Cobalt is suddenly abundant
economist.com
economist.com
Just remember this the next time someone says something can’t be done because of the immediate inflexibility of supply to meet demand in a market. There’s almost always a lag time between start of production and demand for it. They might be uninformed or trying to misinform.
I suspect similar will hold true for charging infrastructure, solar panels, and other grid infrastructure. Wiring up new power plugs is not fundamentally new technology. Good time to be an electrician I suspect.
There's still no supply for the lithium shortage (the lag time is a minimum of 7 years to open a new lithium mine) but we are waiting to see if sodium batteries will come to the rescue now.
Of course, sometimes that result involves exploiting the shit out of workers and destroying the environment along the way, but by God they'll get the thing done if said thing makes them money.
Who do you think funded the first railroads exactly?
Hint: if you think it was the government I suggest you start studying the railroad bubbles of the 1830s and 1840s
Also, nationalizing passenger rail travel in the US (Amtrak) seems to have led to one of the worst passenger rail services in the world.
If you are on a paved road, wide enough for two cars to meet, it is almost certainly public.
It appears that can be entirely divorced from capitalism.
Just because we have demand driven resource exploitation doesn't mean that all of the profit has to be provided to a small over-class.
Indeed, wouldn't it create a greater ability to follow demand if the wealth were evenly distributed?
(We might ask if making the human race into the perfect resource-exploiting parasite is going to work well for us long term, but that is a very obvious limitation that diverges from the current discussion.)
Money is invested because people with money chase yield, if yields are positive, but lower across the board, that money would still be making the exact same investments.
But it's certainly not the case that people make the "exact same" investments with or without taxes, especially of course as taxes get higher. Money will shift out of investment to consumption as expected profits decrease, or indeed out of the tax regime to other areas or to black markets.
the goal is to have investments that serve broad interests. instead of investing in better yachts, supercars, jets, etc.
instead of investing into Amazon to dropship fake shit for quick bucks our economic surplus ought to go into developing better actually useful appliances, tools, technologies
for example, instead of OralB and Philips bamboozling us with sonic this and that with smart AI toothbrush marketing we ought to actually figure out dental care.
okay, sure, higher taxes on the wealthy doesn't guarantee more conscious consumerism, but might at least give it a chance.
Except on the middle class. All capital gains do to middle class workers is ensure they stay middle class
That is required for capital markets to work.
How about $5 spread over 1 million people? How about $5 million?
The reason that markets work is because participants have "skin in the game", and losing money would hurt them, so they want to avoid losing money, so they try to make good decisions, and those that don't lose their money and are disempowered in the process. But once you reach a state where you're so wealthy that money no longer matters, you are able to distort the market at will, making it irrational (and thus inefficient) and destroying its ability to efficiently allocate scarce resources.
I wish more people understood this. You don't need to go full communism and make everyone's wealth equal, but if you want markets to work you do still need to make sure that the wealthiest are not so wealthy that they won't suffer from making poor financial decisions.
Please provide a case history.
It’s not, and it is a fiction to say it is.
Capital wealth is a representation of total risk adjusted future expected returns subject to a discount rate.
But we don’t advertise human capital this way; the excess future labor returns adjusted for some basic cost of living.
But they are the same thing: future profits.
If advertised this way, relative wealth would look vastly different.
He uses the phrase "perfect liberty" to describe the ideal version of a market and also understands this will never be equally applied or possible with all markets.
It's an amazing piece of work and I'm really enjoying the audio book as it reads more like a lecture and is very pleasant to listen too.
Airbnb’s founders sold parody cereal to hustle up the money to keep their business afloat.
See North Korea, Cuba, Soviet Union, and China as examples.
With the exception of China those example countries have either rich or poor people. There is no middle class.
At least in capitalist driven societies like western nations there can be a middle class that lives relatively well off and cheap options of consumption that also allow poor to have the basics in life.
A world where the Nazis won might have less inequality after they succeeded in killing everyone without blonde hair and blue eyes. But more likely they would have gone on to look like a brutal dictatorship with very few among the top class living lives remotely similar to what we know today. I doubt they would have had a Moores Law let alone chip manufacturing. We do know the Soviets bankrupted themselves and did have greater inequality than the capitalist system they were competing against while benefiting from its existence. China of course benefitting similarly to modernizing with the modern worlds free market thriving outside its borders. Heck, that tale is a victory story of capitalism over communism as the CCP very much had to capitulate and allow the market to function in increasing scope over time, reluctantly.
