Because I see so much "conflict metals" discussion when lithium is discussed, I would like to contribute that less than 3% of global lithium production takes place on small artisanal mines, in which place human rights abuse may occur.
Over 85% of lithium is produced by just 2 international corporations with large scale mines complying with multiple international regulation requirements.
> Over 85% of lithium is produced by just 2 international corporations
If I search google for this string, your post is the only one that comes up. How did you arrive at this figure?
In the history of industry, when has it ever been a positive indication that only two players control the majority of the supply?
Do these companies directly own the mines or are there partnerships and subsidiaries involved? What countries are they operating in? How long is the supply chain from the mine to the product?
How are water rights being managed? Is there correct oversight? Are any governments trading long term environmental damage for short term profits? What happens when the mines are depleted?
Albermarle - a Aussie company does about 1/3 of the worlds lithium mining.
SQM - a company out of Chile.
China - does the rest.
Each is responsible for ~ 1/3 of the worlds lithium production. Although SQM is on the downfall due to the referendum recently. And China is on the rise as companies like BYD are trying to really take over much of the larger lithium battery market, especially with EV cars but even laptops etc.
Most of this came from my own research for investment reasons.
Given this split at face value, then the inference that 85% of lithium is in compliance with international regulations is false. It would be at most 67%, and probably more like 33% in compliance actually.
Albemarle Corporation is an American specialty chemicals manufacturing company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It operates 3 divisions: lithium (68.4% of 2022 revenues), bromine specialties (19.3% of 2022 revenues) and catalysts (12.3% of 2022 revenues).
It holds significant part ownership of Australian located Lithium mines (and mines in Chile):
> Talison Minerals Pty Ltd was a mining company based in Australia. It was split into Talison Lithium (as of 2020 a 51:49 jv between Tianqi Lithium and Albemarle Corporation)
and:
> Tianqi Lithium Corp is a Chinese mining and manufacturing company based in Sichuan.
Ero: mining of concentrates is carried on Australian (and Chilean) soil and subject to Australian mining regulations (some of the highest in the world ATM) with the refinment of concentrates being carried in Malaysia (high standards), Australia (high standards), some in China (various standards).
The point being that mineral resource ownership and regulation is a complicated layered business and your inference is sketchy at best.
If you're interested in learning more you can either study more on your own or subscribe to a mineral intelligence database, eg:
Well my comment is regarding who is doing the mining and more importantly where it’s being sourced.
Some have more regulations than others.
Chile has been looking to socialize its mining ops. So the international interests in their sources has waned a bit.
China does it cheaper but with far less concern about safety, environmental friendliness etc.
Overall these companies account for the lions share of raw lithium materials in the world. But what specific percentage and who is buying from who are totally different topics. For example why would a company like BYD look outside of China for lithium for its batteries?
BYD is a big supplier of batteries for companies like Dell, Lenovo and others. And they make car batteries for EVs in China and SE Asia.
Google has noticeably deteriorated in recent weeks. Does anyone have insight into that? Like more or too much gpt? The first link here is an article from 2021:
I see plenty of results from Google about this string, from multiple sources and multiple types (video, news and classic links). Unclear about that deterioration.
Right, but Google doesn't show everyone the same results. The earlier poster clearly didn't get a very good search result. If google search is bad for some people or in some cases, it should be a concern for everyone because you would never know when you are getting that poor result.
It basically does show everyone the same results. There's some session-based reranking and ads are heavily personalized, but there's basically no personalization in regular search.
Having been in some niche commodities sectors myself, Google doesn't always have relevant information and the producers are more interested in their competitive advantages that they’ll let people guess their way to completely inaccurate realities even at the expense of the industry.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are no sources that you respect.
International regulations are often very lax and not well enforced in a lot of mining operations in the developing world.
We only know what people tell us or show us (unless you are fortunate to be able to boots on the ground investigation yourself). Companies and profitting parties in the lithium supply chain want us to believe that mining is ecologically sound and not abusing people. The first hand accounts and investigations of numerous investigators tell a different story in many areas of world.
If you read up on what lithium mining actually entails (in many areas it is not really mining per se)... you'll realize it is an ecological disaster. Big mining operations are big ecological disasters and small operations are small disasters. The same can be said for oil sands and other resource gathering endeavors, so I'm not trying to paint lithium mining as particularly bad. But it is not good.
The EV and battery industries are very interested in white-washing the lithium supply chain... but it is very, very dirty. I'm not an ecologist but from what I've read it appears to me that is much worse than fracking in many operations around the world.
If the Salton Sea, California, lithium mining operation really gets underway... we'll get a chance to see what "best practice" lithium recovery looks like, which will probably have much lower ecological damage per unit lithium. The Salton Sea area is already pretty messed up, anyhow.
I agree that it's deliberate, and I extend that to any sort of mining - after all it comes from the stance of misinformed "environmentalists" not being able to tell the difference because any of that type of action is bad
There are certainly people reposting comments that mix up lithium and cobalt and keep asserting that all EV batteries use cobalt and how terrible that is. They are not all environmentalists. A lot of them are just using those talking points as a way to oppose the move to EVs.
They also like to post a photo of an open pit gold mine in Australia and claim that it is a lithium mine while complaining about the massive environmental impact. they never respond when I post a link with proper attribution showing that it is not a lithium mine.
If nuclear power were profitable, no amount of vehement opposition due to environmental risk could stop it. There'd be nuclear power plants everywhere. Fortunately for your vehement opposition, considering all costs. nuclear power has always been the single most expensive way to generate electricity, has never been profitable, and never will be, even if it wasn't regulated. Investors can't be found unless a government subsidizes construction and pays for decommissioning and waste storage and security. The only reason so many nuclear power plants were even constructed in the US in the first place is that someone somewhere, or perhaps a team or committee, vastly overestimated the need for fuel for bombs. Anyway, it really sucks, but opposition and environmental concern can't really stop the destruction of ecosystems or environmental catastrophe if whatever is causing it is profitable. Nuclear is done and didn't need help killing itself, but keep that in mind if you have any other pet environmental concerns, i.e. that to win and protect the environment, one must figure out a way to obliterate the potential for profit in risking or destroying it. Otherwise, you're just shaking a tiny fist at the sky for all the good it'll do.
I don't believe this is inherently true. Theoretical designs exist that solve a lot of nuclear power's problems: this issue is that it got caught in a death spiral due to Chernobyl. That ended investment and R&D, so nuclear power plants didn't improve while other sources of energy did, so they got even less investment and R&D.
> this issue is that it got caught in a death spiral due to Chernobyl.
Nuclear (fission) power's unprofitability predates Chernobyl to the very first reactors and continuing up to this day. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station was the first commercial reactor to come online, and it was a small reactor, cost $78M to construct in 1958. Decommissioning and cleanup 30 years later cost about $100M. Considering the plant and the resulting mess were small, I really don't think it broke even, but I can't find any economic analysis that includes all the things.
A study in 2019 found that nuclear power has not been profitable anywhere in the world.[1] The study also found nuclear power has never been financially viable, that most plants have been built while heavily subsidised by governments, often motivated by military purposes, and that nuclear power is not a good approach to tackling climate change. It found, after reviewing trends in nuclear power plant construction since 1951, that the average 1,000MW nuclear power plant would incur an average economic loss of about $8B.
And R&D in fission is complete. We know pretty much all there is to know regarding it, and reducing cost simply is not viable through more investment in R&D. We've been working on this in earnest since the late 1940's, so it's no surprise we have figured everything out other than how to do it cheaply enough to achieve economic viability. There are some nuclear power applications where economic viability don't matter, such as nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, and I expect we won't stop building those, but commercial nuclear power just can't work because of the money, and nothing else is needed to say "no," and if it was economically viable, no other objections, such as environmental, would stop it.
Yes, it's never been profitable. The first photovoltaic device was built in the 1830's, and mass photovoltaic deployment only became profitable in the last decade. R&D in fission is absolutely not complete. The investment in it has been pathetic since before computer modeling existed, there's no way there aren't efficiencies to find. So much of the field references papers from the 50s and 60s, because that was the last time there was money and a non-strangling amount of regulation. Thorium reactors, theoretically much safer and cheaper, have barely even been tried.
It would take a huge capital investment to get a program like this off the ground, so it's too risky for the market. The invisible hand's rejection is not the same as impossibility.
> The first photovoltaic device was built in the 1830's, and mass photovoltaic deployment only became profitable in the last decade.
This is a bizarre comparison. The US invested about $1.5T total in developing nuclear power. Almost nothing was invested in developing PV. If only 1% of the money wasted on developing nuclear power had instead been invested in PV, nuclear power would have been dead by 1970. A recently passed bill earmarks $6B to keep nuclear plants open. Compare to recent DoE announcement to spend $82M on PV manufacturing. Even with this nearly two orders of magnitude imbalance of spending, PV is going to beat the pants off nuclear by making tons of money compared to nuclear power losing mind-boggling amounts of it.
R&D can not make nuclear energy cheaper. It is simply commercially unviable. If you can figure out a way to make it profitable, you can have all the nuclear energy you want, but a lot of smart and capable people spanning 4 generations have already tried and failed.
nuclear did need help to kill itself. I dont know about usa but in europe many political parties were funded to destroy nuclear. trading it for coal and russian gas. nuclear is the best energy we have today . nothing ever come close to it. renewables are a fad heavily backed by people that are making money out of it. You cant power a full sized country with it. it fluctuates too much. in terms of what you need to build and renew solar panels or wind turbines it has a deep environmental impact. it is actually as renewable as nuclear… look at germany relying on fossil fuels and killing the environment to fit your green agenda. living proof of a clown state backed up by corrupt politicians
Also worth pointing out that much of EVs and grid storage are shifting to cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate batteries. Many people aren't aware of that.
Wow the replies to this are nuts. All sorts of mental contortions to make lithium sound controversial when it's way down the list of controversial industries
Generally not the big ones. They are big enough to have a local branch office that can fined if caught. Small and medium sized companies are much harder to fine as they just don't operate in your country.
When the big ones do they are very careful about it, so they can claim to be in a grey area. Tire companies know there is child labor, but they are buying from the parents, and they make sure outside of harvest those kids get a great education (when the kids grow up their either leave, or work the plantation as medical or management staff and not labor). You can still say they are in the wrong, but they have made a place where you can understand the grey
Sure, international corporations violate human rights, but unless you provide proof these lithium corporations are, then we can just assume they aren't.
Largest companies digging in the dirt creating the vast bulk of the world's lithium concentrates (prior to refining in Chima | Malaysia) are in Chile and Australia and all are listed on the Canadian Toronto TSX exchange.
Minerals and Resources rules for exchange listing are pretty tight with respect filing third party independant reports that assess mineral volumes and estimates, economic feasibility, environmental impact, and human rights etc.
While it's possible that some things are covered up in these relatively modern capital projects (eg: like conditions mining copper in PNG in days of yore leaving substantial impacts today) it's unlikely due to modern communications and the known fact that everything gets out and doesn't remain hidden - more so today than back when PNG was literally and figuratively obscured by clouds.
Austrlia is keeping clean, and you can knock yourself out looking into
Not unless significant blocks of their shareholders do . . .
Giving a shit about the environment, child exploitation, etc. by larger investment funds has increased in recent decades , there's been a rise in "ethical investment".
Ergo TSX companies care more when third party reports about bad practices are filed at the exchange.
I just did, by explaining in which cases belief can be said to exist, and you have no reply. You don't seem to be following very closely nor employing any modicum of what could be considered "reading comprehension skills".
TBH you write like a bot trained on debatebro teenagers.
There's no specific claim being made here. It's just that assuming a lithium mining company (which, as an industry, has a terrible human rights record) would not commit human rights violation because it is a multinational company is a strange assumption to make.
Not only strange but also illogical. Corporations make more profit when they act illegally. From lobbied protectionism to monopoly, exploitation of natural resources to pollution, hiring of ex government officials to bribery and gift giving and favors, and of course from hiring underpaid and abused workers in countries without labor protection, to knowingly using slave labor, and more, they have billions of reasons to break laws and violate human rights. And every time they do it, they pay a small fine that is dwarfed by their profits and nobody goes to jail.
You don't even have to look overseas. PG&E has caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage due to wildfires caused by cost cutting; they don't want to do the maintenance they're legally required to do. Entire communities are left homeless and people are killed. And the company gets a tiny fine and the executives get bonuses.
It's actually amazing to me that corporations don't do it more often. It pays to be a piece of shit company.
That's a convenient way to dismiss ruthless exploitation of 3rd world populations, nations, and the natural environment.
And if you don't consider the police violence against the indigenous populations of Bolivia following their democratic elections then what are your qualifications exactly? "Lithium mining" is not the problem, of course, but the political interventions of Lithium interests has robbed millions of people of freedom.
All large scale economic activity in developing countries like this is often accompanied with human rights and democracy violations.
This is a false choice really. It’s not lithium that’s causing this but the broken political system. I’m half Brazilian and just the other day I heard a mining dam break that led to a mass cancer in surrounding populations. This was Vale one of the largest companies in Brazil.
It doesn’t matter what’s being used, virtually everything that comes from developing countries causes gigantic crimes that are unimaginable to first world.
You’re selecting one specific product but it’s not logical to do so. They all cause this. And what’s the other option? Not buying products from developing countries?
> mines complying with multiple international regulation requirements
Really? Please cite which regs apply in North Korea.
I am an actual miner. We have State and national regulators who visit and have authority to stop work. I have neither seen nor heard of international regulators.
> with multiple international regulation requirements.
How is that meant to be re-assuring?
As far as I know Chevron hasn't yet paid the money it is due to pay to the Ecuador state for past environmental damages inflicted on the ecosystem there, I'm positive they were branding their work to their stakeholders back-home as respecting "international regulation requirements".
The more I read about prices of different commodities the more I realise the biggest movement in prices is not because of demand and supply but rather because of speculation and gambling.
