous amount of free energy our way, it's maddeningly diffuse and requires enormous investments of energy and materials to capture it in a usable and reliable form. The Wynn in Vegas has a 160 acre solar farm in some of the sunniest land in the country and it provides...almost enough energy to power a single large hotel.
None of this is to say that solar power is bad, just that we should have measured expectations.
Dense is a subjective term, and solar is without a doubt a dense enough energy source.
Compare the amount of land needed to power the US with solar to the amount we use to brew a small amount of ethanol as a minor energy sourced. We can completely power the US with a fraction of the land that we currently use as a subsidy for corn farmers, who grow more corn than we can eat.
While I'm less optimistic than you on solar power, you're absolutely right about ethanol, which is easily one of the worst and most inefficient power sources we could have possibly chosen to invest in. It's a significant indictment of the
US political system that so much money was shoveled into it.
Now include the largest uranium mines like inkai in your area calculation. Or alternatively any recently opened coal mines.
Then include that any solar panels feeding variable load can go wherever (like roofs and parking lots) and take no land but instead enhance the other use.
Then include tilting agrivoltaics (which increases yield for heat sensitive crops and makes animals healthier).
Dedicated utility PV in a good area has a higher area energy density than any scalable power source except gas. Include dual use and it has the lowest land impact worldwide. Specific power is pretty damn good too, about 20W/kg (or 5-8W/kg net, so slightly better than nuclear).
Strategic installation of solar panels certainly helps maximize efficiency, and is in general a great idea, especially in some areas. But to your point about the space taken up by uranium and coal mines, that's only a fair comparison if you also calculate the mines needed for things like lithium, copper, etc. that would all go into a solar-oriented power grid.
It's not because they're no longer needed once the panel is produced. That would be analogous to the sand and copper and steel and indium and cadmium and gadolinium and chromium and zirconium and nickel and silver in the nuclear plant (and fuel cycle). All of which except silver outmass minerals of similar rarity and mining impact in the solar panel (and that is quickly changing). Even then it's questionable because most of the nuclear reactor cannot be recycled, but the solar panel legally must have recycling prepaid in many jurisdictions.
You're welcome to include mining for the entire supply chain of solar and exclude the supply chain of the generator for thermal though, it doesn't change how one sided the land use is in solar's favour.
"No longer needed once the panel is produced"
The land used for the mining isn't land that we're just getting back--given the costs of making it useful again for anything else, space used for a lithium mine is in almost all cases essentially going to be gone for good. This is of course true for other mines as well, but your notion that lithium is an exception is a curious one.
"All of which except silver outmass minerals of similar rarity and mining impact in the solar panel (and that is quickly changing)"
Nuclear reactors require relatively small inputs of these metals compared to the metals used in solar panels, and the huge capital invested in making solar panels less resource-intensive could also be applied to nuclear, if we wanted to do so.
"Even then it's questionable because most of the nuclear reactor cannot be recycled, but the solar panel legally must have recycling prepaid in many jurisdictions."
But again, reactors are small compared to the millions of panels that are necessary to be the equivalent of one plant, and furthermore plenty of those materials can be and are recycled, especially in France (the entire history of the American nuclear energy program have created less waste than solar panels have in just a couple decades). And, again, innovations that make solar panels more recyclable (which we absolutely need because right now they mostly just produce massive amounts of toxic waste) could also be invested in nuclear recycling. I did get a good chuckle out of your vague "many jurisdictions" though.
> The land used for the mining isn't land that we're just getting back--given the costs of making it useful again for anything else, space used for a lithium mine is in almost all cases essentially going to be gone for good. This is of course true for other mines as well, but your notion that lithium is an exception is a curious one.
Solar panels aren't made of lithium.
> Nuclear reactors require relatively small inputs of these metals compared to the metals used in solar panels, and the huge capital invested in making solar panels less resource-intensive could also be applied to nuclear, if we wanted to do so.
[Citation needed] Solar panels don't need tonnes of indium per GW or gadoliunium or an ongoing 100kg of copper per MW per year. Modern panels on a modern racking system have a higher capacity weighted specific power than an EPR and a lower metal fraction. The cells (which are still over 90% silicon) are only about 2% of the total mass of a module and weigh less than the raw uranium for an equal energy output, let alone the rest of the reactor and supply chain.
