You are a greenie. You buy a hybrid even though the math doesn’t work out. You don’t mind, you love doing your part for Gaia. Eventually science catches up and the math does work, likely through the creation of nifty lithium batteries.
Thorium reactors come on line, electricity becomes cheap, and every night you top off your new electric car. Everybody joins you.
What happens?
Well it becomes quite conceivable that lithium, your new batteries most important part, becomes the new economic king maker.
And Bolivia takes top honors:
Soon the Organization of Lithium Exporting Countries (OLEC) forms a cabal to control the price of lithium and to make themselves “players”.
This scenario might work out fine. But I’m sure the typical Greenie advocating a shift to electric cars hasn’t given a whit of thought as to were the geopolitical cards will land.
January 5th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
As any committed capitalist knows, the OLEC cartel cannot succeed. Unlike oil, lithium can be recycled once the battery gets tired. And it is unlikely that Bolivia has the only economic source of lithium. Like gold and iron before it, only the extraction price will change when poorer ores are discovered as the world price for the metal rises. Batteries can also be made from other metals with chemistry yet to be discovered.
January 5th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
OLEC… it can’t succeed, but like Obama and the socialists, they can wreak havoc as they collapse.
In terms of whether lithium would become strategic, I don’t know. All I ask is that greenies think it all through before they force us down their “green” path.