And how most of the news is manipulated. For example they are equating lithium price fall with stagnating car sales. Where as car sales might be stagnating but electric car sales are taking a larger portion of total car sales ie electric car sales/lithium use is still increasing.
Of course. The net present value of a stock or asset can only be calculated based on its expected future price and earnings. Since there's no way to know this with 100% certainty, stock prices are inherently speculative. Even value investors must struggle to accurately value a company's intangible assets.
But there's a material difference between "attempting, in good faith, to determine what the demand for a commodity will be in the future, and buying based on that" and "attempting to determine what the price of a commodity on the futures market will be and buying based on that".
When people say that a commodity's price is being driven by speculation and gambling, they mean that it has shifted from the former to the latter. This means that the price is disconnected from the actual, physical use of the commodity, and is instead being driven by the inconstant passions of the commodities market itself.
>But there's a material difference between "attempting, in good faith, to determine what the demand for a commodity will be in the future, and buying based on that" and "attempting to determine what the price of a commodity on the futures market will be and buying based on that".
These are indistinguishable. Unless you want to restrict markets to being only between suppliers and consumers, there will always be middlemen attempting to predict the price, and since they need to eat, they will be attempting to profit from changes in price.
Which is fine because suppliers and consumers are many times willing to let others handle the risks of price changes (volatility), hence the market for futures.
Of course there's a difference. It's based on information asymmetry, i.e. the 'greater fool' theory. When the information asymmetry is deliberately created, that's being done in bad faith, and is the sort of thing we call fraud when done on an individual level. It often feels like a great deal of our corporate and financial machinery are designed around diffusing actions that would be criminal, or reprehensible if done person to person, in order to allow them to be done at scale without consequence.
> When the information asymmetry is deliberately created, that's being done in bad faith, and is the sort of thing we call fraud when done on an individual level.
What information asymmetry? The previous comments referred to speculators betting on price movements.
Deliberately creating fraudulent information asymmetry would be altering data in industry reports and publishing false manufacture/consumption data. Which, I assume, is illegal.
What is illegal is financial advising without a license. Which recommending a stock falls under. Altering some one else's report and claiming your rendition is the real one is forgery or something, but writing your own report and making up numbers is totally fine.
By, for example, deliberately delaying delivery while owning a significant segment of the available commodity, such as Goldman Sachs did with aluminum a decade ago. [1], while simultaneously selling derivatives based on the very commodities they were manipulating. To the best of my knowledge, there were no consequences - if anyone knows of a financial penalty or change to law or regulations, please share!
I agree that there is concern of malfeasance in that scenario, but I was under the impression the context of the discussion was solely around the purchase and sale of contracts for the commodities (i.e. betting on the future price of a commodity), not manipulation of the actual supply and demand.
When the same legal entities are in a position to do both (participate in the futures market and manipulate supply and demand) I do not see how or why you would try to make such a distinction.
It feels like you're trying to say, "this market would work fine if it weren't for those meddling bad actors" as a response to "the problem is the bad actors".
Read up on the onion futures markets; due to a (rather fascinating) historical decision, they are one of the few commodities without speculative futures. As a result, price volatility in the market is massive, with far worse swings compared to the efficient markets where speculators operate.
I challenge you to write out what scenarios you think reducing market participants will solve. Historically it has 100% so far been highly illiquid markets with huge price spreads, which is terrible for both sellers and buyers.
What you’re suggesting means a farmer selling wheat futures for delivery a year from now needs to be at the market at the same time a bread maker is looking to buy wheat a year from now. That basically doesn’t happen because the bread maker doesn’t need that level of forward looking price stability.
That is how they were in the beginning. I recommend reading about the development of markets and futures trading to see what benefits they provide, as they are a component of any developed economy around the world.
The price should be disconnected from the actual, physical use. If we have a surplus of a substance now but there is reason to believe that we'll need a lot more of it later then the sensible thing to do is to hoard most of it until it is needed and to start producing more of it. Speculators help do that by driving up the price which is a signal to both producers and consumers.
The market thought that China was going to need a lot of lithium for EVs, so the price went up which incentivized higher production and lower use. That's a good thing because it made it more likely that China would meet their demand. Now the market has better information that China is going to need less lithium than previously thought so the price drops which makes it viable for previously marginal users.
People who say that don’t understand what’s going on. Those futures eventually resolve to delivery so this is the real price that producers are selling and and consumers of commodity buy at.
All of the speculation is entirely based on how the news might impact the physical product.
Oil prices went negative precisely because storage was full and people didn’t want the obligation to take delivery of the oil when nobody was using it.
> how most of the news is manipulated. For example they are equating lithium price fall with stagnating car sales
Mass media is mostly crap at price-move stories. It’s less manipulation than false correlation. (The writers are incentivised to write, not to write a particular story.) There is a lot of thought that goes into lithium pricing. Current price moves are mostly speculation about supply, given near-term demand can be pretty precisely measured given battery production in operation and breaking ground. (Battery supply limits EV production, which itself outstrips demand, so volatility in consumer demand is tamped at the extraction layer.) Recent debate is about potential supply from brine in China.
I personally have an impression, that commodity prices are a function of shocks. Gas prices in Europe, uranium prices in mid 2000s, lithium due to sudden EV demand, etc. World then adjusts, and prices "collapse" or rather stabilize. Basically, don't buy commodities when the price is high.
That always bugs me when these things are reported. Something goes up 30% in a year due to speculation and/or supply chain shocks, and then drops by 5% and it's "prices crash!" No it's still up ~25% year on year.
You are looking at different horizons. It might be up year over year but month over month if it trends down that information is more accurate as to where the future price will grow.
It's nothing to do with morality or any justification, it's just what it is. Since there's an instrument to gauge supply and demand, that instrument can also be wanted, so there can be supply and demand of the thing that measures supply and demand.
You can also do "bad" things on first order by hoarding the items themselves.
There is more to economics than supply and demand. This unnecessary gambling has too many negative externality and IMO no positive effects other than making some people some money with no work.
Necessary gambling is what helps the market figure out the real long term availability of something. I have not seen any necessary gambling in my years in manufacturing. So in my view all speculation on commodities seem unnecessary.
> I have not seen any necessary gambling in my years in manufacturing.
You need to manufacture a widget and it must cost no more than $5. You have a few inputs to your widget, some made with steel and some with plastic. If steel and plastic prices increase, your inputs cost more than $5 and you’re making a loss on every widget you sell.
So you go to the futures market and take a bet that the input prices will increase. If you’re right, you win $, which makes your widget manufacturing profitable and you’re still in business. If prices fall you lose the bet, your profits are lower. But hey, at least you’re still in business.
A responsible, well run manufacturing business benefits from the existence of such a market because it allows them to de-risk.
What’s the person on the other side of the trade up to?
This debate reminds me of the lead up to the Onion Futures Act, where moral outrage over speculation led to a ban and subsequent lack of insurance (and higher price volatility) for onion farmers. To the point that the son of the farmer who first lobbied for the ban returned to Congress to ask for its repeal.
> "What’s the person on the other side of the trade up to?"
The same thing: hedging/insuring against price changes. The supplier (ultimately, a farmer, steel mill, gold miner, electricity generator, etc) is getting a guaranteed price for the commodity they're selling, reducing risk.
Virtually no hedging happens between natural buyers and sellers precisely because they approach the market at different times, and don’t have the in-house pricing expertise to discern good and bad bids and offers ex ante. This is why, absent financial participants, the natural participants get hosed. (And why they use financial markets versus direct purchases and sales.)
Again, these aren’t theoretical considerations, we’ve always had naïve Puritanical elements seeking to ban speculation, and in some assets and jurisdictions they have succeeded. Reducing market participation has never worked.
> So you go to the futures market and take a bet that the input prices will increase. If you’re right, you win $, which makes your widget manufacturing profitable and you’re still in business.
This isn't remotely how manufacturing works. Manufacturers are focused on making the widget, for them the most important thing is that material is available, not a paper contract.
Opening a new mine is nothing but speculation, for example, and price signals from markets play a role in such decisions.
More narrowly, the ability to forward sell or buy things allows financing of production but in turn it needs people willing to take the other side. Derivatives money is a thing.
Essentially you are saying 100% of bad things are bad. Which is true, but also meaningless statement. Since it would still be true in a utopia with no bad things.
I can give you a great example of the positive aspect of speculation.
Look at the futures market. Speculators are a big part of the liquidity of the futures market.
Price of wheat is $60/bushel. Farmer won't harvest for another 6 months and is worried prices will drop. They can secure a future and lock in the price now.
Wheat purchasers aren't on the other side of that trade, because why would they lock in a higher price? A lower price benefits them.
Speculators come in and bet on the price of wheat, creating a deep pool of futures that can be bought and sold.
When speculators were allowed into the oil markets rather than actual buyers, the price jumped to like $120 barrel in like 2007. They had to stop it because hedge funds could just drive the price up indefinitely. See Bitcoin.
Speculation didn't suddenly exist in 2007. I do recall several regulations being changed at that time which _relaxed rules_ around the market. Is it possible that these regulations had more to do with the outcome than mere "speculation" in and of itself?
"speculation" was a bit improper, but prices are intertwined.. demand in one sector will affect demand in other, so forecasts cause price fluctuation that reaches afar.
commodities suppliers (miners, farmers, distributors) use futures market to hedge against their inventory everyday. Trade exchanges serve a very important function in this ecosystem.
Supply demand doesn't, but this rampant gambling is morally detrimental as it has unnecessary negative externality in society. They don't want to accept that their jobs are just a leech on society and has no other benefit than to fill their own pockets.
I certainly agree there are many morally degenerate speculators whose presence is an overall net negative, but I think speculating on a commodity’s price is pretty much required to make any sort of long term plans involving that commodity. It all depends on the specific circumstance really.
I work in manufacturing, in the high end of the tech. Our products have perhaps the most complex supply chain. I have talked to the industry best about this. I have never once heard an expert cite speculation as helpful for there 5 year or 20 year plan. But I don't want to make an argument from personal incredulity, can you cite a source on how speculation helps long term planning? Not pop sci stuff, something concrete like a trade article a manufacturing trade or something written by a supply chain engineer?
To ask for an expert quote on a thread on hackernews sounds like a little bit overkill for me, and for me (and probably parent), it does feel a little obvious.
Let me try to answer this though: one example out of many is how Kodak speculated that the transition to digital cameras would lead them to lose profit over the long run, so they chose not to pursue the route. This was a long term plan that lead them to bankruptcy. (of course, they changed course once they realized that digital cameras were competitive options, but the original long term goal was to continue the film camera route, shown by their unwillingness to even try to produce digital cameras as an possible option)
> can you cite a source on how speculation helps long term planning
Unless you lock in all commodity costs, how is long term planning even possible without speculation? If you plan to open a distribution center somewhere, the optimal location depends on e.g. fuel costs. You can’t do anything but speculate about the costs of those commodities. So I don’t even see the need to track down sources. Do you not see that you just need to guess at the (future) cost of certain things?
I see you didnt reciprocate the courtesy of not making an argument from personal incredulity. These things are complex af. When the people who optimize supply chains all day every day tell me that speculation market is more of an hindrance than help, I'm not going to take your random argument to be worth anything.
The futures market is the only thing that allows you to lock in a price to buy something 12 months from now at a reasonably consistent price. How is that a hindrance?
The existence of the futures market does not prevent a copper provider from entering into an exclusive sales contract to sell 12 months from now to a specific consumer. However, unless they match the current 12 month contract price, one of them is taking a bad deal with what they can get on a much more liquid market. Additionally, their counter party risk is now much more significant because they are tied to one other party.
Maybe you could actually offer something specific about how “the speculation market is more of a hindrance than a help”?
So far whenever I see this, it’s people who don’t like that the price changes on them but their solution is to remove participants from the market to a point where it is so illiquid the lack of trading looks like the price isn’t moving.
To me it seems, you both are rather debating semantics.
Of course it is "speculating" trying to estimate fuel prices, but this is not meant, when people condemn "gambling" on the stock market. What they mean is people with lots money investing wherever short term profits are possible and often gaming the market while doing so. So creating unexpected price changes for the actual industries needing those supplies and they obviously don't like that. But I couldn't draw a clear line between "necessary gambling" and "unnecessary gambling".
I see. Your claim that it it is entirely negative is fine to make without any support whereas my claim that there are some situations that could be positive (only one suffices) is not okay even when support has been given (any mine that is opened or distribution center that is opened employs speculation).
You are just making a bunch of claims with no support but “people I trust say so so the claims are true”. Now I really will bow out.
I am taking the null position here. That the speculation market doesn't help. If something isn't helping and is extracting value from the market its by definition detrimental. The onus is on you to provide the proof for positive positions, that the speculation market does help.
Nobody is forced to use the futures markets. The onus is on you to explain why it’s negative despite all of the sellers and buyers choosing to participate there.
I’m not a huge fan of taxes, but they are absolutely about morality. Society as a whole deciding to discourage consumption of harmful/unhealthy things like sugar, soda, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
It’s not a requirement for consumption taxes to driven my morality as a first order effect.
It’s entirely reasonable for law to take the moral stance that people should broadly pay for the benefits as participating in organised society, so to ensure the long term upkeep and maintenance of that organisation they derive benefits from.
At which point consumption taxes have nothing to any moral judgement about the consumption of various products, but simple calculus that the voluntary consuming those products increases the cost of running our society, and so you should pay a bit more for engaging in these activities.
But none of that is judgement on the morality of activity. I personally couldn’t give a shit what drugs you or anyone else consumes. But I don’t particularly like the idea of having pick up the bill later for an activity I didn’t participate in. So if you pay some extra taxes to cover to cost of additional healthcare, then feel free to consume whatever the hell you want.
> But I don’t particularly like the idea of having pick up the bill later for an activity I didn’t participate in.
The repeated grouping of morality/ethics into purely religion/judgement throughout this thread really bothers me. IMHO your argument is an argument of moral propriety of making people pay for others choices. You’re semantically choosing to not call it that is all.