That last is just more lies. All of the solar panels ever produced could fit in the tailings pit of Husab dug out for a single year of operation. Half of the US dragging their feet doesn't discount the fact that most new PV in the civilized world is recyclable and mandatory to do so.
Do you have anything honest to say or just the same slimy lies?
Solar panels aren't made of lithium, but they are made of a wide variety of other things that have to be mined (which, again, uses up space and has to be taken into consideration), and the batteries which will be necessary to make them a viable part of the total transition to renewables will require massive amounts of it--lithium mining is expected to double in the next few years, and renewables are a major driver of that.
Nuclear reactors use less copper overall than renewable energy sources. (https://help.leonardo-energy.org/hc/en-us/articles/360010919...) Uranium, by the way, is also recycleable--most fissile material can be reused, and the amount of waste produced is tiny.
And yes, the total amount of waste produced by nuclear energy is miniscule, and could fit in a much smaller amount of space than is taken up by solar panel waste, which is well over a quarter of a million metric tons. Both are small compared to, say, coal ash, but solar disposal does have significant costs and can and does produce significant waste.
And one last thing--you're hypersensitive and pathetic. I started this discussion agreeing with your main point and trying to observe something straightforwardly relevant and you've been having a tantrum in response the entire time. Log off.
Again, quantify them rather than vague hand waving. 1kW net of PV module has about 100g of metal in it and lasts 25-50 years. 1kW of fuel rod lasts 3-6 years and requires 130g of enriched uranium, a bunch of rare earths, 2kg of copper and steel for handling and requires extracting 1kg of raw uranium. The amount of lithium 'required' is zero, but if you choose to use LFP for diurnal storage, you need about 1kg. Roll together mining impact for battery, PHES, and solar and you've still not covered the uranium mine, let alone all the steel, extra copper, indium, gadolinium, chromium and so on. Inkai is over 460km^2 with a much larger zone in which the ground is too poisonous to inhabit. If you want to see how much copper is actually needed, maybe rather than using an unsourced article from 2018, look at the most recent IRENA or Frauenhofer PV reports. Racking systems have changed completely, modules are higher power and have less metal, and connection voltages are in the kV range now.
> And yes, the total amount of waste produced by nuclear energy is miniscule, and could fit in a much smaller amount of space than is taken up by solar panel waste, which is well over a quarter of a million metric tons. Both are small compared to, say, coal ash, but solar disposal does have significant costs and can and does produce significant waste.
Again. Compare for me the volume of the tailings pit of a typical open pit uranium mine like Husab with the volume of every solar panel ever produced. A few hundred grams of metal encased in glass for an entire lifetime of energy is not 'significant waste'.
> And one last thing--you're hypersensitive and pathetic. I started this discussion agreeing with your main point and trying to observe something straightforwardly relevant and you've been having a tantrum in response the entire time. Log off.
Projection much? You tried to push lies and propaganda, now you're having a tantrum when challenged. Every topic where nuclear shilling isn't immediately banned is full of the same set of talking points that have been debunked between years and decades ago.
What on earth do you mean by 1kw of fuel rod? Your quantifications make no sense and cite no sources. You're going to need to be more specific than "read the latest reports"; this report (https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Technical-P...) from 2021 for example makes it very clear that copper is not a trivial concern for renewables at all. If you have serious evidence for your unclear and uncited claims of "how much is actually needed", then go right ahead. none of your other numbers are cited either; your assumption of 1kg for lithium battery looks like you just made it up on the spot the way you did with your bizarre earlier falsehood about how much copper a nuclear reactor consumes--and a transition to a renewable-centric energy system will require significant battery storage capacity, so it's not a question that can just be dismissed.
A fuel rod assembly with 500kg of uranium produces about 200,000,000 kwH over its lifetime (https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...), which comes out to 400k kw per kilogram of uranium, or 400 kw per gram. The amount of rare earths in each solar panel may be relatively low, but it also uses a significant amount of silicon, which as a metalloid has to be mined. Beyond that, none of this even addresses the differences in intensity of production; because nuclear produces its lifetime energy much more quickly than a solar panel does, the relative density of solar that you need in order to provide a comparable level of power over time is considerably unbalanced.
