The prices have gone up, so mining is expanding. There’s a clear next step to the way commodities work. That next step is not for prices to continue increasing dramatically, things should level off and eventually return to normal, as I explained.

> Understand that renewable activists are predicting that lithium battery production will not only increase exponentially, it will also exponentially drop in cost per KWh as this happens.

Battery prices don’t need to keep dropping for them to take over the world. They’re already cheap. Of course people would love for the prices to drop, and they have historically been dropping slowly, but the basic elements will cost a certain amount, so there is a price floor. I don’t know where that is, but it is lower than we’ve seen, because every step in the battery production chain has been making a profit up to this point, including the miners.

The fact that prices have increased only indicates a mismatch between supply and demand, not that the natural price needs to be this high, or that it needs to continue rising. As I pointed out, everyone was already profitable at a lower battery price than what we have today. If batteries are expensive because of lithium, more lithium mines will open and drop the price. If batteries are expensive because the battery makers are price gouging, someone else will undercut them.

The main concern for something like this is market distortion by patents. If the best way to make batteries is locked behind a patent, that can cause prices to be unnaturally high. This concern does not apply to elemental lithium.

> Higher commodity prices make it viable to extract the more inaccessible reserves, but those reserves will only be profitable so long as prices remain high.

You’re practically quoting my comment to me. I addressed that. It is possible that the price will settle higher than it is today if those methods play a big role, but it won’t matter. You don’t seem to appreciate how insanely cost effective batteries already are today. A modest price increase is fine, but it is still illogical to assume prices will stay high. Lithium is not hard to find. Why would the market settle on expensive extraction methods? It is a strange assumption to start from. We’re not talking about something that’s rare.

Either way, the outcome is unchanged unless batteries increase in price exponentially, as your earlier comments apparently assumed.