Nah I’m more than happy to agree that I’m making an argument of moral propriety. There has to be some consistent basis for forming laws, and some sort of coherent social order.
But my point is there’s a difference between moral basis for having laws and taxes, and their specific implementation. Consumption taxes are just one approach for implementing a social system build on the basis “fair contribution/usage”, or whatever we want to call it (my views on “moral” behaviour are too nuanced and confused to fit into an internet comment, so let’s just work with something simple). But the taxes themselves aren’t a direct expression of moral judgment themselves, but rather an implementation detail of a broader governing moral system that provides legitimacy to laws and the states rights to enforce them.
It might be a distinction without a difference. But if someone is going to call out consumption taxes as somehow more inherently driven by moral judgments than any other part of a system of law, then I think making the distinction is reasonable.
Morality seems more of a subjective call, e.g. "Thou shalt marry heterosexually ahead of procreation", than a stochastic analysis, e.g. "X percent of fatal car crashes involve blood alcohol above Y concentration."
What I'm after is that much of the ethics by which our legal system operates, e.g. a BAC limit for legal driving, is divorced from moral questions such as: "Is drinking beer a sinful act?"
I think you’re gravely misguided. BAC has nothing to do with sin, it’s connected to the morality and ethics of putting your fellow citizens at risk of your impaired driving.
My repeated point has been that morality != religious sin, rather the latter is a subset. I don’t necessarily agree with laws/taxes in this regard, but it’s important to understand where they come from.
Speculation and gambling is just complicated casting lots.
Predatory gambling where the participant can only win good feelings and lose money, is the immoral, addictive nightmare nobody wants. When talking about regular joes anyway. Be honest enough to sell good feelings straight.
I can't comment on the select finance bros who have manipulated the rules towards a specified outcome. Not really casting lots anymore at that point.
If it gets too corrupt all bets will be off, and that will hurt everyone who needs short term liquidity and to take speculative moon shots.
No because market 'gambling' actually impacts the outcome.
You can paint it as a bad thing but there are useful things that come out of this.
If someone wants to 'gamble' that grain prices will be higher in the future, they can buy futures. Where do these futures come from? Farmers today who want a fixed price for their future harvest.
And what about the 'gamblers' who bet that the demand for lithium is going to increase, and therefore invest in building a lithium mine?
There is a finite supply of the underlying, each sold future equates to agreed upon future deliveries. So in reality the number of contracts sold (not traded) does equate 1:1 with demand for the underlying.
When that doesn't hold true you will end up with Failure To Deliver (FTD) which causes Very Bad Things™.
Generally speaking though commodities markets aren't rigged in the way that people complain about in some other markets but they are subject to pretty violent volatility in the face of uncertainty.
This is largely due to pretty fixed supply with highly variable demand. i.e I can't just shut off all the oil wells right now and return ships currently on-route to energy exchanges and even if I could I wouldn't have the storage. Storage is also an interesting one because storage costs money and was pretty much why oil contracts went negative for a short period.
All of what you say could be true - I just find it hard to believe given IRL finance bros are constantly trading and profiting off of futures/commodities trading without a single worry of the underlying commodity.
If your claim is that 'finance bros' (perhaps let's call them commodity traders) don't consider anything about the fundamentals of the underlying, then you simply have no meaningful understand of trading.
there are two factors that control market prices: supply elasticity and demand elasticity.
commodities with inelastic supply and inelastic demand are prone to very wide price swings.
inelastic supply means that increasing prices don't increase supply. in the case of lithium, it take time to bring new production capacity online, so supply is very inelastic in the short term.
inelastic demand means that increasing prices do not decrease demand. in the case of lithium, batteries are a very valuable product, and the raw cost of lithium is a small percentage of their total value, so increasing prices for lithium do very little to reduce demand.
the price movement here is totally predictable and exactly what you would expect based on standard economic formulas taking into account supply/demand elasticity. it is not speculation or gambling.
demand went up, supply lagged, the price spiked, supply increased, the price went back down.
electric car sales may still be growing but growing at a lower rate, and projected demand growth is probably decreasing relative to projected supply, so the price is falling.
Speculating/gambling is a huge factor in anything that can be traded. But commodities also rely on physical deliveries which have influenced prices directly on various occasions. Of course for commodities also the selling side has direct influence on prices. That can go so far that for oil deliveries the tab is opened/closed on convenient times. So understanding prices is significantly more difficult than e.g. for stocks. Also speaking about the news part, a lot of data on commodities isn't freely available so you need to buy it. Trading itself on those is highly restricted - and speculative - anyway.
> Where as car sales might be stagnating but electric car sales are taking a larger portion of total car sales ie electric car sales/lithium use is still increasing.
I'm quite surprised the article doesn't mention sodium batteries. Li-Ion batteries are notorious for thermal runaways, so CATL and Tesla already shifted to LiFePO batteries quite some time ago. I think everybody would be more than happy to ditch Lithium based batteries altogether.
How so? The people physically purchasing commodities are doing so by determining how worth it is to them at the current (or future) price, same with sellers. Speculators are almost never actually taking delivery, but they are providing liquidity for buyers and sellers by participating in transactions as counterparties. The final price paid by the ultimate physical buyers is based on their own value judgment of quantity demanded per price, and the final price paid to physical sellers is based on that same price (of course, either could be willingly using futures instead of spot prices to reduce risk).
Buyers and sellers could trade directly among themselves if they wished, and if the commodity markets were divorced from reality (either unable to deliver on futures contracts or having futures settled at different prices than their contracts stipulate) nobody would use them. Because speculators don’t take delivery, how they react to news and other events is only assisting in price discovery between the time a future is issued and settled, because at settlement time there is no immediate uncertainty regarding supply and demand in the spot market.
I think you might be making a common mistake in your comment of equating news for popular consumption with actual news that traders, buyers, and sellers care about (usually very quantitative and well guarded data with nuances that an article for public consumption will never account for). Articles for popular consumption are not moving markets very much, especially in commodities where public involvement is low (vs stocks) and consequently public sentiment has little effect.
I mean, that’s a straight up cartel. There’s nothing surprising about that.
But the OP is confused about their comment about commodities in general. They are largely based on supply and demand, but most companies need to predict supply and demand months and years in advance because converting raw material into a sale to the end user is a multi month to multi year process, so a natural result is that the prices are based on speculation of supply and demand, months to years in advance.
> They are largely based on supply and demand, but most companies need to predict supply and demand months and years in advance because converting raw material into a sale to the end user is a multi month to multi year process, so a natural result is that the prices are based on speculation of supply and demand, months to years in advance.
But that practically means they are based on speculation about possible future supply and demand, and we are more or less taking it on faith that that speculation is correlated to actual supply and demand.
> But that practically means they are based on speculation about possible future supply and demand, and we are more or less taking it on faith that that speculation is correlated to actual supply and demand.
This statement almost seems tautological. Of course prices are based on speculation about possible supply and demand, nobody has a crystal ball that can tell them “actual” supply and demand.
In a competitive and liquid market, you expect prices to rapidly approach “optimal”, because otherwise there’s an opportunity there for someone make money out of the market inefficiency, buy correctly predicting when supply is high, and buying, then selling when supply is low. Which is exactly what future etc do, except without the need to actually move the physical commodity around.
> Of course prices are based on speculation about possible supply and demand, nobody has a crystal ball that can tell them “actual” supply and demand.
Exactly, no one has such a crystal ball. And this actually generally applies not just to future supply and demand, but even to the past: it's actually impossible to measure supply and demand across any significant industry, to check whether prices matched it or not.
And yet, economists and economical theory enthusiasts talk about the "law of supply and demand" as if it's some scientific observation, and not just a simplistic model that seems intuitive.
> In a competitive and liquid market, you expect prices to rapidly approach “optimal”, because otherwise there’s an opportunity there for someone make money out of the market inefficiency
You might expect that if you believe in the law of supply and demand, but as we were discussing, that is not how prices are actually formed, and anyone betting based on observed supply and demand (to the extent that it is actually possible to observe them) will be beat in general by others who are betting based on current speculation, which is how prices are actually formed.
For example, if you are betting that gain prices will increase in the winter because that's what you think they did every year, and ignore some prominent pundit predicting that they will decrease this year, you may well lose the bet if everyone else believes the pundit. And that will be true regardless of whether grain will be in low supply or not.
> You might expect that if you believe in the law of supply and demand, but as we were discussing, that is not how prices are actually formed, and anyone betting based on observed supply and demand (to the extent that it is actually possible to observe them) will be beat in general by others who are betting based on current speculation, which is how prices are actually formed.
But we do see prices approach optimal. Your argument is predicated on the idea that the law of supply and demand is only a useful model if the actual price always follows observed supply and demand. But for that to ever be true, it would require speculators to have a crystal ball, otherwise there’s no reason to believe the speculated price will always match the “optimal” when the point in time being speculated about actually occurs.
The law of supply and demand tells what market systems will trend towards. But like complex control system, having a governing idea about long term trends doesn’t mean momentary perturbations don’t occur, it just helps you understand what the system will do after the perturbation.
To claim that the law of supply and demand is useless, is like claiming that Hooks Law is useless for understanding how suspension systems in cars work, because perfect springs don’t exist, and cars don’t remain stationary.
Perfect markets don’t exist, perfect information doesn’t exist, so why would anyone expect real markets to perfectly follow the law supply and demand? And clearly markets do follow the law of supply demand at the macro level, when long periods of time are considered, otherwise commodity pricing would be entirely arbitrary and wouldn’t in anyway reflect the value of the commodity to society at large.
Where do you see that? What does it even mean, how can you objectively tell what is the optimal price for a good or service, so that you can later say that the market converged to it?
For example, is 1000$ the optimal price for an iPhone? Or is it simply the price Apple chose? If they sold it for 500$, would they make more or less money? How do you know?
> And clearly markets do follow the law of supply demand at the macro level, when long periods of time are considered, otherwise commodity pricing would be entirely arbitrary and wouldn’t in anyway reflect the value of the commodity to society at large.
I would argue that it often is, at least for many non-essential products. The price of many non-essential goods is much much higher than the price of essentials, even when those non-essential goods are cheap and easy to manufacture (say, softdrinks or many cosmetics). The price of most energy resources is largely controlled by non-market forces, even on the face of it.
Also, why restrict this discussion to commodities? If we switch to investments, the price of stocks is quite obviously arbitrary as well, with "market makers" often controlling the allowed prices (or at least, price volatility) for stock. The price of real-estate is often determined to a large extent by the price of borrowing, and that is quite explicitly set by banks and the central bank based on nothing related to supply and demand. Services are even more complex, with huge variations in price based on entirely subjective factors.
> Also, why restrict this discussion to commodities?
Because they’re generally pretty fungible, and have a larger number of sellers and buyers involved in the market, hence their markets are more likely to behave like an ideal market. The same does not apply to housing, or services.
> Where do you see that? What does it even mean, how can you objectively tell what is the optimal price for a good or service, so that you can later say that the market converged to it?
For commodities, I would point to the reasonable price stability that exists. As evidenced by the fact that basic goods don’t frequently suffer from repeated shortages or gluts of supply. Strongly indicating that the price is both high enough to incentivise production, and stable/low enough to allow for relatively low risk long term investment in production, because continuous long term demand is expected.
> For example, is 1000$ the optimal price for an iPhone? Or is it simply the price Apple chose? If they sold it for 500$, would they make more or less money? How do you know?
These is nothing about the iPhone market that suggests it’s anything close to an ideal market (for one Apple have a monopoly on iPhone sales), so I don’t know why you would expect it to behave like an ideal market.
> The price of real-estate is often determined to a large extent by the price of borrowing, and that is quite explicitly set by banks and the central bank based on nothing related to supply and demand. Services are even more complex, with huge variations in price based on entirely subjective factors.
What’s your point? Of course a law describing how ideal markets work doesn’t correctly describe markets well know for being extremely distorted and non-ideal. Next you’re going to tell me Newtons laws of motions are all useless because they can’t help you model the behaviour of objects travelling at relativistic speeds.
You seem to be struggling with the idea that a model doesn’t need to be perfect, or applicable to every real world scenario, to be useful. All models have their limits, that no surprise to anyone. That doesn’t make them useless, it just means you need to be aware of limitations, and adjust expectations appropriately.
The pundit's claims are part of the speculation. If you speculated that the pundit's words would matter, you'd short or sell out grain, making the pundit's words matter. Supply and demand are only sometimes good measures of people actually using or producing these products (and when they fail bubbles occur), but are always good measures of the spending of both people actually using the product, and the investors buying it in wanting to sell it.
In any case, as the investors buy the product they eventually have to sell it, meaning over the long run demand and supply are good measures of "actual" usage and production. You know this because there's never a bubble that doesn't collapse and return to equilibrium.
> In any case, as the investors buy the product they eventually have to sell it, meaning over the long run demand and supply are good measures of "actual" usage and production.
That's not necessarily true. It depends on the product and industry, but it's absolutely possible to horde products for long periods of time (see diamonds and gold) or to choose to destroy products rather than sell them at a price you don't like (see public transportation in many US cities in the 50s, or fancy food items).
> you may well lose the bet if everyone else believes the pundit
Can you give a real life example of when a pundit giving a predict against the actual supply that had everyone buy-in? Says, oil price goes down even when demand is hot?
The price of oil is a particularly bad example, since it is heavily controlled everywhere in the world, as is supply. The international price of oil is largely set by OPEC or the USA or a few other countries (depending on geographical region).
Also, this type of pundit influence is common with the price of stocks. It also happened with the price of natural gas in Europe last year, when it increased based on lack of confidence in reserves that turned out to be misplaced, and never really recovered.
An inverse example would be any bubble, for example the housing bubble that happened over a decade ago. Prediction of house prices going up eventually reached a point where house prices were going up, despite low "actual demand" (of course, if you count "demand for investment", then prices are absolutely a measure of that).