"Again. Compare for me the volume of the tailings pit of a typical open pit uranium mine like Husab with the volume of every solar panel ever produced. A few hundred grams of metal encased in glass for an entire lifetime of energy is not 'significant waste'."
I'm at a loss for how to explain to you that this a fallacy on your part. I'm talking about waste production, and you're trying to compare apples to oranges by bringing up uranium mines instead of comparing waste production of the different methods. That you're so intent on repeating this obvious fallacy suggests to me that it's the best you can do. I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but the anti-rational fanaticism of green energy cultists is going to push the world off a cliff.
You can't even distinguish between energy and power, now you're mixing kw and kWh. A reactor with about 100t of fuel rods produces around 1GW and refuels every 3-6 years. Ergo 100g of refined uranium (plus zirconium and gadolinium, then caesium indium and silver for control rods).
The toxic slurry in a uranium mine is waste from producing energy. It outmasses everything else you are talking about combined by orders of magnitude and is rarely dealt with in any permanent or safe way, see the Indian village of Kadapa or any of the mines in Niger or Uzbekistan for examples.
Then bringing up the most abundant element on earth as if mining it is a relevant impact is another huge stretch. Quartz mining doesn't even need the same grade of sand as concrete. What an utterly intellectually bankrupt claim.
You're the one trying to concern troll over the space and minerals used by PV. Demonstrate that the total land use and mining impact of the entire supply chain is actually higher.
I also note you've cherry picked a report that talks largely about vehicle batteries but tangentially mentions thin film panels (an obsolete technology being abandoned) rather than monocrystalline, and then doesn't quantify it per MW (hint: the numbers in it are nowhere near your claimed 4t/MW). Where is all this copper supposed to be? You're claiming that there's 100kg of copper hiding in this photo https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
You're very narrowly trying to compare SNF with the entire solar module, ignoring the reactor, the upstream fuel supply, the low level waste, and the waste containment. The sheer stupidity of thinking you have a coherent enough lie is mind boggling.
Significantly less, but not debilitatingly less. For a panel in direct sunlight and adjusted to point directly at the sun, the ground value is 1,050 watts per square meter.
If I've learned anything from the Civilization games, you need to have top-tier resources in the desert hexes. Otherwise, the gameplay is too unbalanced
I just cross referenced that against Google Earth and your comment is completely misleading/incorrect. I’m kind of irked by how interesting your claim was compared to how wrong it turned out to be. It is completely dominated by an arid climate with tiny swathes inlaid into it.
The climate map shows how it is comparable to the most desert regions of the United States, such as Arizona, New Mexico, or Nevada.
Apologize if I over-stated its diversity. California might have been a better comparison, but I do not think it is completely misleading and incorrect.
Put the Koppen map of California next to Iran for comparison… Maybe if you limit it to just Southern California you can get close to the same proportion of arid/desert. But I think that pretty much matches the common conception of Iran.
Virtually the entire country is arid / steppe except for a few tiny strips, where the (beautiful) videos you shared were taken.
Contrasted with the United States which does have a lot of arid space (30%?) but is dominated by temperate climates. Not even including Alaska. Your claim that Iran is comparable to the United States in that respect is just totally wild lol
Huge vast swaths of Australia and the United States are effectively deserts, but they don't "define" the country. It mainly comes down to what pictures you see in the news when something happens, and Iranian cities look "deserty".
This is the real reason, and I am guilty of it, it's because of the Persian cultural influences and some pictures, people just assumed, it wasn't until I saw some travel shows or more social media that I realized its closer to what I saw in Turkey.
Or Douglas Adams. Clearly such such a bizarrely improbable abundance of resources that are so mind-bogglingly useful could not have happend purely by chance so it is the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
You could have gone with an oppressive regime brutalising its own citizens on the basis of a fundamentalist interpretation of a religion, or that they are helping to arm a country currently engaging in imperialism and genocide again under the pretence of a holy war, but instead you went with “racism”. Nice.