If we’re talking about which economic system would have greater inequality than we have to take the thought experiment out much farther than your initial quip. There certainly is inequality in the modern free market. It’s certainly far better and equitable than any system tried before or “on offer” in WWII. That war seeing the victor rebuilding the losers over several decades instead of rubbing sand in their wounds as every war saw in the last to that point. Modern day Japan and Germany.
If economics is to be treated as a legitimate science, it needs to move away from thought-based theory into evidence-based testing.
"Capital" is just a proxy word for resources.
How can you develop anything without resources?
Same critique of so-called “Democratic socialism”. If it’s socialism, it’s not democracy.
Obviously in practice there are often regulations concerning unions, but that's true of basically every part of a market too.
More money for the business = more money for their members.
For example in British Columbia where a relic of alcohol prohibition remains in that the government manages liquor distribution and still has some (unionized!) liquor stores, the union agitated to have those liquor stores open on the weekends. The government initially wasn't interested! Union members though wanted more hours and more money and to sell more liquor.
And although there are clear examples where market economies are nimble, there are also clear examples where market economies are fragile or don't actually produce outcomes that are best for customers or society. A health insurance company that puts most of its innovation effort into finding creative ways to refuse to pay out to its customers while obfuscating this outcome is a natural thing in a market economy.
Health insurance companies in the US are more or less run by the regulators these days. Obamacare has seen to that, driving out of Washington state all health care providers for self-employed people but one.
I have all my other insurance with one company. Their premiums are higher than average. But the times I needed them, they were there with the money and even legal help. They're worth the higher premiums. It's the free market at work.
If you want, I can point at gazillions of other industries where markets have led to obviously suboptimal outcomes. Command economies have major problems and may be worse in almost all circumstances but "markets make everything good" is just observably false.
Whatever you want to call it, the thing that we have and the thing that libertarians want observably produces shit outcomes in a number of domains. If I can't blame the free market, I can blame the political advocates who claim to want a free market for the specific outcomes of their policies.
Please do.
> obviously suboptimal outcomes
I find targeted ads obviously superior to generic ones. And "surveillance capitalism" is so far just a derogatory term for which I am still waiting to see any actual, real-world downsides.
Unlike, say, "surveillance state" which is a horrifying nightmare I had the bad luck to experience.
I’m not making an anti-capitalist point, but I don’t know how well that point holds because it seems like the same case can be made for the other side.
For example, the financial markets were slow to react to information in 2006-2007 until we had already driven off the cliff. Some would say the same about climate change etc.
It seems to me that a hybrid system is actually the best as balancing that risk.
Edit-also the reason you don’t immediately think of the word “regulation” is for the last 40+ years anyone suggesting regulation has been ran from public life as a communist or nazi. But regulation absolutely is just applying the usual legal system to the market to make sure the market stays within acceptable and safe bounds.
A lot of the incentives in the us market are very short term in nature, especially in publicly held companies. It seems like this leads to companies following hype cycles right off of cliffs even when it’s not hard to see problems.
Now, in wind, Europe is still leading.
1. preferential treatment for providers of capital to ventures when it comes to risk & reward (compared to provision of labor or IP)
2. minimal/reduced central planning (aka "free market")
3. regulatory and cultural environment favoring entrepeneurialism i.e. low barriers to starting new ventures/exploring new ideas.
There's no inherent reason that we need to retain all 3 of these, and quite a lot of us would like to keep #2 & #3 and drop or substantially modify #1.
Also, #1 isn't about whether capital is required or provided - it is nearly always necessary. The question is about the distribution of risk & reward between the providers of capital, labor and IP. When capital has outsize economic and political power, it's not suprising that it also arranges for itself a political, economic and cultural environment in which it reaps more of the rewards than the providers of labor or IP.
The current push to onshore production actually feels a little regulatory. It’s a system that does need some “light” steering from time to time.
(I could go on that if a company publishes ads they’re operating market power that should be countered. The reason to the counter is market power means the supply side isn’t producing the market clearing amount of product and instead of selling what they produce there is always waste. But this particular point in time is very anti-progress.)
That's not what this thread discusses, and OP didn't need to be sarcastic. I've lived in centrally planned economy, and it was a failure on every single meaningful level, just like any other centrally planned economy. There were frequent shortages of basic items, some stuff like exotic fruits were literally impossible for common people to buy, or it took 3 hours of standing in the queue. I think some of the western spoiled kids argumenting for some form of communism would be a bit smarter if they actually grew up in systems they push so hard for (of course this time the pipe dream would actually work because XYZ, but these things keep failing because of basic nature of people, good luck fixing that).
Its just like if people generally needed to fear the failure a bit, and society needs to let some people fail in order for the rest to thrive now and in the future. Remove this thread, and next generation will be significantly weaker.