OPEC is a cartel constraining supply to increase prices, it's not a free market but an example of "demand and supply" in it's most brutal form. OPEC prices are not about "gambling".
You don't need to use derivatives to gamble, they control the supply but that control is a lagging control. Any decision they make is essentially a bet about where the oil market is going to move in several months. They are usually big enough that any move they make is going to set the tone but that isn't always the case.
They need to make continual bets on the health of transports, changes in energy mix etc in order to move or keep the price in a favorable band for them. Misstep and the price of oil falls, cutting into their profits or push it too high and face demand destruction and shale extraction coming online because it's profitable at those higher prices, increasing competition and stifling volumes simultaneously.
Are they any different than the Isp and telcos in the states or Walmart, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft or payment service providers like mastercard and visa all of them work as cartels or monopolies. All these companies cost Americans more than when OPEC manipulate oil prices I think
It's interesting to see that people still believe there is some type of fair price discovery when things like dark pools, market maker exemptions, naked shorting, tokenized securities, trillions in derrivative bets (hello 2008), spoofing (JP Morgan getting fined 1 billion after making 10 billion in profit in gold price spoofing) and so on and so forth exist.
Speculation and gambling about what future prices will be are not the big issues here, the markets themselves are completely broken (by design).
You just listed a bunch scary sounding financial buzz words, but I doubt that a thorough analysis of them would support your conclusion.
In fact, many have the opposite effect and result in more efficient price discovery. Take naked shorting for example. Without shorting, it would be far more difficult for an equity research firm to be incentivized to look into fraudulent stocks, as was widespread with Chinese companies a few years ago. Without their efforts, stock prices would have remained inflated for longer.
You don't understand what naked shorting is. Naked shorting is shorting without first borrowing from someone. Normal shorting is limited by the availability of stock to borrow (by the way, if stock holders wish, they can request from their broker that their stock won't be available for borrowing, potentially causing short squeeze), by the interest rates on borrowing the stock.
Naked shorting skips it all. Some market makers are privileged and can sell stock they don't own and didn't borrow. So they have a privilege of printing stocks in the short term, and that's quite broken, and many of them abused this position to manipulate markets. Normal participants in the market can't naked short.
Naked shorting means that the market maker who supposedly sold you a stock, can now fail to find the stock he sold you, leading to "fail to deliver".
The excuse given is that naked shorting allows for more liquidity, but given the other problems, I think it's bad.
> excuse given is that naked shorting allows for more liquidity, but given the other problems, I think it's bad
I assume you have a counterpoint to the decades of data the NYSE, SEC, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and others around the world have collected that show naked shorting improves liquidity without FTDs negatively impacting price discovery while tamping volatility, evidence made particularly robust by the fact that naked shorting is permanently banned, and has been temporarily banned, in many markets, such as Australia, Switzerland and, for some stocks post crisis, in the United States? (See Wikipedia for a summary.) The whole affair reminds me of the lead up to the Onion Futures Act [1].
Isn’t that argument somewhat strange or dishonest? To paraphrase you: I‘d rather have naked shorting and the associated manipulation and problems with it than better price discovery for stockholders.
In your example, the stockholder isn’t protected either, only an equity firm derives profit from this information. In a more ideal world the stockholders themselves would do this due diligence, which is something that already happens.
Also there’s differences between shorting and naked shorting. I could well imagine allowing fully hedged shorting and outlawing naked shorting. Especially considering the issue of fail to deliver, that’s just absurd with our technology.
No one designed this system. It grew, organically. People started recognizing parts of it they could take advantage of, and pushing to have those parts become more prominent, largely individually (as opposed to in one grand conspiracy of collusion).
It may be true that some of those people believe it is in their best interests that the markets be "broken", and so have pushed that far intentionally, but there is no one overriding will and no single hand on the rudder to even be able to do that on purpose. It's all just greedy people trying to get their own interests put before everyone else's.
> wouldn’t it be better if the volume at least is shown on open exchanges?
Empirically, no. Large blocks of stock don’t have a liquid market. Forcing them into the open means chopping it into tiny pieces while using derivatives to hedge, for the sophisticated, and getting hosed, for the unsophisticated.
Insider trading involves trading that violates a fiduciary responsibility. That is: you work for a company owned by shareholders, and you trade based on information you have as a consequence of that employment, harming the shareholders.
Without that fiduciary responsibility, it's not insider trading, it's just trading. If you overhear someone with inside information talking about some inside knowledge, then trade based on that, you're in the clear (as long as you didn't collude with the leaker.)
We aren't rushing to make nuclear fusion because we have insufficient electricity... and you can't replace what the scientists know with another coal plant.
Global survelliance, inifinte database records and instant comms has really destroyed the potential to keep and develop real secrets. It's going to hurt (badly) in the long run.
So insider trading for as long as GCHQ/CIA/NSA refuses to rat people out....
Forgot about the “no one else” knows part, but the point is being good at something (or knowing something others do not) is not a bad thing, as implied by “insider trading”.
For example, if you figure out a cheaper alternative to lithium, and want to bet that lithium prices will fall as a result of reduced demand, then those are your spoils for figuring that out.
Price increase is governed by how much a buyer is willing to pay and how long a seller is willing to hold. That is supply and demand. Their reason to supply or demand is 100% due to speculation or gambling or whatever you want to call it. There is no intrinsic value for anything. Supply and demand is not a magic spell that saves people from guessing what prices should be.
> the biggest movement in prices is not because of demand and supply but rather because of speculation and gambling
the movement reflects the expected future supply and demand at the time.
The speculation is something that financial engineers use to offload the risks of such commodities from one party to another (such as from producers to consumers of said commodities).
With the way derivatives are used these days to speculate/gamble they do not help rather result in the boom bust cycles we see in more and more industries these days.
Batteries has a long supply chain, and in this case the market is forecasting a drop in demand. Due to more sources and increase output in the early stages of the chain, the offer has increased.
Note also the article refer explicit to EV in different paragraphs .
it's described in the article.
> with the expiry of a more than decade-long programme of subsidies for EV purchases.
> the expanding supply outlook for the metal is mainly what is pushing prices lower this year
> Supply is coming on stream faster than you can say ‘boo’.
> first-ever lithium deposit to be discovered in Iran’s mountainous western province of Hamedan. At an estimated 8.5 million tonnes,
> China is also expanding its lithium-supply capacity from lepidolite, which, while considered the most abundant lithium-bearing mineral,
You're definitely right that the news loves to write headlines after any daily price fluctuations and pretend they know the reason, when in reality it usually explains nothing and becomes irrelevant by tomorrow.
Your two premises don’t necessarily relate to each other. I believe both:
- journalists attribute price changes to whatever story they can find. Sort of like how every day there’s a story of why the Dow moved by a fraction of a percent.
- price moves are almost entirely supply and demand. Sure, speculation can change price in the near term, but considering the size of these commodity markets, you’d have to believe an absolutely enormous amount of capital is at play in speculation.
Markets in a high energy cost environement make their margin more on volatility and speculation.
You will also see margins themselves widen until the system falls in on itself.
We dont have a financial margin tracker.
Also increasing interest rates in a highly indebted economy increases inflation; short term by widening of margins and long term by offputting energy extraction.
Monopoly and cartels has the most impact on prices. and the market can not work if there are few partisipants.
also gatekeepers, those that stand in between producers and consumers can screw up the market if they have a large potion of the market.
car manufacturers seeing the same sales data would then secure lithium supply 12 months ahead for an expected 12x growth, which then turns out to be only 5x. From macro data pov, the graph is still trending up. This is why guidance is important and also why lithium miners hedge against their inventory using future market. Supply and demand still applies, just that its effect is being amplified by overleveraged commodities trading market.
The quote from the article below [1] demonstrates why the doomers, degrowers, Neo-Malthusians, etc. keep getting resource scarcity wrong. They keep quoting the "proven reserves" numbers [2] that only count what is extractable with current tech at current prices, factoring out new technologies / techniques, as well as reserves not discovered yet or discovered but not yet "proven".
[1] "But while demand for lithium has been subdued, many believe the expanding supply outlook for the metal is mainly what is pushing prices lower this year, with a wave of fresh supply expected to come online from facilities in China, Australia and Chile. Five analyst forecasts, including ones from Bank of America (BofA), JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley that were reviewed by Bloomberg in mid-January, for instance, anticipated production increases of between 22 percent and 42 percent in 2023 alone. “Supply is coming on stream faster than you can say ‘boo’. Demand remains strong, but prices have been unsustainable for some time now,” analyst Dylan Kelly of Ord Minnett recently told Mining.com."
Once upon a time, my conception of oil drilling was roughly that there were these giant tanks of oil underground, and to extract it we more or less stuck a straw down and sucked it out. And that one day, the well would make the same sound as the straw as you're finishing a milkshake, and we would suddenly have no more oil available.
Then circa 2002 I got a job at an oil well services company, and learned a lot of complexities about oil drilling. A key insight is that not all oil is equally economic to extract, and therefore the amount of oil available to extract is only fixed for a given price and set of technologies. As prices go up, the amount of available oil goes up too; as technology invariably marches forward, the amount of available oil goes up.
This behaves nicely with the control system we call the free market. As oil gets used up, prices will go up, which will unlock more available oil acting as negative feedback. At the higher price, some oil users will find a different solution to their problem, while other oil users will grumble and pay up, acting as a second source of negative feedback. This process repeats as the available oil at the new price point is exhausted.
This same pattern exists for essentially all mined resources. We're not going to one day run out of cobalt or lithium or whatever. As mines that are economic at current prices shut down, its price will go up, and some users will find an alternative, while others will grumble and pay. The higher prices will enable mines that weren't viable at the lower prices.
Pedantically, there is a "limited" amount of these resources right? Like "if you drill deep enough there's always more" feels incompatible with the fact that these resources are all downstream of actual geological effects.
Or is it really actually "dig deep enough and we find stuff" has almost always been true, making this distinction without a difference?
Just can't help thinking about lakes and acquifers drying up. Even in a more "renewable" scenario, at one point there is a bottom. I just wonder if we have a good feeling for where that is .
Sure, for any sort of mineral or metal there's a hard limit to how much there is in the Earth's crust, and while the oil was created by a natural process, that process doesn't take place on a time frame that's useful to humans (and might not take place at all now that bacteria has evolved).
We don't sit around fretting about the limited supply of palladium or something, because there's never been as much of it that was easy to extract as we wanted. We do worry about lithium, because right now it's economic to extract it in very large quantities and we know that won't last forever. But my point is that we won't transition from the current abundance to "every last atom of mineable lithium has been extracted and if you want more you have to dig up a landfill and pull it out of discarded CR2032 batteries" overnight. When we've dug up all the lithium available at the current price, there will still be plenty more at a slightly higher price, and when that's used up, there will be more at a price slightly higher still, and so on. Yeah, there's a limit, but long before we hit the limit, the gradual price increases will have push society to find a way to go on without copious amounts of newly mined lithium.
It's not just economic cost, it's also energy cost (the EROI). It costs some % of a barrel of oil just to pump up a new barrel of oil. When that ratio is 100%, you can no longer pump oil for energy, though you might still pump it for the raw materials, or to convert a different source of energy into tasty gasoline.
So there probably always be oil remaining in the ground that costs too much energy to extract.
In the “infinite energy” argument, there is some notion of “well I can use solar energy to get this oil, which has different characteristics, even if the energy is less overall”. Not all energy sources are fungible, right? But it’s a good point
Even with no changes in tech the 'proven reserves' are way less than the amount of minable stuff out there as turning an area of land with say gold in into proven reserves involves drilling a load of holes in it and sending the drill cores off to be analyzed which is expensive and so only done on the bit you are about to mine.
See, this is it right here, you're doing it! You're resorting to extremist hyperbole, when what matters are actual details.
Resources are not infinite, but that is not relevant. What is relevant is the (finite) amount and the rate at which they are used.
To go hyperbolic in the other direction, if there are a trillion accessible grams of something and humanity uses a kilogram a year, then we won't run out for a billion years.
But both your hyperbole and mine are pointless. The question can't be answered without the actual details. Your argument is just "resources aren't infinite so we shouldn't use any of them!" That's not a good argument.
Another thing people often seem to miss when comparing lithium for batteries to oil for combustion, is that lithium is not a fuel in a battery, it's a vessel. It doesn't get burned up. Whether we can recycle it efficiently enough is a big open question, but it's not gone the way fossil fuels are.
Straw man fallacy. Your parent comment didn’t make that argument, only that resources are relatively more plentiful than the assumptions that many people make. I would argue the GP is correct.
Technological advances in the 1970s in agriculture (incl. genetic engineering of more nutritious yellow rice, artificial fertilizer from petrol products, improved planting density) allowed us to increase food staple yields. These improvements have expanded world food yields to double the amount of population that can be sustained by the current number of farm operations.
Fracking and horizontal drilling have made US oil/gas drilling (not just pumping of existing wells) profitable again. The explosion of cheap oil in the 2010s (and the cratering of oil prices in Trump’s term) was created by this technology. Fracking isn’t as cheap as the cheapest pumping in the world (probably Saudi light oil), so assumptions must be made about prices and when this technology can add to the world supply. But re-pressurizing existing wells (which is what fracking is) had been tried for 50+ years and only around 2005+/- did the technology work to make it become profitable.
Both of these are examples of modern technology that has bent the supply curve by breaking the simple, fixed assumptions of some economists. And no, no one thinks the supply curve bends infinitely.
Lithium Triangle[1]. "a region of the Andes that is rich in lithium reserves, encompassed by the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.[1] The lithium in the triangle is concentrated in various salt pans that exist along the Atacama Desert and neighboring arid areas, the largest areas including Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, Salar de Atacama in Chile, and Salar del Hombre Muerto in Argentina.
The area is thought to hold around 54% of the world's lithium reserves."
Well, not any more maybe. A large lithium deposit has been dis-covered in Iran as the internationalbanker article notes. (Unusal hyphenation of discovered intentional: it was uncovered, made more widely known, rather than found for the first time ever.) Now that it's in demand, no doubt there are many more deposits of lithium waiting for the limelight.