Turkey had a great position controlling access to the Black Sea during a major conflict, then Earthquakes happened. Given the oil and Americans in the region, I wonder if they are fracking....
Fracking does not and cannot cause large, deep earthquakes like the one recently in Turkey, in which plates significantly move in respect to each other.
They can cause very shallow, weak earthquakes, where the top of earth's crust slightly moves.
“The Feb. 25 earthquake was only a magnitude 4.9, which would not traditionally be considered very dangerous. But it was able to destroy older and more vulnerable buildings because it was so close to the surface -- only about one kilometer deep according to the new study”
Wonder what the deity was busy doing when the US and UK overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran to install a puppet regime that was so hated, that the current one was welcomed in?
There was a whole series of other opposition groups that fought in the revolution and a whole clerical faction that backed other groups and opposed Khomeini, like Mahmoud Taleghani who mysteriously died in 1979. While Khomeini centralized the opposition, it wasn't without violence. A lot of people seem to have believed he was little more than a figure head for the revolution and would step aside when the shah was gone and that the Bazargan government would pick up where Mosaddegh had left off. Before Bazargan even stepped down the Revolutionary Committees were disappearing critics and the Hezbollahi were beating journalists.
Basically every country has lithium. And lithium is just one of many materials needed for EVs.
> Life, as always, is stranger than fiction.
No it isn't. Lithium is very, very common. Pretty much every large country will find plenty of lithium if they go look for it. There is plenty in the US, plenty in China, plenty in Australia and so on and so on.
It would be entirely foolish for one to confuse theatrical displays of piety staged in Islamic Republic for any substantial connection to the said deity.
Apparently chinese are try to extract it.[0] They also just got this oil deal recently.[1] I think the mineral extracting is actually good, regardless of who does it. It's increasing total GDP in any event.
I think you are being rather naive that the Chinese won't simply bribe the right people and any benefit from the extraction actually reaches the Afghan people or increases their GDP in any meaningful way.
They can try anyhow, who knows how well that will go. Might be their turn to get stuck in a quagmire over there.
Afghanistan is about the worst possible place to extract resources from. Yes, yes China is trying, but its China, its a billion people thy are trying literally everything everywhere.
China will find Afghanistan just as useless as the US and literally every other empire for 5000 years.
And even when it's broadly right, it manages to be wrong (ask it for coal reserves and it'll give you a real world source, a list of countries which is correct, and some percentages which... don't match the source it claims to have taken them from)
You might as well put "well according to my mate Dave who claims to know everything"
People have been conditioned to mistrust everything, even the premise of objective reality, to the point that they don't believe it matters - ChatGPT being wrong some of the time is still seen as preferable to the perceived status quo that all media, politicians, scientists, scholars and everyone on the internet actively lie to you and manipulate you all the time.
I think your numbers are total's in that country. The article claims this is the biggest single "reserve" (I assume they mean deposit?). But your core point is not wrong: there is still much more available in the counties you list...
* Resources: All the mineral we know about, including that which is not economically or technically viable to mine
Numbers (2021) I've seen show total world reserves as ~ 20MT. Total Resources are more like 90MT.
Bolivia has a large percentage of the resources (ca 20MT), but no appreciable reserves (according to USGS) and I haven't seen production numbers from it.
nsenergybusiness.com is being fast and loose and not particulalry precise with technical mining jargon.
JORC standards have it that:
A resource is that amount of a geologic commodity that exists in both discovered and undiscovered deposits—by definition, then, a “best guess.”
Reserves are that subgroup of a resource that have been discovered, have a known size, and can be extracted at a profit.
While this is an Australian standard it (and near equivilants) are the standards used on the largest mineral exchanges on the globe ( TSX et al )
The above 21 million tonne figure for Boliva is a best guess resource guesstimate and not an actual Proven Reserve estimate backed by sampling + geophysical survey + drilling + staged Technical Reports.