Yes, there will be some corruption in practically any large economy. But certain ay promote more or less, and there is always a tipping point where the economy becomes less stable due to excess corruption.
- In the scale of human history, we haven't used oil at industrial scales that long; roughly 170 years our of, say ~12000 years since the Neolithic Revolution [1]. In those 12000 years, there's times we have have "made it" past resource shortage, but there's also times it has all come burning down. We don't always find ways past problems.
- It's a rather romanticized characterization to call "human ingenuity" what saved us from "peak oil". Yes, there was a lot of ingenuity and tech involved, but there were also some nasty politics, disastrous wars and terrible environmental impact from new extraction sites/techniques. Economic pressure doesn't only make us smarter, it also makes us more ruthless.
- Overall, is this what we want? Perhaps the peak oil predictions of the 80s would've been a better outcome; we'd live in a world with less "stuff", yeah, but also perhaps fewer problems? Thinking about the current transition to EVs: do we want to replace all gas cars with them, or is the better outcome that cars be expensive, and we opt for more efficient modes of transportation like public transit or walking? Our economic system means human ingenuity and ruthlessness finds a way to scale production, since profit incentives align with that. Perhaps though the better ingenuity would be not to find "more", but use what we've got in a better way.
[1] I chose the Neolithic Revolution since that's arguably when our mindset shifted from "following resources" and adapting to what we find, to settling down and producing what we need instead. Thus I'd assume this is where the concern of how we manage our resources became more akin what we find ourselves in now. We weren't going anywhere— we had to figure out how to keep the land from decertifying, our water from running out, etc.
We could easily be looking at a huge amount of war and suffering in the near future as global peak oil hits and there are no new horizons being developed. Fringe quacks, like the US Energy Information Administration or Shell [1], have models that say in the worst case we could be hitting the peak right as early as this year if we are unlucky.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OilProductionTightTotalHu...
Yes, they were. There is some uncertainty because of more or less accurate estimates, fields that turned out to have more gas or oil than expected and marginal technology improvements. Also, oil producing countries love to play with supply, which results in fluctuations that obscure the larger trend if you don’t pay attention. But all of this changes the time scale, not the trends. Oil fields inevitably reach their maximum and decline one after the other. As oil and gas are not created over the time scales we need, there also has to be a global maximum. After that, decline can be longer or shorter, and well managed or not, but it is unavoidable.
To draw an extreme analogy: We could say that Hong Kong has vast amounts of open real estate because someone could buy sea floor and dredge it up to the surface somehow with modern technology - in theory, yes that is so. In practice, it is not so. Hong Kong has not much free real estate, even though more can be made available at very high prices.
There is always going to be oil available at some price - probably huge amounts in theory. It isn't going to be useful and nearly no-one will be able to use it. Certainly not to sustain what we would currently call a comfortable existence.
No, not really. The big shift was shale gas; the rest was mostly incremental. And again, starting from zero production a couple of century ago and going to zero at some point in the future (because gas and oil are finite resources) pretty much implies a maximum at some point in between. The concept of peak production is as inescapable as gravity. It can be delayed, but it is bound to happen. And when we realise that it is declining, then it’s too late to put alternatives in place.
Russia has had great success in their oil discovery and field management with abiotic derived techniques.
The peak oil supply curve may be a lot more deep on the right tail than is assumed. The peak may simply have been the draw down of the initial surplus, but known fields refill with time, and new fields can be discovered with search techniques based on abiotic theory.
Western corporations have bet a lot of money on a peak oil transition driven crisis. It may never come.
This is bullshit, though. Our best model for the Earth core has it made of iron, with an outer core of liquid iron and nickel. Lighter elements would not make sense from a simple physics perspective. Plus, we don’t really have any mechanism for stuff to get out of the core to the crust through the mantle. So I guess you mean mantle, but then that’s silicates. Again, that’s denser than carbon. We do know a couple of ways for matter to go from the upper mantle to the crust, but that matter is silicates.
From a physical and thermodynamic all perspective, the only mechanisms that makes sense to get hydrocarbons underground imply that they come from the surface and get submerged.
> The peak oil supply curve may be a lot more deep on the right tail than is assumed.
That is an argument that can be made, but…
> The peak may simply have been the draw down of the initial surplus, but known fields refill with time, and new fields can be discovered with search techniques based on abiotic theory.
This is simply not happening.
> Western corporations have bet a lot of money on a peak oil transition driven crisis. It may never come.
Because it makes sense. They employ some of the best geologists and geophysicists, have access to more data than anyone else, and have more computing power than most other research entities to run their models on. They also hedge their bets because there are trillions of dollars at stake, so you’d think they’d be all over anything vaguely plausible.