Wikipedia continues: "By one estimate Argentina could displace Chile as the second largest lithium producer by 2027.[3] Similarly, there are estimates the posits [sic] Argentina producing 16% of the World's lithium by 2030, instead of 6% as in 2021.[3] Low royalty payments when compared to Chile are cited by The Economist as a particular advantage.[3]"
Iran is not a reserve it may well be a resource but a long way from being a Jorc etc reserve.
Also that lithium triangle is still a historic artefact of lithiums previous life as a really good lubricant and anti depressant. Given lithiums importance these days, more and more hard rock deposits will be found.
For the xth time in yth year There is no lithium shortage. Up until a decade ago we weren’t even looking for it. Now that there is money to be had we will find it.
A huge factor is accessibility of reserves. Often new discoveries are so remote and inaccessible that they are completely unrealistic to be producing within the next 10/20 years. I think both Iran and Argentina fall into this category.
Not a great article (from a minerals and resources perspective).
Two specific factors; recent mine expansion at sites that dig in the dirt and produce concentrates _and_ recent and near future expansion of processing locations that take concentrates and refine to ship usable lithium.
Eg: Minesite in Western Australia currently ships concentrates to Malaysia and will soon ship also Texas.
Shipping concentrates is pretty standard in mining low-grade resources. Near the mine, there's usually some kind of plant to extract the good stuff and discard the dirt.
Otherwise, there's a huge amount of wasted effort shipping dirt and rocks around, and dumping them someplace.
What's shipped out usually needs more processing. What's left behind is usually the big environmental headache with mining.
Lithium traditionally has seen refinment of concentrates take place some distance from the primary hole in the ground; Western Australia is soon opening refinement facilities "not far" (couple of hundred km) from the primary mine (Greenbushes).
Generally digging hole -> concentrate (in this case (Lithium) the concentrate is Spodumene) is a largely mechanical process - crushing, grinding, screening, centrifuge, seperation, etc and what's left behind is overburden and not of interest tailings - this is "regular mining problems" and these are not huge in todays regulated environment, post mining rehab is required and ideally pre mine eco systems come back.
Refinement of concentrates, particulalry of Rare Earths is generally where nasty chemicals come into play which requires tight processing and strong oversight to keep "clean" .. acids at end of re-re-re-use need to be nuetralised and processing areas need strong under-pan barriers to prevent spills leaching down to groundwater, tailings dams need to be strong, monitored, and regularly dealt with.
These are all things which are "all right" in theory and good practice .. but do require strong oversight and an educated third party invested public keep a close eye on transparent operations.
Sodium batteries will have any effect only in a few years. So this is mostly the case of increased production in anticipation of stronger demand that has not realized.
The latter is not necessary an indication of a less demand for batteries. There were a lot of progress recently in increase of the energy density in mass-produced batteries, and that may contributed to lessening of the demand.
Has there been a commodity that has spiked in price due to true lack of supply and non new supplies were found? From peak oil, to copper , lithium and rare earth minerals predictions of we will run out during a price shock always seem to turn into a price collapse.
> "Mid-February also saw reports emerge that the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery manufacturer, China’s CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited), had begun offering discounts on batteries sold to certain Chinese EV companies, such as Nio Inc. (NIO) and Zeekr, thus reflecting the ongoing downturn in the lithium price. Such discounts are reportedly being offered to enable CATL’s customers to lock in battery purchases—the most expensive component of EVs—at below-market prices if they agree to purchase at least 80 percent of the batteries they require for their EVs from CATL, on the assumption that lithium-carbonate prices will continue falling significantly."
In the U.S. I think this would be quite illegal. I realize China is different, but it's still interesting to see this kind of thing out in the open as if it's normal. (The closest situation I can think of is when Intel was sued by AMD by offering discounts on CPUs to manufacturers that didn't use AMD products[1]. Intel settled with AMD for 1.25 billion dollars.)
What the article does not mention: in June a new chinese emission standard for vehicles, that can hardly be met by combustion engines, will hit. That may drive up the Lithium demand.
And in 23Q4 or 24Q1 CATL will sell its 500 Wh/kg batteries. Although I couldn't find much about the chemistry of the new cells, that may cut the Lithium demand in half. But not very fast, I guess.
Assuming the denser batteries have the same amount of lithium per kg, I don't see how we'll see a halving of lithium demand. That would only be possible under the incorrect assumption that battery demand is static.
That's already not true with current technology as EVs are gaining market shares rapidly, but also the new technology will be opening new usages, so it will opening new markets, further driving the demand.
Yes, it may cut the Lithium demand in half, if the demand does not change (much), and that is not likely. Sorry for the not so well formulated statement. I meant that that may lower the inclination of the curve of Lithium demand significantly.
Let's assume "from the internet" estimate is at least somewhat correct, and the average EV battery contains 10kg of lithium (this is rounding up the more common 8kg estimate to make it easier to count).
The collapse in lithium prices could mean that the electric car market has been overvalued and that the actual production of electric cars is much lower than 12 million, because lithium batteries are not only used in cars.
Nothing, over time, prices will still begin to rise. Even though the technology and business of recycling lithium from used batteries will somehow develop.
And for sure, this decline will not affect the price of batteries in any way.
I first saw on HN itself an article on how it’s possible to extract lithium from seawater. Wondering how scalable it is. Seemed to me like a game changer, possibly.
Someone can set up some extractors up in the great eastern garbage patch, and filter plastics ,microplastics, chemicals, etc, whilst extracting lithium.
This report talks about Chinese demand, but there is demand coming online from European auto-makers such as VW which is spending billions to electrify its fleet (not to mention US and Japanese car makers).
Copper is another decarbonisation-related element that is predicted to have large shortfalls in supply compared to demand in the future.
I'm currently on a laptop. Why does one increment of the mouse wheel scroll like four screenfuls on this web page? I'm not gonna use the scroll bar to read your shit; have a nice day.
Here's some wild speculation grounded on a wisp of research:
Eurasia based cartel had cornered the market on lithium vital for new energy. US based interests bent the ear of the Chilean government to break this monopoly by nationalizing these privately owned mines and rediverting the supply. Speculators got wrecked. Does anyone know if a Credit Suisse customer had dealings in Chile?
tianqi sold all his shares of SQM (one of Chile lithium companies, around 23%) after the announcement.
The situation of the lithium in Chile is very particular. in the Pinochet dictatorship, litium was nationalized, because it was a key ingredient of atomic bombs (and not much else at that time), and USA didn't want other countries to access the resource, so all current mines are in a lease contract (Albemarle until 2043, SQM until 2030). the new proposition opens new zones for exploitation, in exchange of the public-private parnership
Probably not until significantly more capacity is added. Right now all the big battery suppliers (CATL, CALB, EVE, LG Chem, Panasonic) are all at capacity meaning they have no incentive to lower prices.
If new capacity comes online and it's not greeted by increased demand (unlikely) then prices could fall. Wouldn't hold my breath though, the targets China has for EVs is going to provide strong support for demand even if the rest of the world goes into recession.
In 2022-23 several hundred billion USD of investment in new battery production capacity in the USA and Europe was announced in multiple announcements. (Source: cleantechnica, or batteriesnews, or energy-storage.news, or maybe industry weekly; I'll try to find it again. In the mean time, there's this[1]. Edit: and this: battery-news.de[2].)
Much of that should come online in 2025 - 28, if not canceled first.
Edit 2: there are several steps in the production chain beyond mining and initial refining. There is material production for anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, separators, and lithium; there is cell assembly, there is pack assembly, and there is production of electronics associated with cells and packs (charge controllers, pack management). Each of these has its own issues. It's not as "simple" as refining oil.
About the yellow flame, another explanation would be sodium from the salt. My daughter’s saline nebuliser does that to our cooker, even from the next room.
So basically, we can’t switch to EVs because people don’t have enough money. The crowd that thinks poverty is the solution to climate change proven wrong once again.
> A legacy of the Pinochet era in Chile is the privatisation of minerals and water, which gives companies ownership of those resources in an area. While mining operations squeeze this already dry region even drier, communities lose their access to potable water, leaving them relying on tankers to deliver it.
“We used to have a river before that now doesn’t exist. There isn’t a drop of water,” says Rivera. “And not only here in Copiapó but in all of Chile, there are rivers and lakes that have disappeared—all because a company has a lot more right to water than we do as human beings or citizens of Chile.”
And this is in Chile, the second largest producer of lithium. Just because it goes against your views it being anti-EV, doesn't make it FUD. People have other types of grievances like the human cost of lithium mining, even for the amazing storage capability of lithium batteries.
As a former citizen of the USSR, I have to object to linking environmental issues to private property. The Soviets did all kinds of tremendously bad things ranking, from geo-transformation to placing the heavy industry in the middle of cities. From what I read about North Korea, the entire country is ruined by various extraction and industrial projects.
Not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to share my own take, which is that one of the clearest, bluest skies I've ever seen was over North Korea. Because they sucked at doing "industry" compared to the South Koreans. In the 90s in South Korea, the rivers ran black and every corner you turned had its own putrid chemical smell from whatever fly-by-night entrepraneur had found a way to make a buck there. But that's an anecdote and I haven't been back to see what it's like now.
Yes. For many folks there is an intrinsic value to protecting the environment.
I find more and more that even within the NGO and environmentalist community people only care about how natural resources impact people in a utilitarian sense. I can respect that philosophical position, but it makes me equal parts angry and sad that it's taken as a given. I don't believe life on earth exists just to serve human needs.
I think there are two kinds of environmentalist - the purist kind you prefer and the practical kind. The practical kind has the arguments that appeal to most people with things like "let's not run out of oil because it's useful" and "lets not cause climate change because it'll lead to problems for people". But the purist kind is really more of a religious belief that you can't persuade people of in practical terms. That doesn't mean it's wrong - it's just that even adherents don't know why it's right, if it is. Just like religion. You see the purist kind extending to things like "lets not colonize the moon or Mars because we'll damage their natural state." Maybe in a million years, they'll turn out to have been right, but nobody knows that today.
When pointing to another country in a discussion about policies, the point is never "we should be absolutely 100% like them in every single ways". There will never be a path for a country A to absolutely follow country B's path anyway.
In that respect, unless you believe over polluting the environment is an absolute necessity to avoid malnutrition, pointing at NK's economic policy issues in this discussion doesn't help us much.
Out of curiosity, are you from NK? I am fascinated with that country. Wrt South Korea, Koreans I spoke to only complain about the environment when winds blow from China.
The important part is the "complete ownership of those rights". In the Soviet Union, a community had no rights and little power by ways of representative government to defend themselves. It's little different in the case of Chile. Do the nuances of state/corporate ownership of resources mean anything when they are both large, far off organizations exploiting my land with little of my own say?
The problem is when you can externalize problems with impunity. Doesn't really matter what the basic system is. Generally you find that systems that strip individuals or disfavored groups from having any power at all do that a lot. Especially those where pushing back is dangerous.
The USSR did call itself democratic. In a sense, since it was central control for all. The USA did NOT call itself democratic -- the preferred term up to the '70s was "constitutional republic". To avoid the flattening that "democracy" was perceived to produce. The argument is that democracy ALWAYS leads to tyranny and collapse.
To quote "Both are anti-democratic". Which I don't understand. Is your claim that both systems (as practiced in the USSR and USA) led to extreme wealth concentration? Did the economy increase during this concentration? If so, do you still consider this "anti-democratic".
Democracy is inherent and implicit in a republic. And I think you're mistaken about "constitutional republic." That term really wasn't used much, though representative democracy and "democratic republic" were terms that were used more frequently.
The entire argument about the US not having a democracy but a republic really stems (in modern times) from the John Birch Society.
You could well be right (I am not American). I do recall discussing the GDR with some USA people... a "democratic republic". Was told, back then, that the term had been co-opted. But then, I don't know much about the John Birch Society.
> Is your claim that both systems led to extreme wealth concentration?
Yes.
> The argument is that democracy ALWAYS leads to tyranny and collapse.
Rather than Plato's mob rule criticism, I'm using the more contemporary capitalism-vs-democracy (winner-takes-all) food fight.
The tension in USA, at least, has always been wealth vs democracy. The "liberal" in the traditional "liberal democracy" was a reference to our economic system of free enterprise. The aspiration was to balance winner-takes-all with will-of-the-people. Basically the formulation of modern Nordic "democratic socialism".
I think the USSR would object to being called capitalist, since they were one of the major Communist revolutions until their economic collapse.
And in this vein, we shouldn't forget Mao's "four pests campaign" in China under Mao which caused mass starvation by killing sparrows which had been eating insects, leaving them with a literal plague of locusts.
I mean, sure, that's what happens literally any time you set up a super-powerful government, necessarily including any government powerful enough to redistribute all of a society's resources. See also: company towns, Pol Pot, the Kims, Mao, or what was happening in that rebellious colony called the USA before the citizens stopped it.
But claiming it fits a bespoke definition of "capitalism" seemingly invented for this particular discussion, despite that being against literally everything they professed, seems a bit much.
They didn't end up with extreme wealth concentration by letting people freely exchange goods and services. That usually happens when people take control of who is able to exchange goods, whether via monopolies or government control.
Your parent didn’t call the USSR “capitalism”, they called it “private capitalism”. I’ve never heard that term before so I’m guessing it was ad hoc.
I’m guessing the public capitalism / private capitalism has to do with where the ownership of property, concentration of human capital is, and there the market making prices are found. In that sense, the public/private dichotomy mostly works. Sure, Communists argue there is more virtue to their system than simply market making and state owned property, but those are effectively downstream / derived qualities.
And Mao murdered tons of people (both directly and the way a mob boss would have) for many different reasons. He probably was the kind of person who might murder someone because he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I don’t think that matters much in this discussion and I don’t think we should self-censor our thoughts because the ghost of a terrible person might hear us.