For that matter Iran here is asserting that they have an actual reserve backed by drill data and tech reports which leaves the question of:
Of course not, but The West (NATO and its allies) uses those excuses to support coups, dictatorships and regime changes that benefit American companies. The objective is to plunder the country of its natural resources, and control it politically and militarly. Do you think the west gives a flying fuck about human rights? Do you see protests erupting in Saudi Arabia or Dubai or other western allies? They dont care about human rights, they care about stealing and controlling the resources of another nation.
Just some context:
If the Iranian regime falls this is actually a good outcome, even if it has backing from western interests.
Having said that, up until now Western governments have largely ignored the plight of the Iranian people, leaving them to fend for themselves.
If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources.
It's still a good outcome, but if it happens I don't think it will have came from the good will of western governments.
> If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources.
s/ lithium / oil /
.. and now we're looking at the 1953 Iranian coup d'état in which the US and UK deposed a democratically elected government to prevent them poking into the details of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and exposing the degree to which Western goverments were "helping" the Iranian people (err, sorry, themselves) with resource royalties.
That led to 25 years of despised western puppet government and an eventual overthrow that over compansated and lurched backwards into theocracy .. leading to today.
Even sadder, the US tried to claim it was because of communism. When it was basic nationalism. Communism has historically been the reason. Muslim also fits the bill ala the differences between PK + BG treatment vs India.
Keep in mind that the ~1.5B cars + trucks in the entire world combine for only ~10% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Also, if your electricity is made by coal power plants there's no point using EV.
EVs are significantly more efficient in turning energy into movement, and generating power in a dedicated power plant is far more optimized than it is within an ice car. Even if you are getting all of your power from coal power plants, the emissions are likely close to parity if not marginally better.
That is the worst case scenario however. Most places in the developed world only get a percentage of their power from coal, and over the lifecycle of the vehicle, that percentage is set to reduce. It makes little sense to take about the state of the world today, when a new vehicle is expected to be on the road for multiple decades.
Your talking points are tired and not helpful. This is a transition that needs to happen. There are better critiques to be made.
Incorrect. Even if your power grid is the rare case of 100% coal power, an EV running on that grid would account for about as much CO2 as a ICE vehicle getting 50mpg which is better than most gasoline powered vehicles.
Since almost all power grids use a mix of fossil fuels and carbon-free sources, the actual numbers are much better than that worst case.
> You're looking at it with a very north-atlantic centred perspective.
So? You say that like it is a bad thing.
I didn't say Iran is completely illogical in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The comparison to North Korea is most apt. I don't want another North Korea situation, one is enough thanks. This one would be worse.
Why? Because Saudi Arabia and Egypt and others will then likely decide they have to get nuclear weapons too. I don't care about "fair", I want fewer countries with nuclear weapons not more - for obvious reasons.
There is a difference between unprovoked act of aggression against non-nuclear country for the sole crime of not wanting to associate with you and a literal theist dictatorship working on nuclear weapons who are open how exactly they plan to utilise them.
>"who are open how exactly they plan to utilise them"
Any sources on how? Have they declared that they will attack another country with nuclear weapons? Or it is simply them suddenly becoming immune from invasions / attacks?
It's not "not wanting to associate with you", it's more like:
Wanting to join an aggressive unfriendly nuclear-powered military alliance that's been expanding and approaching your borders for the past couple of decades.
That's not what caused the war. Interest in NATO membership came later, before 2014 there was basically no support for it in Ukraine.
What resulted in all this was that Ukraine was negotiating a very favorable trade deal with the EU. They had a presidential election, which was won by a guy who promised to be friendly with Russia, but also push through the trade deal. Only, when the trade deal was almost done, Putin called him, they talked for several hours, and at the end he declared that he was shutting down the deal, and would make one with Russia instead.
This was extraordinarily unpopular, because the terms of the EU deal allowed for Ukrainians to work as guest workers in EU. Doing that, you could earn more in three months doing unskilled labor than you could expect to earn in Ukraine with a degree in a year. Russia had nothing similar to offer. Because of this, there were massive protests. Then the president ordered troops to fire on the protests, and the protests escalated enough that the president fled. After that, Russia invaded Crimea and Donbass.
Two thirds of Ukrainians opposed NATO membership in 2013. Support only became a thing when there already were Russian troops in Ukraine.