On a small scale, each well to each region, it seems to be quite accurate.
On a global scale however, it doesn’t seem to account for the changes in technology or the geopolitical pressures caused by oil shortages.
So, I used to be worried about it, but now I’m not. The main reason for my optimism here is that solar power seems to be following the best possible curve for replacing oil in energy production, while Elon Musk‘s personal fantasy about going to Mars happens to have a pre-requisite of the development of industrial scale CO2-to-methane conversion, and methane can be converted into longer chains for the other stuff oil is useful for e.g. plastics.
However, there will still be global and national political concerns as the transition to renewables radically changes the economies of the world – Russia OPEC, all the oil rig workers (and coal miners because it isn’t just oil), and so on.
To take a more specific example, cited in the international energy report as "the pessimistic take" in 1998, the "end of cheap oil" and the start of the decline in production of conventional oil before 2010 has been correctly predicted by peak oil theorists (at that point the price of oil was $15/barrel and still going down) :
https://www.resilience.org/stories/1998-02-28/end-cheap-oil/
They might have underestimated the possibility of tight oil providing a temporary relief valve though, not even mentioning it in their discussion of unconventional oil (tar sands and kerogen). (They do mention technical evolution, though maybe not revolution ?)
But then, even though the tight oil industry has produced oil, it seems to be more of a kind of fraud, a bubble bolstered by easy Wall Street money, now starting to pop (?), even though collectively supposedly it is still deep in the red, with only a few quarters in the green during more than a decade. And this despite the fact that it has been selling its oil when the global price was much higher than $15/barrel ! And so, one might wonder whether it has not been a net waste of oil too, as building and operating all that machinery is certainly not energy free. (Not to mention the costs of environmental cleanup.) Has the US failed badly at capitalism here ?!?
This seems like a good counterargument, however on thinking it over I don't think it's valid. For most of those 12,000 years we didn't have any way to share knowledge except verbal and basic stick figure paintings. The amount of time that we've had the scientific method is even shorter, and the amount of time since the industrial revolution tinier again.
Based on that chain of thought, I don't think it's valid to draw historical comparisons beyond the last 500 years or so. Perhaps not even the last 100 years.
Faced with a truly civilization threatening resource shortage in the next decade or century, we could literally move asteroids to solve it. With that in mind, can you really claim it's valid to compare ourselves to neolithic hunter gatherers and say we face the same kind of existential risks over resources?
I'm not really presenting it as a counterargument, just a thought, because at the end of the day we're talking about predicting wether we can find future solutions to future problems.
> Based on that chain of thought, I don't think it's valid to draw historical comparisons beyond the last 500 years or so. Perhaps not even the last 100 years.
If I were presenting this as a rigorous counterargument, I'd go beyond what you allude; it's not 500, or 100 years of history that we can draw on to predict what will happen in the future. It's 0. We haven't had problems like the ones that will come, we don't know what the theoretical solutions could be, and we don't know wether we'd be able to implement any of those theoretical solutions.
We could get lucky and metaphorically "draw heads" from now until eternity, and pointing out that in the past we've sometimes "drawn tails" can't disprove it, you're right.
All I'm saying is we've failed plenty in the past, so it's worth considering that perhaps we could fail in the future too. We are more capable, though the problems are bigger. We could get lucky, but we could also get unlucky. We don't know.
> Faced with a truly civilization threatening resource shortage in the next decade or century, we could literally move asteroids to solve it. With that in mind, can you really claim it's valid to compare ourselves to neolithic hunter gatherers and say we face the same kind of existential risks over resources?
Here I need to point out two things:
- Until it's done, having the capacity to mine asteroids will only be theoretical.
- Yes— even if we manage to move asteroids. I think it'll be valid comparison for as long as we exist.
We are living beings in an environment. We can use energy in clever ways to gain the resources we need to survive and perhaps grow in that environment. The demand for resources and the supply we can access might grow as our population, complexity, and capabilities grow, but we'll forever be grappling this core mechanic of survival: we need to make sure we don't run out of X, else we risk all this we've built to come crashing down.
One thing I brought fourth on my third point in that original comment is that perhaps the solution to this timeless question isn't always in the supply of resources. Perhaps we shouldn't always figure out how to get more of X, and instead figure out how we can need less of it. But I'm going now beyond what you just asked me in your comment, sorry.
Peak tin is a conspiracy theory, and everyone who worries about the Sea Peoples is a warmongering racist.
If the climate and seismic disasters which appear to have displaced the Sea Peoples hadn’t happened, isn’t it plausible that peak tin wouldn’t have happened? There was plenty of tin on Iberia and the British Isles.
Scarcity of tin didn’t cause the Bronze Age collapse.