That formulation erases any distinction between capitalism and anything else, leaving it as just an empty synonym for badness. I'm calling out the intellectual emptiness of that use as an epithet here.
Your article is pretending that the water access issues are caused by lithium mining. This is a specious argument that only makes sense because they omitted the obviously pertinent fact that Chile is in the grip of a decade-long drought.
The fact is, instead of restricting water usage related to lithium mining, they'd rather let the river run dry. While the drough is a major factor, so too is how the regulations allow the continued abuse of the limited resource.
It's speculation at this point. Just depends on whether people think the water cost of lithium mining is more than the sale price of the lithium. Either that or the government isn't doing its job.
If Chile is undergoing a drought, are there not ethical considerations for prioritizing water for the benefit of the public rather than for manufacturing?
What you just described is a failure of government to setup appropriate water rights. It has nothing to do with mining. The same exact thing happens with agriculture.
> We used to have a river before that now doesn’t exist. There isn’t a drop of water,” says Rivera. “And not only here in Copiapó but in all of Chile, there are rivers and lakes that have disappeared
It’s more likely that climate change was responsible for this problem.
Lithium is not the only cause of aquifer depletion in Chile, avocado farms have also been responsible for depleting the wells of residents [1].
These outcomes, as the article alludes to, are due to the privatization of resource rights, which is a consequence of Pinochet government going all in on the policies Milton Friedman promoted [2].
Citizens of Chile are more victims of neoliberalism than they are of any particular industry.
From wikipedia: « In 2010, Chile was the first nation in South America to win membership in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization restricted to the world's richest countries »
Chile has a GDP per capita not all that different from peer South American countries of Argentina and Uruguay [0]. It is a stretch to characterize “winning” membership to the OECD as some sort of objective, non ideological measure of economic progress.
GDP per capita is a very narrow indicator that does not come close to telling enough about the economic condition of a country.
Argentina seems to be going bankrupt and drown in enormous inflation every couple of years. That isn't the case with Chile. Based on this factor alone, Chile and Argentina aren't peers.
I won't propose any exact criteria, given that this is HN and I am in no mood for nitpicking games, which usually follow after a demand for something exact.
However, if I were considering investment from my own pocket, political and economic stability would play a much higher role for my decision making than GDP per capita. And Argentina would therefore be a big no-no, while Chile might make the cut.
> I won't propose any exact criteria, given that this is HN and I am in no mood for nitpicking games, which usually follow after a demand for something exact.
I understand that, you were the one who dismissed GDP per capita as an objective measurement of economic development.
The point I was making that the OECD exists to espouse a particular model of global economic organization and development, which is politically informed.
As to your question about investment, what might be beneficial to me as an investor isn’t necessarily the same as what is beneficial to a citizen of a particular country.
Economic situation of a country is a fairly complex picture that cannot be measured by a single scalar value. GDP per capita is not useless, but just one value among many. Same as you wouldn't try to measure an individual's overall health by their BMI alone. It tells you something, especially on the extreme ends of the distribution, but in the middle, not that much.
Yeah, OECD is very political. No disagreement about that.
But I would say that the correlation of "being attractive for FDI" and "having good standards of living among the general population" is rather high and given that FDI tends to predate said growth of standards of living, there actually may be causality.
Excluding resource-rich countries that grew fat on something that comes out of the earth, pretty much every country whose standards of living soared since, say, 1950, attracted a lot of FDI beforehand.
After all, the same things that attract investors (stability, low crime, high educational attainment, reliable electricity supply, rule of law) tend to be good for the citizens as well.
Some countries are known for falsifying statistics -- Argentina and China, for example. Chile is not. That means that if the official GDP/capita of Chile and Argentina are about the same, the real ones must be very different.
(And they aren't the same. Chile's is a lot higher at the moment.)
> In the U.S., Pinochet is often a talking point in economics debates. He was a brutal dictator, who killed thousands and who tortured, imprisoned, and/or exiled tens of thousands more. It’s very understandable that Chileans would want to expunge any portion of his legacy. But in the U.S., it’s his economic policy that continues to be debated decades later. Some libertarians believe that despite the brutality of his regime, he implemented economic policies that were wildly successful in raising Chilean living standards.
I would say the USA (where I grew up and still live, which doesn't make me a expert, mind- these are mostly just feelings) is also a victim of neoliberalism[0], and that people who revere President Reagan (USA) and Prime Minister Thatcher (UK) are generally selfish and inconsiderate of (what I see as) the importance of other life on earth whether or not we can directly benefit from it.
> What we are now doing to the world... is new in the experience of the Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.
> The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. Those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.
Environmental destruction doesn’t have a single exclusive cause.
There is the horseshoe theory that says that either extremes have more in common with each other then they have with the center [1].
If I we’re to connect neoliberalism with Soviet communism, I’d say that both ideologies are examples of high modernism, which is the idea that leaders can optimize on a metric and ignore all other factors that contribute to their countries success. This never has positive outcomes for the people living in those countries.
Wrong. Lithium in Chile was nationalized in the 1980s by Pinochet. Lithium extraction and processing has been granted to privates in long term contracts that will continue to be valid but will not be renewed, and new mines will be owned directly by the state.
"Fun" fact about that, it was nationalized because it is a material for use in atomic bombs, in the 70 and 80 there wasn't another use for large scale lithium mining, except for that
They've announced plans to do so and those plans have issues and wil take time:
> While Chile's plan to take control of its lithium industry has caused global shockwaves, state-led production of the metal used to make electric vehicle batteries is seen by analysts as likely years away given technical and political challenges.
I don’t want to disagree with you because I agree on principle with what you are saying but this case you describe has nothing to do with EVs and everything to do with neoliberalism.
Incidentally, bogus generalizations about HN are one of the lowest-quality forms of this. Please avoid that.
The community is divided on most topics, especially the divisive ones—this is neither surprising nor interesting, and perceptions about what's "saturated" are driven by people's passions on $topic.
It's crazy out there right now - massive political pressure with tax breaks, climate anxiety marketing for EVs, mass confusion about energy supply chains and pollution whether oil or electric, a lack of clarity about battery ingredients and lifecycles from extraction to disposal.
I'm not hugely invested but I do prefer cooking on gas. I've had element stoves, they suck. I then had gas, it's great. I stayed in an Airbnb for a month and a friend's condo for a week with induction, it was better than radiant but worse than gas to me.
Also the power goes out at my house about 2x a year when we have windstorms. The stove still works, induction doesn't. So I can still cook and make coffee. My other option would be to use my grill in that situation. I like having backups.
It's not some conspiracy with me, I just didn't like it as much. There are dozens of us.
I also ran an experiment a few years back with some particulate sensors. I noticed when measuring during wild fire smoke the particulates went way up when I cooked bacon. So I did it again on a hot plate not gas. Same thing. The bacon grease and cooking itself was giving off a ton of particulates. To me the lesson was maybe cook outdoors. Or figure out how to plumb a vent through an upstairs living space attic and roof to vent outside.
I've also been hesitant on electric cars. My friend has an original roadster that I've driven several times. It's great even tho I can't even get out of it because of my size. However I go out to ski and road trip a lot. I constantly am evaluating if an ev is ready for that use, it's getting closer but not yet. The ski hills I go to are near range for a EV and the charging spots are all taken as are all the spots so that's a risk. Camping and backpacking is more iffy. There was charging at Yellowstone in a few spots but I doubt they ran it to mowich lake yet.
But the kicker is I just have several old cars (08) that are in great shape and I hate all the shit on new cars when I rent them. There's a few features that are great like the anti-tbone feature, and some backup cameras. But he'll they used to beep whenever someone was near you, or they freak out when your 5 feet from a hedge when parking moving .2 mph and slam on the brakes, or the infotainment system is slow, crashes, and has no buttons. So I'll just hold while those bugs are worked out. I think these cars may all get to 20 years easily.
That’s really interesting that the particulates were comparable from induction and gas cooking. If you did any more comparisons and recorded them anywhere, I’d be curious to read more about them.
I’m guessing this might be a temperature dependent issue. I enjoy using a cast iron to brown meats, but I really dial it back in homes without true range hoods (e.g. they vent back indoors). If I go for maybe 25% browning, I can massively reduce the smoke. It feels a shame to not do a steak to perfection, but when I’ll prefer that to venting the whole place for an hour.
The sensor I used was one of these (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NSGY7B3) attached to a ESP32 sending data to my grafana/prom setup on my nas. If you have done those it's like 2 hours of work and about $40 per sensor/esp pair. I couldn't leave the house without a respirator when our aqi got up to 650 for 2 days.
Anyway it's pretty easy to play around with. I didn't save the data anywhere unfortunately.
>To me the lesson was maybe cook outdoors. Or figure out how to plumb a vent through an upstairs living space attic and roof to vent outside.
Huh? Why would this be necessary? Just use the range hood that should already be installed and should vent to the outside. Are these not required in your country for some strange reason?
> I can’t believe that actual people are that invested in burning hydrocarbons.
Yeah, it's weird, right? Why _are_ people so invested in burning natgas and coal and other hydrocarbons for large-scale power generation when a plethora of proven near-zero-emissions alternatives exist?
From a climate-change perspective, banning natgas cookstoves is a few pennies saved on like a thousand dollar expenditure. It's similar to the performative "charging for plastic takeaway bags" and "not bringing out table water" nonsense that California likes to do from time to time... it's way easier than making a real dent in the underlying problem, it inconveniences a ton of people (so they know you're doing something), and because "something" has been done, enough of those people don't bother finding out about and loudly and continually agitating for making a real dent in the underlying problem.
Forget burning, even pumping gas to residences is itself a big source of emissions, because of how leaky the pipes are. Between two to seven percent of all gas put into the system is lost directly to the atmosphere, and it's a very potent greenhouse gas.
One way or the other, it needs to go away. It's not performative, it's necessary for achieving long-term emissions goals, and it's low-hanging fruit.
> ...banning natgas cookstoves is a few pennies saved on like a thousand dollar expenditure.
and
> [Low-impact, high-visibility stuff like that is done because] it's way easier than making a real dent in the underlying problem
If you'll pardon the mixed metaphors: When it comes to environmental stuff, a lot of the time, the low-hanging fruit isn't worth picking because the high-hanging fruit is the thing that's the immediate wildfire hazard.
Setting aside the validity of your claim that it’s just a “few Pennie’s on a thousand dollar expenditure (which I strongly disagree with…banning natural gas hookups would be worth it even if climate change wasn’t a problem).
Your argument basically boils down to “I’m in debt and need to start spending thousands of dollars less. Cutting out this completely unnecessary expenditure will only save me a few dollars so I shouldn’t cut out this completely unnecessary expense because it won’t save me all the thousands I need to save”.
I'd say a more accurate metaphor would be "I'm in debt and decided to ignore my biggest high interest loan in order to fully pay off my smallest low interest loan so I feel good about something"
Sure it's good you have less debt but while you were resolving the small loan you were racking up massive interest on the big one
It is still good to fix if it contributes to a significant amount of warming, but it isn't cumulative like CO2: it eventually degrades in the atmosphere.
There will be no “real dent”. You have to make small changes along with big changes.
And banning natural gas piped infrastructure is an easy win.
1. No one is banning natural gas stoves. You can still use a natural gas stove. You just need to bring your own cylinder like most of the world and half the food YouTubers already do.
2. Natural gas stoves have significant indoor pollution impact. It’s a huge benefit even outside the climate change side.
3. Natural gas infrastructure is expensive, dangerous and unnecessary. Cities will benefit from the removal of all those pipes from under their streets even if climate change wasn’t a thing.
Banning gas hookups is such an obvious win (again, for those who want, gas stoves are still available with a cylinder), it’s remarkable to see the level of status quo bias that exists.
> Natural gas infrastructure is expensive, dangerous and unnecessary.
It’s been used and operated safely for hundreds of years in cities on the East Coast. The idea that it’s dangerous is simply FUD to scare people into spending $1000 on a future piece of e-waste to cook their food.
Do you mean induction stoves are e-waste? Why? They should be perfectly durable, no moving parts, simple operating principle. They aren't even super expensive and their price is going down.
Far more things that can go wrong with them though (at least compared to a standard gas stove). "Repairability" for electronics is considered a competitive disadvantage where companies want to force you to buy a whole new device instead of fixing the blown capacitor (or whatever the issue is).
Although the right to repair movement seems to be making some headway recently, so maybe all is not lost. Touch screens (with no alternative), and subscription service shoehorns need the same treatment, ban them.
That would be a good way to actually make a difference because it not only makes using gas for cooking less attractive but it also makes gas heating and gas powered industry significantly more inconvenient!
EDIT: would probably be a political nightmare to implement though…
I don't think anyone that cooks for themselves genuinely thinks this. E-stovetops are literally a joke, designed by and for adult-infants that eat microwaved soup from Trader Joe's, not for real people that make real, delicious food.
Induction tops are orders of magnitude superior to coil-based stovetops, and are viable and possibly superior replacements for gas tops despite the cookware limitations and other issues; when their control schemes mature (no capacitive touch) and prices come down to the point of attainability for the unwashed masses they will be welcomed.
But, coil-based electric tops are an embarassment for anyone that sells them, installs them, and "uses" them.
The point of the natural gas stove ban in new construction is to stop building additional natural gas infrastructure. Building new pipes to new housing will lock us in to decades of additional natural gas use.
I expect natural gas for heating will be the long pole of greenhouse gas emissions. Eventually we'll have to disassemble what we already have. For some areas, it may make sense to do that soon.
Boston, for example, has old and leaky natural gas pipes that have been found to be leaking tons of methane into the atmosphere and causing occasional explosions. The city will probably have to invest billions of dollars into repairing its natural gas distribution pipes in the next 10-20 years, which would remain in use for 50-60 years more.
Or, they could spend a bit more money, convert everyone to induction cooktops and heat pumps, and get rid of the natural gas altogether.
I don't have any statistics on this, but I feel like I see far fewer plastic bags littering the streets these days. That alone is a win for me personally.