Nope, not remotely the same as Iraq. I like how some whataboutists here are arguing that Iran was treated poorly and therefore "deserves a nuclear weapon" and at the same time that it is all a conspiracy and they aren't developing one - despite overwhelming evidence from none US sources.
You of course are referring to the deal that had the US air freight $400m in the middle of the night to close the deal, only for the Iranians to completely ignore the deal anyway?
Poor Ayatollahs. They surely deserve to be treated better. :(
And yet regardless of how poorly it was treated or "what is fair", which is all the whining is ever about, nobody can remotely come up with a reason for why Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be a positive development for anybody.
This is a dangerous game, regardless of your politics.
Astroturfing does not necessarily imply bots, comrade.
> nobody can remotely come up with a reason for why Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be a positive development for anybody.
Whether it's a positive or negative development really doesn't matter. What matters is what actually happens once that occurs.
When India and Pakistan developed and tested nuclear weapons, we didn't see proliferation or development of nuclear capability in the region. Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, etc. didn't start their own nuclear programs.
So in the event Iran gets nuclear weapons, it's likely nothing of consequence will happen.
> When India and Pakistan developed and tested nuclear weapons, we didn't see proliferation or development of nuclear capability in the region
Both hostile reactive (Pakistan against India) and (at least semi-)cooperative (Pakistan, or at least AQ Khan as a rogue actor, to other states) proliferation occurred as a result of the Indian and then Pakistani nuclear programs.
When India did it, it did lead to proliferation, specifically, in Pakistan. Pakistan’s program lead to (as well as their own bomb) proliferation through the AQ Khan network (to North Korea, as well as several states that never, at leadt yet, tested a weapon.) Myanmar also appears to have had a nuclear weapons program in the 00s, with assistsance from North Korea, which may or may not have since been abandoned.
Similarly, Israel's program contributed to the motivation for Iran's and Syria's programs (reactive [both of which appear to have also gotten cooperative aid from the Khan network and/or North Korea, which circles back to India/Pakistan]) and to technology for South Africa’s nuclear weapons (cooperative).
> When India did [nuclear weapons testing], it did lead to proliferation, specifically, in Pakistan.
And, in the end, neither of them has used those weapons offensively or defensively in close to 50 years (25 years for Pakistan).
> Myanmar also appears to have had a nuclear weapons program in the 00s, with assistsance from North Korea, which may or may not have since been abandoned.
Yet they haven't advertised it or tried to use them (if they ever had them) in any capacity. As for North Korea, while they do test missiles on occasion, they have not made use of any nuclear capability against another country.
> Similarly, Israel's program contributed to the motivation for Iran's and Syria's programs (reactive [both of which appear to have also gotten cooperative aid from the Khan network and/or North Korea, which circles back to India/Pakistan]) and to technology for South Africa’s nuclear weapons (cooperative).
Yet, all the focus is on Iran in terms of sanctions and fear/warmongering about them developing nuclear capability. Every single example in the past has shown that developing such capability has not resulted in any type of nuclear conflict.
> And, in the end, neither of them has used those weapons offensively or defensively
The goalposts moved pretty quickly from the original wildly false claim that their programs did not contribute to further proliferation in the region, to something like “well, neither they nor the states in the area of further proliferarion they contributed to have, to date, used nukes in anger, so it doesn't matter”.
I would suggest that waiting until after a nuclear war to take proliferation concerns seriously is... not a great idea.
> The goalposts moved pretty quickly from the original wildly false claim that their programs did not contribute to further proliferation in the region
My original claim was that nuclear weapons did not proliferate in the region beyond India and Pakistan (and there was a 24 year gap between India's and Pakistan's first nuclear tests). You claimed that:
>>> Myanmar also appears to have had a nuclear weapons program in the 00s, with assistsance from North Korea, which may or may not have since been abandoned.
But this wikipedia page[1] does not mention anything like that. Do you have a source for your claim?