Take a household spending frivolously, and then buried in an earthquake. It would be odd to use their example when arguing for responsible fiscal practise: that wasn’t the cause of their demise. Peak tin didn’t happen because a separate factor did in civilisation before it became a problem.
The decline in the supply of tin is thought to be an important part of the "domino effect" that led to the collapse. These were great civilizations that are thought could've managed issues related of mass immigration and/or invasion, but with weakened economies this wasn't so much the case.
> Ironically, the interconnectedness that had strengthened these Bronze Age kingdoms may have hastened their downfall. Once trade routes for tin and copper were disrupted and cities began to fall, Cline says it had a domino effect that resulted in a widespread “system collapse.” [1]
But you're right, scarcity of tin alone couldn't have caused such widespread system failure, and it itself was caused by other factors. Overall though, the wider point I was trying to make is that things can go wrong, and we can't always figure out how to solve them.
[1]: https://www.history.com/news/bronze-age-collapse-causes
He throws together everything, calls it "systems collapse", and ends up with something that's untestably complex. It's more a throwing up of hands in defeat than it is a useful explanation.
In contrast, Robert Drews' theory is much simpler, and therefore more testable. Even if it's too simple, that's a good thing! His theory is that there was a realization that infantry, properly organized and even with bronze weapons, beat chariotry, and as this realization spread the existing civilizations became indefensible and collapsed. Only two survived (Egypt and Assyria) because they managed to adapt in time with their own infantry.
(For some reason, Cline ignores this theory, not even mentioning it to refute it. I find this peculiar.)
I don't think this follows, especially with your previous statement that:
> Economic pressure doesn't only make us smarter, it also makes us more ruthless.
It seems like the increased economic pressure of competing for less stuff would force people to be vastly more ruthless than they were in the 80s, which presumably would result in more problems.
Cobalt/Nickel chemistries will be for luxury cars, long range vehicles, tractor trailers, until the sulfur chemistries take over in probably 5-8 years (although I hope a lot sooner).
So this is kind of good news, but really isn't the meat of the BEV revolution.
I would expect that customer to disclose shipping product in a March investor event.
I was referring to their roadmap chemistries that they are next targeting for mass production, that will likely underlie what I call the "third phase" of BEVs. The first was the earlier prototypes and Model S/X era of Tesla. The Model 3 heralded the second phase, where most carmakers actually started trying at BEV products. Third phase is where the ICE cannot compete pricewise and BEVs are the clear choice when buying a new car.
200-210 wh/kg should do 400 mile cars if they have to . the 160 wh/kg sodium ion though, that should be a 200-300 mile car, eventually drop to $40/kwh... that will be the city car revolution, a technology for several billion BEVs.
Exciting times. Of course the US government is hopelessly behind.
The 350 mile LFP car is probably already in production in a Shanghai factory if you can still stomach giving him money...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-clima...
I believe this will trigger a "reverse economies of scale" where gas will get more expensive and less profitable from the drop in demand making large refining facilities and the like less profitable. Which will cause closures, and further inefficiencies, and a downward spiral.
What I most hope is that the tar sands and fracking oil becomes fundamentally noncompetitive, and what is left is the remaining conventional extraction reserves.
I also hope it starves every petro-authoritarian state. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, etc.
But that's still a decade away, a lot can happen.
My personal opinion will be that shortages on battery related materials will be solved by going to hydrogen cars. Replace a finite resource with a practically infinite one.
Fuel cells often use platinum (anode) and nickel (cathode).
The comparison is to batteries. We don’t burn the cobalt or lithium either.
Ultimately, you will realize that the leap from batteries to fuel cells is not that difficult. It’s smaller than the leap from ICE to batteries after all. So if there is an alternative way of making an EV that uses much less resources, it will be adopted.
And like hydrogen, with lots of infrastructure costs, shipping biological feedstocks and fertilizers around also causes emissions and lowers energy returns.
I would not bet on hydrogen for air travel, unless you mean lighter than air craft then maybe with careful design. For planes there's enough existing bio-based options that are simply liquids and much easier to handle. Batteries probably make more sense than liquid fuel in a car if you're assuming the liquid fuel comes from renewables.
If that's the case you might as well use the starting energy (electricity) and use it directly rather than converting to liquids and then back again.
In the latter, it is because the energy is well over an order of magnitude too low. It's pretty much impossible for something that resembles a conventional battery to work. Not even the theoretical limits of conventional batteries will make for a worthwhile plane. So battery planes will pretty much always been short-ranged aircraft that can't replace jetliners.
As a result, the future of air travel is guaranteed to either be some kind of e-fuels/synfuels, or hydrogen itself. There are no credible alternatives unless you're imagine nuclear powered planes.