Give it time and you'll be seeing plenty of the reusable bags littering instead
In theory they are supposed to be reusable but in practice I think they are going to wind up being single-use for most people. Maybe we'll start using them as garbage bags as they accumulate around the house.
Yeah, my bag use hasn't changed at all, except instead of getting 3 to 6 lightweight plastic bags on each trip, I spend an extra quarter, and get 3-6 heavy plastic bags on each trip. Very much a net loss, as they have to use at least five times the material.
(When paper bags aren't available. I've always preferred paper.)
Product packaging probably generates 1-2 orders of magnitude more waste than the bags holding the product.
I live in an area that's banned plastic bags. Given enough experience, grabbing a reusable bag out of the car before going into the store became an unconscious programmed action.
Unless you empty your groceries in your car to leave the bags there, at some point bags need to make it from your house to your car, so that you have some to take into the store.
That's the part I struggle with.
Also, if you order groceries for delivery, they bring your order in reusable bags. Which you then keep.
My point is these re-usable bags have a tendency to accumulate over time. Maybe not at the same rate as plastic bags would otherwise, but once you have dozens of these bags at home it starts to be tempting to just use them as bin liners and toss them, just like we did with plastic bags
Which sort of defeats the whole purpose, right? The ideal is people would buy as many as they need and use them for years.
But that isn't going to happen any time soon imo. If ever.
They put out less BTUs (9k vs 15k-25k from a high end gas burner) and you can’t cook certain types of cuisines like a stir fry, getting a good sear on steaks, etc. As someone who went from Gas to Electric it really is a massive downgrade.
The reason gas is superior is due to heat recovery time. Recovery time is the time it takes to reach temperature after adding food to a pan. Gas is superior to all forms of electric in recovery time. There simply is /more energy/ in a cubic foot of gas compared to what a home electric circuit can deliver in the same time frame. It’s science, plain and simple.
The practical effect is food spends less time steaming, so for example, a stir fry doesn’t come out soggy and unappetizing.
A gas stove might be able to create more BTUs/min but if half of that heat misses the pan because it's rapidly rising and being vented out of the kitchen it's not really helping me much.
Meanwhile most of the energy from my electric stove actually makes it into my pan instead of out a vent or into my kitchen.
I have an induction wok, it cost a couple hundred dollars on Amazon, heats up instantly and goes up to very high temps.
I do not have the problem you are describing.
> Gas is superior to all forms of electric in recovery time.
This is really going to be dependent on which stoves we are comparing, along with the type of pan being used.
> There simply is /more energy/ in a cubic foot of gas compared to what a home electric circuit can deliver in the same time frame. It’s science, plain and simple.
Science as I alluded to in my previous comment, would account for waste heat. Which is where a significant amount of the energy of a gas stove goes.
Yes… it’s also significantly cheaper than I high end gas stove?
We’re talking about appliances here, OP was comparing a high end gas stove’s output to electric. My point is that my couple hundred dollar unit can replicate many of the things OP was claiming you’d need to buy a $5,000-$10,000 gas stove for (though I am in no way suggesting that these are equivalent in functionality to each other).
That's just really a different class altogether. I doubt my gas stove cost more than 200 new :)
But the thing about a cheap gas stove is that it performs as well as a high end one, at least for a one person household like mine. If I'd invest in induction it would all get much more expensive to get the same performance.
If that is your opinion, I kind of doubt that you would have that much of an issue with an electric stove, at least not the ones that OP was complaining about. An expensive gas range is going to perform significantly differently from a $200 one. At least, if all we are talking about is “heat goes into pan”.
Edit: Look, I don’t mean to come across as though I have an issue with your budget or choices, but you’re derailing a conversation that was in response to someone claiming that electric was inferior specifically in comparison to high end gas stoves. Your $300 range isn’t going to put out the 15-25k Btus that OP was talking about, which was why I made the comparison to a relatively less expensive induction device. I personally use that device for a significant amount of my cooking as I rent a unit that only has an underpowered 2 burned stove.
Gas stoves need to go away because getting rid of gas infrastructure in the long term will be a huge win, but the gas industry spends heavily on propaganda to convince people otherwise: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54
Us. We can make electricity from lots of things and turns out in about 10 years a lot of it will be made from renewables in most countries, and the trend is only going one way.
There's a reason there is a push to electrify everything.
Obviously getting rid of gas stoves is good for the environment. In the US, the only conceivable use I see for them longer term is camping stoves and extremely remote houses that don't have electricity.
I'm guessing you have some other view from your comment, please explain.
No one is banning gas stoves. They’re banning gas hookups which will indeed remove gas water heaters and furnaces.
The fact that NY’s decision to ban gas hookups in new buildings is being framed as banning gas stoves is in itself the result of gas industry propaganda. In fact,
Gas stoves are the one thing that can easily be continued because people can use gas cylinders.
Why not all three? Just stop using gas altogether. I pass enough of it myself, thanks.
Edit: why am I being downvoted? Is it not a legitimate question to ask why not go all the way with converting to electric when appliances exist for all three use cases? Do my farts stink too bad?
Because gas stoves are the easiest to replace. If someone doesn't have gas lines in their house, they'll just use an electric stove. Replacing a water heater or furnace either needs heat pumps or resistive heat and it becomes potentially much more expensive.
Stoves don't matter in the big picture here, they are secondary to whatever people are already doing for heat.
If you have a gas stove, you probably don't have a circuit or wiring or receptacle to plug in an electric stove. So you'll need to get a 240V circuit installed, which for most people will require hiring an electrician. Same as putting in a heat pump.
I sure do and my house was very much a basic median market build but built by a smaller builder who only does 2-6 homes a year. An electric oven is far superior to a gas oven but I do enjoy my gas cooktop. It’s all in one like a standard range but is listed as a dual-fuel model. As an easy first step, we need to mandate the 220v hookup in all new kitchens and then phase out the gas. A simple building code adjustment would do the trick and putting the receptacle in at the time of construction is cheap compared to a retrofit.
So what? You already have electricity. If you don't have a gas line to your house, you aren't going to get one for a gas stove. Again, gas stoves are secondary to having gas in the first place, focusing on them is nonsense whether someone wants gas or not.
You said "gas stoves are easiest to replace" when in fact if that is what you have, replacing it with anything but another gas stove is difficut (or at least, more expensive)
Replacing a gas stove with an electric stove is much easier and less expensive in the long run than replacing water heaters and furnaces with electric versions.
Also this isn't about replacing a working stove in an existing building it's about substituting electric versions for gas versions if there are no gas lines, so I think you missed the entire context of the thread.
Much more money is spent on climate change propaganda than there is on gas propaganda. I see climate change propaganda almost every day, but pro fossil propaganda extremely rarely. I think that this is because fossil fuels are extremely useful in practice, and so the users don’t need to be convinced of their benefits.
The gas stove bans are idiotic and petty to defend based on environmentalist principles. The amount of gas burned by those stoves makes roughly zero impact compared with all the other hydrocarbons we burn.
The ban of gas connections and by extension gas water heaters, gas furnaces and gas stoves is being reframed to be just gas stoves. So yes, if you cherry-pick the lowest impact item out of the list of gas appliances, the impact is low.
Exactly this. Gas stoves are the flashpoint, because at the end of the day, people generally don’t think about what type of energy their heating comes from. The gas stove is the deciding factor that determines whether or not a gas line gets hooked up to a home or not.
Most people decide on a heating source based on price, not on the stove they want. In the US, in most areas, gas is cheaper to heat a house than electricity is. The may shift as heat pumps become more popular, but historically it has been the case.
No, the gas stove bans are smart. They're not for reducing carbon pollution, they're to reduce indoor air pollution, and also the danger of having combustible gas plumbed to everyone's home. Houses explode due to gas looks with alarming frequency. Electric is simply safer.
I'm not defending the ban on gas stoves, but a much better reason to ban them is their impact on indoor air quality. Burning natural gas indoors emits all kinds of nasty stuff like carbon monoxide, nitric oxides, formaldehyde...stuff linked to all kinds of diseases from asthma to cancer.
For serious chefs, gas ranges remain far superior to their electric counterparts. I’ll be the first in line to buy an induction cooktop that performs as well as a high end gas range, but we’re not there yet.
I've had three in different places I've lived, and while they are fantastic temperature-wise, the software and interface is always what infuriates me. They are almost all touch interfaces to keep the flat glass aesthetic, which is absurd because spills happen on stoves and touch interfaces don't work wet. Additionally, most of them automatically detect pans being removed and turn off. An annoying feature for an experienced cook who tosses food around in a pan with one hand.
Obviously. But it shuts it down when you remove it instead of just working again when reapplied. It turns off the cooking surface and you have to turn it back on again, instead of momentarily breaking the heat while you pick it up.
I've had pretty much all kinds in various apartments in the last while, currently back on "hot plate" resistive electric (renting currently), which sucks and is inefficient.
Induction is amazing for some things, but for some other things I prefer gas.
Given the choice, I'd have some kind of combination of gas and induction. Maybe half and half?
So not a chef by any stretch but i’ve been cooking on resistive stoves for a long time. I find it works great for me to use good pans. My favorite is one with low thermal mass but a good heat distribution layer - and it seems to be stable as far as keeping the cooking surface nice and flat.
If I had a choice I wouldn’t use gas for a few reasons. Air quality, the amount of water that gets released and fire hazard. Seen too many buildings explode on tv lol.
Induction is great for instances where you can just leave a flat bottomed pan to do its thing. It is also nice in smaller kitchens where the efficiency keeps the heat going to the pan rather than the air.
But they do not work well (or at all) when a pad is moved around a lot, or it has a rounded bottom like a Wok or Karahi. At least the ones ive used don't. You are also reliant on the designers to give enough heat levels to actually cook properly and to provide a generally usable device that is fit for purpose. None of these things are an issue with even the cheapest gas stoves.
Having a both would be perfect. Just one or two gas burners for frying would be fine.
Yeah, we are living through that horror as well, turns out roughly half of the people we know that have an induction stove ended up having either multiple replacements or live with the peculiarities of their unit. It’s not cheap stuff as well, one couple have a high end Miele one that goes completely haywire if anything drops on its surface and that is after getting one replacement and one “upgrade”…
They can continue using gas stoves with cylinders.
Most of the world does that.
Of course, what actually serious chefs find is that once the subsidy for gas is removed (by removing legislation requiring utilities and buildings to provide piped natural gas), not only are induction stoves much more effective, cook faster, etc., they also keep their kitchens incredibly cool and make them much better work environments than having a bunch of gas burners around.
For the restaurants that need woks they can use a gas stove and have a gas cylinder shipped in every morning.
Serious chef is such a condescending fallacy (no true scottsman, argument of authority). Please instead state why induction does not perform according to you.
You cited wok hei as an aspect of performance that induction stoves don't have, but it's hardly an argument in favor of gas stoves. The article you link is basically about a tool that makes up for what common home gas stoves can't even provide.
Previous Serious Eats articles about it even cited the lack of performance from gas stoves and recommended modifying one with a Wok Mon, but even then the results weren't perfect.
Edit: For some reason I feel the need to clarify that this isn't a comment in support of, or against, gas stoves. I just like cooking and am aware of how hard it is to achieve quality wok hei at home.
China is the world's largest adopter of induction cooktops. Wok cooking isn't a problem. You can even buy induction cooktops specifically shaped for woks. Can we please retire this silly talking point now?
This is true of standard wall outlets which are 110V but not for integrated appliances like ovens and induction cooktops which can pull 200+ volts from your breaker panel. The problem in the USA isn’t your power, it’s your weird habit of buying combination stove-and-oven units. Stop it.
It really is silly, as wall mounted ovens are so much nicer to use in practice, and moreover occupy real estate nothing else is usually using at that level.
Tabletop induction burners that use standard outlets are way more cost effective than induction ranges, too. That thing is $200, which didn’t even pay the electrician bill to put in the 240V 50A outlet and circuit for my range.
It's sublimated class resentment. People resent things that are perceived as coming down upon them from a coastal rich Ivy League educated elite that is perceived as holding them in contempt.
It all just sounds like rich people in private jets flying around telling them to use less energy to save the planet.
There is of course too much inequality, but it's not because of EVs or phasing out gas stoves.
If you want to, you can find coastal elites that dislike anything, even say electric stoves. So what, why do people have all these grievances because of a sense that someone somewhere doesn't like their choices? I'm from the south, I'm positive people there don't like some of my my life choices, I don't go around feeling mad about it. Blaming coastal elites just seems like an excuse to ignore evidence of problematic choices - yet that view also probably doesn't help.
It's a persecution complex. That's how how get members of a majority religion absurdly claiming they are "being persecuted" when reminded that other religions exist.
This contempt is the flip side of the freedoms granted by the constitution. The government is not allowed to enforce certain behaviors. That social control is left to the public itself.
The bizarrely irrational behavior from the red states doesn't even make sense in its own terms. If this doesn't merit contempt, nothing does.
that's a bold claim cotton, care to back it up with some actual data? I've lived in several places across the country, they seemed to all have gas an eletric in a mix.
Thank you and interesting. I lived in St. Louis, there was a lot of natural gas. But its next to illinois which is over 80% so wonderi f there's a % in stl not anywhere else.
I bet some of it also like, ok you’re banning gas stoves that I like cooking on but everybody owning a Ford F-850 and private jets are still cool (from an environmental perspective)? Seems like a spending a few bucks to save a few pennys kind of scenario.
The health argument is fair but seems like it shouldn’t be a mandatory requirement so much as a safety warning (based on my current understanding).
The fact that we are even talking about it I guess served the original goal which was to distract from other, larger problems and discussions.
This could be interpreted as saying unless you fix everything at once, any incremental change should be seen as disingenuous and merely a distraction. Would you like to rephrase?
I'm not the OP but I share this attitude. The argument is that it is hypocritical to heat your 50-room house using hydrocarbons and fly around in a private jet while telling other people to cut their CO2 usage. If you aren't willing to sacrifice for your cause, why should other people sacrifice anything for it?