> I would suggest that waiting until after a nuclear war
Again, this has not happened so far, and it doesn't look like the probability of that happening will change regardless of whether or not Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
> When India and Pakistan developed and tested nuclear weapons, we didn't see proliferation or development of nuclear capability in the region.. therefore... So in the event Iran gets nuclear weapons, it's likely nothing of consequence will happen.
Whether the domino theory is at play depends on the balance of power and specifics of each geopolitical region. It simply doesn't follow that because India-Pakistan was contained such a thing won't happen in the Middle East.
In fact you'd notice that is a pair. The counterparty to Iran having a nuke would be Saudi Arabia having a nuke, an extremely likely outcome.
Iran itself is an aggressive and expanding regional power. What is to deter Iran itself from invading others? Oh that's right, more nuclear weapons. So next Saudi Arabia will absolutely scramble to get one. 'etc.
Some Americans don't like the influence of Iran's mullahs, but the UK and US supported the mullahs and Shah in 1953 when the secular prime Minister Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil. The US backed the Shah and mullahs and SAVAK's brutal campaign against Iran's secular left into the 1970s. Then Iranians turned against the Shah and US imperial influence and here we are.
The fewer theocratic dictatorships with nukes the better. Its not that "Iran" as a construct having nukes is bad, its that the decisions to launch them lie with a few religious zealots who are known to not make good moral or ethical decisions.
> "President Bush said to all of us: 'I am driven with a mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did."
Well now this is also a practical problem. At this point, you'd have to unseat this "theocratic dictatorship" and possibly kill N thousand people in the process, otherwise they will inevitably get the nukes.
That's the thing with non-proliferation that doesn't really sit right with me, it kind of goes against human knowledge and progress. You have to have a smaller group of people ban certain kinds of knowledge from the rest of humans, and be demonstrably willing to use violence to enforce that, otherwise anyone with enough determination will eventually figure it out. Even when there was somewhat of a consensus on how to deal with that during the Cold War, a bunch of countries slipped through the non-proliferation but everyone pretended like it's ok. Now that there is less consensus on anything in this world, how will this system work going forward?
Do you honestly think, say, the United States is any better equipped to make "good" decisions? Kinda hard to make that case with nukes specifically at least...
It's zealotry all the way down, whether you explicitly name your god or not. The only irrational thing here is to claim moral superiority based off something as superficial as a particular religion.
>The fewer theocratic dictatorships with nukes the better....the decisions to launch them lie with a few religious zealots who are known to not make good moral or ethical decisions.
moral authority is only a talking point; a feint veil over the actual truth. Which is that the nuclear powers do not want more nuclear powers, lest those that aren't allies strong arm using nuclear blackmail (against, let's say, the USA's interests).
And tbh, i think ignoring moral authority, or "justice" or "peace", and talking about the truth, makes more sense.
If everyone has nukes, the probability of a nuclear exchange goes towards 1. The probability of nukes landing on your city goes towards 1. We survived the last seventy-five years due to a relentless geopolitical exercise in limiting the proliferation of these weapons, often at great (moral and concrete cost.) We won’t survive an environment where every single tin-pot dictator has thermonuclear weapons mounted on ICBMs.
Are the atheistic western elites any better? WW3 seems to be kind of a possibility now. Pushing Russia into a corner was not a smart move. Especially for Germany.
It might be a perfectly rational course of action for them to pursue nuclear weapons. And in that case it is a perfectly rational course of action for western powers to bomb/whatever to deny them.
normally who complains about it lives in a country where They are out in the open enriching uranium to 84% with lock and loaded nuclear weapons already.
Looking at how we treat nuclear vs. non-nuclear powers, you'd have to be a complete idiot to abandon a nuclear program close to producing a weapon in exchange for avoiding a few years of sanctions from a small fraction of your potential trading partners.
Hey warmonger. So which nation should bomb USA which has tons of nukes? What kind of sick reasoning is that? Iran, unlike nations like Israel, has inspections of their nuclear energy facilities by the IEAE.
Cheating what exactly? The US withdrew from the deal. And why do you think there is a difference between Iran having nuclear weapons and US or Israel having it? And do you not see the difference between cooperating with IAEA and not allowing them any access?
[1] https://innovationorigins.com/en/india-discovers-5-5-of-worl...