Do you consider power beamed by laser from space to not be credible, even into the unlimited future?
These are highly implausible ideas. On the order of aerial battery swapping. You can imagine such things, but they won’t happen in any sort of practical way. Far less than just figuring out a greener fuel.
Why is this implausible? Mere assertion of incredulity is not sufficient, especially at long time horizons.
Seems farfetched compared to replacing the liquid fuels, and I'll stick by that, fully acknowledging that the liquid fuels don't (presently) have a perfectly closed carbon cycle. Don't focus on it being perfect in two decades when vastly better is available today...
Of course that gets a lot better when fertilizer is made from renewable hydrogen instead of natural gas and the transportation is electric from renewables instead of gas cars, and if we used electric/solar heating for the thermal inputs it seems like the CO2 losses can get an awful lot better.
Hydrogen is theoretically closed cycle (though displacing fossil fuel electricity on the grid is obviously superior most of the time), but only if you redesign and rebuild the entire fleet of commercial airplanes. I think as long as coal plants are operational a lot of these details are almost besides the point, and as soon as fossil fuel plants are all offline the solution will be obvious from the experience we gained in getting there.
I maintain that swapping equivalent liquid fuels into the existing fleet is most likely to actually happen at scale.
The aircraft would have limited backup power (those batteries for climbing to altitude, say, or an APU), and presumably there would be extra backup laser sources in orbit. One could even have multiple lower power lasers targeting each aircraft for redundancy (this would also cause a beam that hit the ground to have lower power, as the beams would diverge from one another.)
The economics could well kill it, but it would be really nice to have unlimited range due to not needing to burn fuel.
You are confusion implausible with impossible. Sure, it is not “impossible.” It is just absurdly unlikely. I mean seriously, you will need lasers on the order of hundreds of MWs in power, beaming to tens of thousands of planes flying at any given time. It doesn’t take much effort to realize the sheer cost and unreliability of such an idea.
And your appeal to “long time horizon” is just an excuse to not think through the issue. At long time horizons, other ideas become viable, and ones that are much more practical.
You are the one who is writing checks his thinking can't cash.
Sorry, but you are one fantasizing here. Everyone can imagine what this is. You're the one who actually thinks this is possible for a real aircraft. Again, the alternative is simply figuring out a greener fuel. So no matter how much you insist that over a long enough time horizon that this is possible, it will be quickly displaced by far more plausible ideas first. As a result, it's highly unlikely to happen on any time frame.
Yes, a green fuel is another possibility. I'm not ruling that out. Perhaps you could also refrain from ruling out a possibility when you don't have a good argument?
In fact, the only reason you are even giving your idea credence is because it is so far from reality that you can handwave the details. There are no serious studies nor experimental vehicles to criticize. Just a vague idea of how it might work on paper, with no hard challenges since you are free to imagine whatever technology you want. No one has even built any mechanism of beaming MWs of power via lasers before, but you are allowed to imagine such a system anyways. And apparently, a global network of such systems with built-in redundancies, all already working in your mind. The whole idea reminds me of the space elevator, which was another grand concept that works on paper, but was only seen as plausible until people started doing real calculations on it.
Meanwhile, in the real world, real engineers have to overcome real world problems that are encountered in the development of real systems. These things only look hard because you have to see the gory details of real technologies. But in reality, they're far simpler than the crazy ideas you sometimes hear about. Which is why the greener fuel idea is far more plausible. It is far simpler, but only looks more complex because people have to solve the real world problems of it.
Your objection to ME handwaving is obtuse. I am not the one claiming it is impossible. I don't have to show all possible ways it might be done don't work. Don't resort to the usual crank attempt of defending your initial claim by insisting I disprove it. You are obligated to explain in detail why the idea can't work. I don't think you can, your huffing and puffing notwithstanding.
I think you could become more persuasive if you retreated to a time limited claim, say the next 30 years. The best argument would not be complexity, but rather the cost of the orbital lasers.
You can pretty much pick an arbitrary timeframe on this. If you want 30 years, I'll give 30 years. It won't happen in that timeframe.
We have planes that run on energy beaming down from space. Solar impulse 2 worked. Month-long endurance solar drones have existed for a year or two. Payload sucks, and wingspan is long, but that doesn't change the fact they work.
We have battery powered planes. The tech is superior to ICE in every way but carrying enough energy to fly long distance (which is the deal breaker).
Solar alone is insufficient due to energy density and efficiency, but a few kw per m^2 would work. A 2kW/m^2 monochromatic light would solve both of these. Existing PV tech is about 80-90% efficient at its bandgap. Epoxy some standard quarter cells into the top of an airbus, shine a 1000nm laser a few times as bright as the sun on it and your "complex" receiver is done.