This is actually a well-studied effect in psychology. It's called social loafing: if someone sees another person violating some rule, they are much less likely to feel obligated to follow that same rule. Rules can be unspoken or written down, the effect is basically the same.
Not at all, but I am saying that a large fraction of the most visible people who are very publicly evangelizing for it do. If the movement can't convince its evangelists to make the significant lifestyle changes they are demanding of everyone, why would you expect others to adopt them first?
I am half convinced that Greta Thunberg was given a lot of media attention because they finally found someone evangelizing for the cause (with enough political connections, etc) who was actually willing to lead by example.
The idealist in me agrees, but the pragmatist in me does not.
The idealist in me believes that everyone do their part and lead by example. I’m not a vegetarian, so I’ve already failed that test (spouse is though, so I’m reducitarian by default). But I do walk a lot, and have only driven 65k miles in the last 19 years (same car—best environmental thing you can do is not even buy new cars). Pragmatically, my impact is minimal.
Celebrity X hopping around on a private jet speaking for and convincing people to make environmental decisions on a national or planetary scale probably has more impact than me, even if they themselves are worse. And I begrudgingly admit that.
IMHO there is a fault in this way of reasoning, please let me explain.
People who are very visible, tend to:
- Have more impact about what they say, because they reach a big population group and some people identify with their reasoning. (lets call it the elon effect)
- Have a lot more money than average.
Following your reasoning, what these wealthy people say would be almost always be the wrong thing to do, since those people have more money and hence spend more, and hence consume directly or indirectly more energy. Hence they pollute a lot more than average, at least indirectly by buying expensive things that create pollution by their manufacturing.
If those people would say the right thing (e.g. poluting less is better), you wouldn't take them serious. And your conclusion would be polluting less is not better or at least we should not take that advice for granted, because of who said it.
I'm not saying that they lose their right to an opinion because they are not paragons of virtue. I'm saying that these wealthy people make no attempt at all to mitigate their environmental impact while telling you to essentially pay off their carbon bill. Elon Musk is not alone in taking his private jet on 10-30 minute flights for trips that could easily have been done in a car. Bill Gates has a gigantic unmitigated environmental footprint, for example.
Generally, you would expect people with more wealth and status to be focused on preserving that status. Part of that project is (ostensibly) preserving the world. If Bill Gates does not think that mitigating his own carbon footprint is important for the preservation of his fortune (including several seaside mansions, apparently), I doubt it's important for any of us in the preservation of our futures, despite what Bill Gates is saying about it. This is an example of the phenomenon of revealed preference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference) - you can learn a lot about what Bill Gates actually thinks by looking at what he does rather than what he says.
For the record though, I do think that what these wealthy people say is almost always the wrong thing to do in general. Wealthy people are known for giving bad advice on how to get wealthy, for example. Because some of them run their mouths a lot, they are also generally known for not being smarter than the average person outside of their area of expertise. Because I'm picking on Bill Gates, go ask anyone at the WHO or the CDC about their opinion of Gates' level of expertise on vaccines and disease prevention - it's not high.
Also, wealth and publicity are kind of correlated, but not that significantly. Bernard Arnault famously rarely says a word in public. Larry Ellison is very private. You probably haven't heard a word from Steve Ballmer, the Bettencourt family, or Larry/Sergei. The people who speak a lot about social causes are the ones who are trying to build a brand around those causes. You get a lot of famous actors worth single-digit millions (thanks to reckless spending habits) speaking about climate change, for example, while also not opting to adopt any green habits themselves. I'm picking on them too.
EDIT: I'm picking on rich people too much. You see the same behavior in politicians, too. They are completely unwilling to risk their political careers to make meaningful carbon impacts, and instead do inane things like banning plastic straws. That suggests to me that their level of concern is about at the level where someone would ban plastic straws: they want to do visible and silly things to placate the activists, but don't really think the issue is serious.
Thanks for clarifying how you see it. I'm thinking about the documentary 'an inconvenient truth' of last century. If people/politicians would have listened and gave it a serious thought and started to act upon that, in stead of saying 'you consume a lot of energy, so don't tell us what to do', I think we would be better off, the greener technology would have taken off say, 30 years earlier.
Increments so small they set the expected completion time to 1000 years from now are worthless.
There is only so much time people have to create, debate, modify, and enforce policies. Every time you waste our collective time to change on something so irrelevant, you starve out real topics.
Incremental change is fine, but the increments need to be large enough to actually put us on the needed “increments per year” path to get somewhere.
Something like 6 years ago California banned water being given out by restaurants by default. It did nothing to move the needle on the drought and had people debating water usage in people’s day to day lives for months. It was the tiniest increment and California was only saved by a massive winter precipitation event this winter.
We won’t have a massive winter to stop climate change. Stop fucking around with incremental shit and tax all hydrocarbons heavily.
This specific incremental change is at best a distraction and at worst very harmful. We can do many things at once, question is why aren’t we tackling any of the actual problems?
I’m not sure I was suggesting anywhere that we shouldn’t pursue incremental change. Moreso we should pursue incremental change that the public can get behind (private jet emissions charges and such) before pursuing incremental change that the public is hesitant to make when people suggesting the change are the biggest polluters comparatively.
Honestly just think about it. You really think it’s fruitful to try to start solving this problem by convincing someone that they need to no longer use a gas stove when “insert billionaire” is flying around on a private jet? It’s a non-starter. It reeks of injustice even if it’s the right thing to do and the public will instead of cooperate will fight tooth and nail until perceived justice is accomplished.
Sorry i guess i misunderstood. Okay the incrementalness is not the thing. The thing is more, the injustice, the unevenness so to say. Well, I think we should not try to solve the injustice problem and the environmental problem with the same measures.
For every rule, there will be people that break it, does that mean nobody should follow that rule?
Also, for every form or quantity of pollution, there are heavier forms. The jet owner will say that the old-aeroplane-collector or a war in a neighboring country pollutes more.
My point is, following that kind of reasoning, it will be almost impossible to take any action.
But what I’m saying is that when you walk up to someone and say “sorry turn off that gas stove” and then they go and read an article like this [1] you will not just get inaction you’ll get outright action against solving the problem.
So yea, we won’t see much in the way of serious action because the general public does not see the justice in making changes or sacrifices even though they should and will bear the worst of the consequences.
You are right, it is even infuriating. It is also infuriating that rich people are allowed to build a huge machine that is set to self destruct soon after take off, generating multi tons of co2 and other air, water and soil pollution. Still,climate change is a problem worth trying to solve.
or how about this? what if I choose to never use motorized vehicles for transport, I never fly, I use only lowpower devices, but I want to use a gas range.
Isnt it fair that I get to choose what I spend my emissions on?
When fixing one gives you 0.01% and fixing the other - 99.99% you go for a second one to achieve any sizeable gains. Doing it the other way is only good for fooling people to gain some points in one's political career.
And you do not even have to fix second one completely to see positive results so it is not fixing everything at once.
Too simplistic. You can’t do the “99.99%” thing if you violate a population’s sense of justice. In fact you will almost surely make the problem even worse.
My sense of justice is violated just by looking what Governments do to their citizens never mind "green area". And it is all across the world save for the degree of shittiness.
>"What's the one thing that will solve 99.99% of climate change issues?"
99.99% is a figure of speech. The idea is to start with big items. Cooking using gas is far below other "offenders". Go for those first as even if partially it will still be way more effective.
It's an ineffective one, because there isn't any single category that is even 90% or 80% of the issue. Everything is just a small drop in the bucket, it's just that there are lots of drops.
Investing heavily in nuclear isn't going to remove 99.99% the sources of greenhouse gasses. Adding some taxes will reduce some of the usage but not 99.99%, unless you price the tax so high nobody can realistically afford jet fuel or diesel or propane or steak or bacon. Increasing the price of concrete might make projects more expensive, but they're probably still going to use concrete.
Neither of these are 99.99%. Probably not even 80%.
Most of climate change is caused by fossil fuels. The rest are caused e.g. by factory farming (plant & animal - e.g. pesticide rundown), plastic pollution, etc.
If we had boundless nuclear energy, not only would fossil fuels become price inefficient, we could devote the extra energy we generate into synthetic fossil fuels, carbon capture, reducing pollution, etc. Almost all of these are energy bound right now.
Building a nuclear reactor isn't going to make steak go away. So even if you solved.for transportation and industrial uses and everything else you're still only at 90%, not 99.99%.
> If we had boundless nuclear energy,
More of this "nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter" talk. Nuclear energy is more expensive than other sources, not cheaper. It won't be cheaper to make synthetic fossil fuels, it'll be more expensive.
> Almost all of these are energy bound right now.
They're all price bound right now, because the cost of energy is so high in comparison to alternatives. So high most would probably just avoid using it entirely. Spending trillions building a bunch of reactors isn't making it cheaper you're just committing to spending more of it up front.
Either way, making the synthetic fuels isn't the same as just building the reactors. We can have synthetic fuels without nuclear, we can have nuclear without the synthetic fuels, they're independent. So neither one is 99.99% on its own, it's no longer "one thing" like what the person I originally replied to stated. They supposedly have one thing that will solve 99.99% of GHG emissions. I'm not looking for something that will even solve 80% or 90%, why waste time with that when there's one thing to solve it 99.99%.
So once again I ask, what is one thing that will solve 99.99% of GHG emissions?
Transportation emissions are caused by fossil fuels.
As for agriculture, check the rest of the page. Besides CO2, there's also methane and NO2 emissions, both of which are part of a cycle, so they have no long-term impact. The entirety of long-term impact of agriculture is, again, fossil fuels, which is literally digging extra C from the ground and adding that extra CO2 into the atmosphere (technically, TBH, it's also part of a cycle, but instead of 114 years as with NO2, that cycle is millions of years long).
The point is if we invest much more in nuclear, it will become too cheap to meter (e.g. we start using modular reactors that benefit from economies of scale).
You're right, methane breaks down in the atmosphere. What does it break down into again?
> The point is if we invest much more in nuclear, it will become too cheap to meter
So if we ignore the financial costs (invest today) it'll become too cheap to meter.
If nuclear plants can generate with costs <1¢/kWh, why don't they?
If nuclear is cheaper than all other energy sources (too cheap to even meter in costs) why is there any energy kind of energy usage and why would it need massive investment to make it happen? If your costs are practically zero, isn't your profit margin essentially 100%? Shouldn't all nuclear power plants be making money hand over fist competing against expensive nonrenewable resources?
And yet it's often one of the more expensive sources of electricity today.
Don't get me wrong I'm a fan of nuclear and wouldn't mind seeing more of it but not if my electricity bill is 30¢/kWh+. That's not moving towards too cheap to meter.
CH4 -> CO2 -> grass -> cow -> CH4
|
\/
steak -> human -> CO2
and so on...
> If nuclear plants can generate with costs <1¢/kWh, why don't they?
Because they're too expensive to build, because of regulation and lack of economies of scale. Similar to why rockets were expensive, before SpaceX. If we invested more, both in research and in building more of them, in factories, we could build plenty, much more cheaply. The technology for modular reactors obviously exists (e.g. nuclear submarines), it just needs to be commercialized.
> If your costs are practically zero, isn't your profit margin essentially 100%?
You're mixing up or conflating total cost vs marginal cost. The marginal cost of making computer chips is almost 0, but the upfront investment is huge. Same with reactors and nuclear power. If we make more of them, streamline the construction, simplify regulation, etc. the marginal costs will drop massively (as will upfront costs, but they will still be non-zero).
> Methane breaks down into CO2, which is a part of the Carbon Cycle.
So it's pretty disingenuous to act as if methane emissions are unrelated to CO2 emissions, isn't it? That methane released in agriculture eventually does turn in to CO2 emissions. You even drew a graph showing my point. Thanks!
> You're mixing up or conflating total cost vs marginal cost
I'm going by total cost, because ultimately that's what society will pay. We can't just act like building a nuclear power plant costs $0.
> everybody owning a Ford F-850 and private jets are still cool (from an environmental perspective)?
Who is saying this? This seems like a straw man.
Faceless “politicians” are an easy scapegoat, but most politicians aren’t flying on private jets. And the few that do generally are not environmentalists, or if they claim to be, aren’t representative of the entire environmental movement.
Those that are banning gas in new construction are universally politicians at the state and local level, who generally earn fairly modest salaries, and at their highest are at the level of the professional class of society.
> The fact that we are even talking about it I guess served the original goal which was to distract from other, larger problems and discussions.
The bans that may actually go into effect (e.g. NY) are bans on nat gas in new construction, not gas stoves. Gas stoves may be a drop in the bucket but nat gas heating is not. the reason we are talking about gas stoves is to distract from the actual issue of transforming our residential energy infrastructure.
If it's a "distraction", it's because reactionaries are making it one. I don't have a private jet or an F-10,000 (I don't even own a car), and I can see that the pro-gas crowd hasn't considered how good induction cooktops and heat pumps have gotten, and how rapidly they're still improving. The writing is on the wall, there's no future for piping gas to residences, so if you're a government you might as well prepare to stop investing in gas infrastructure now.
The problem here is that you are falling prey to the “it’s easier to destroy things than build them” phenomena.
You have to convince voters that they should support banning gas stoves and such. (Build things)
I don’t have to convince anyone that while the government is “taking away their stoves” so-called billionaires fly around in private jets and own dozens of cars. (Destroy things)
It’s just not effective. I want to see effective solutions, not ideological ones. Especially ideological ones that push people away from stated goals.
Know of someone that paid money to have his seatbelt systems become non-functional basically. Basically yes - they hate being told what to do and will rebel harder. So maybe for these folks we should have a campaign to use even more fossil fuels because there’s so many of them and they disproportionately cause social issues to begin with (the man is directly responsible for many, many ruined lives with his toxic personality, including his own children).
Over 85% of lithium is produced by just 2 international corporations with large scale mines complying with multiple international regulation requirements.