Nothing needs inventing to make it work. The batteries can provide a safe abort in anything except a transpacific route.
Will it beat syn fuel economically? Almost certainly not. But there are no completely out there engineering challenges involved. Just a similar level of engineering to any new airframe.
I saw you palm that card.
Given that even under absurdly generous assumptions you need around five square kilometers, or about 2 ISS' worth, of solar panel area per beam, this omission is not surprising.
By turning around and crying that I didn't say something unrelated you're being completely disingenuous.
Only an idiot or someone acting in bad faith or both would say "Aha! You need a beam with n megawatts to receive a beam with n megawatts!" Of course you do. That same solar array exists in the syn fuel scenario too (except 3-10x bigger and on the ground). Raising it as if you found a gotchya is not just disingenuous but also incredibly stupid.
My money is on a biofuel/synfuel hybrid in the short term. Pyrolised/digested bagasse or some form of grass with electrolysed hydrogen used to modify hydrocarbons and increase energy yield.
Biofuels use a lot of fossil fuel derived fertilizer and require a lot of energy to distill into jet fuel. It might be a stop gap solution, but not a long-term one especially since people could eat the crops grown where biofuel crops are grown.
The carbon in existing waste streams in the US would be more than enough to satisfy existing US jet fuel demand.
Cobalt demand could be met almost entirely by recycling batteries at end of life.
"The state of the lithium-ion battery recycling market - A conversation with battery analyst Yayoi Sekine of BNEF." [2022/12/09] https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-state-of-the-lithium-ion-battery...
My impression, after listening, is that recycling is ramping up asap. And the industry is so young that the eventual shape and size is hard to predict. Also, much governmental investment is needed to accelerate innovation.
Most sane countries have a lead acid battery recycling deposit to divert batteries from landfill. Might be a good idea to implement one for large lithium batteries as well.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Doesn't sound like a great bet to base anything on.
Sure, the specific bet could be lost and won in different windows. But the actual underlying point remains: were not facing exhaustion of resources as a limit to economic growth and development as much as exhaustion of willingness to invest in exploration and development of sources.
"Oh God, there isn't enough cobalt or lithium for all the EV to be sold in the next 5 years" or "there isn't enough lithium for every car to be converted to EV" which are both variants of counterfactuals to actual rate of deployment, replacement of cars in the real world, the replacement of battery technology, new forms of battery chemistry, you name it PLUS extraction of new sources and discovery of new ore beds.
You are free to argue that but that is not why this bet turned out the way it did according to the quotes from the linked wiki. It sounds way more like a coin toss than any rule of the market
But the fact that this bet could've easily been lost and Simon mostly got lucky is direct evidence against "the idea behind the bet"...
In the past 2 decades for example, the inflation-adjusted price of all 5 of these metals have increased.
The arguments Erlichman made were like: not everyone can have a telephone because there is not enough copper in the Earth’s crust.
Slows down. Safely navigates turn.
Ergo, warning was wrong. Stupid warnings.
--
There's a name for this phenomenon.
Like how identifying ozone depletion beget policies to prevent said depletion. Doesn't mean the initial warning was wrong.
Regardless, this is exactly how (we hope) policy making is supposed to work.
This isn’t like the ozone hole, where we identified a problem and fixed it. He was just wrong.
Coincidently, If Books Can Kill reviewed The Population Bomb. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id...
I still think the Ehlrichs are moral cripples, and that they should not have made policy prescriptions. Like the '20s era Progressives (and others), early leftist environmentalists advocated terrible policies for "those people" while minimizing their own inconvenience. Eugenics, notably.
However, I was not aware of the zeitgeist about "overpopulation" at the time, nor how that meme came to support the reactionary project. For instance, morphing into today's rabid anti-Muslim organizations.
So my updated position is, on the balance, The Population Bomb did far more wrong and probably very little good.
My issue is that anti-Malthusian rhetoric, just like anti-anti-racism, often serves to concern troll and minimize actual pressing problems. "Ya, ya, ya. Climate crisis. Big deal. Y'all were wrong about overpopulation too. Calm down."
But two wrongs don't make a right. So I now agree with you wrt this book.
Why were the Ehrlichs wrong? Now that's an interesting question. (a la "All models are wrong. Some are useful.")
Per Hans Rosling, didn't take into account innovation, obviously. But also ignored sociology; eg urbanization and the resulting steep decline in birthrate.
With the climate crisis as context, Ehrlichs' biggest mistakes were:
- too soon.
- too combative, negative.
- making any kind of policy prescriptions. which were also utterly morally bankrupt.
A fable: http://englishaesop.blogspot.com/2010/07/fly-and-chariot.htm...
Stop me if I'm wrong, but the article totally missed the fact that new car battery technologies are mostly cobalt free. I feel it better explains the lack of demand than the article explanation.
> Even a boom in electric vehicles has not been sufficient to counteract this, since manufacturers have done their best to reduce use of the formerly super-expensive metal.
It was a time when there wasn't enough whales to light everyone. We killed (almost) all the whales before coming up with something else (oil)
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/05/peak-oil-thermo...
(With the exception that whales, if left alone, might eventually bounce back.)
Peak oil theory may have been right about the peak, but wrong about the steepness of the right tail.
Russia has had success with drilling for oil based on the abiotic theory.
https://borates.today/lifepo4-batteries-vehicles/
>"These days, LiFePO4 batteries are found everywhere and have various applications, including use in boats, solar systems, and vehicles. LiFePO4 batteries are cobalt-free and less expensive than most alternatives. It is non-toxic and has a longer shelf life."
Are you going to feed them and build schools?
That's what the economy is doing, in exchange for cobalt.
How much money have you personally donated to the children of Congo?
Short of credible threats of Western military intervention, I don’t see a solution.
We don’t employ those kids. Paying more just lines the pockets of middlemen and warlords. Absent a forced sociopolitical shift combined with a Marshall Plan-scale subsidy regime to elevate the country’s health, education and infrastructure, to make the change sustainable, those kids will be in a bad place.
No, they made it illegal when workers rebelled against the most egregious form of exploitation. Wealthy factory or mine owners didn't grant worker's right out of good will, they were forced to do so because workers paid the price of blood to gain their rights.
And shooting workers was also illegal yet "employers" did exactly that when workers started to strike.
I'm with you there, but the example you gave is very different from the ultra-simplistic example I gave.
They don't "run their economy", it's a failed state, a no man's land ravaged by war which population is being exploited by corrupt multinationals that bribe gangs and warlords for security.
In a poor country kinds are forced to do all kind of dangerous work. If not for cobalt they can be sent to fields and be subject for all chemicals used in modern agriculture. Or work in a sweatshop or in a factory with zero regulations about safety. The fact that they mine cobalt tells that this way more money can be earned than through other dangerous work.
I.e. the problem is that the country is poor. Fix that and kids will spent time in schools, not in mines.
A supply chain is not a black box nobody can look into, even if quite a lot of corporations want you to believe that.
Child labor there are just as terrible, yet most people do not care while reacting strongly on pictures of children mining cobalt. The pictures may well be produced by those who wants to put bad image on electrical cars, not because they cared about children.
The proper solution is to have a careful regulation that heavily tax products from countries with lower safety standards. But this is hard as that makes a lot of things more expensive.
Even in the global north, it's common for it to be legal for your children to be allowed to work on your farm. I struggle to think of a situation there where your children are mining at an economically viable scale that doesn't result in the state taking your children away for abuse.
Ohh I absolutely have to. You just justified modern day child slavery. Here’s a radical idea about fixing the poverty: pay them wages that help them uplift from poverty for mining the cobalt. But that’s never happening because you and I will not pay 10k for an iPhone or a million for a Tesla, and that ultimately is where the exploitation starts.
Australia is a massive cobalt, copper and nickel miner [1]. They do it profitably without kids. The cost of transporting ore out of the DRC probably dwarfs any labor savings from using kids.
Child labor in sub-Saharan African mines is a solvable problem. But it’s not a question of paying more, but engaging in a regional development effort with tinges of nation building of the sort Western voters are fatigued with. (I see no interest in the problem from China.)
With the exception of the Mount Gunson Copper Mine in South Australia, Australia has traditionally dumped cobalt back into the hole as it hasn't been economically viable to separate. At $50k per tonne "tailings" suddenly becomes "valuable resource".
Why are you bringing up child slavery then if you personally justify it?
> "Please do not bring kids. It is irrelevant here and can be even factually wrong."
We should absolutely bring up the kids, since this article talks about the scaling of an industry where the kids play a role in its cheapness. It's very much relevant to the conversation of the price of cobalt.
> "If not for cobalt they can be sent to fields and be subject for all chemicals used in modern agriculture. Or work in a sweatshop or in a factory with zero regulations about safety."
Mining cobalt is much more dangerous than agriculture; even "modern agriculture". Sweatshops come in all forms, some incredibly dangerous, very physically demanding and potentially toxic, like cobalt mining. I wouldn't say they're worse though. Saying so is not being too familiar with how terrible cobalt mining can be [1][2].
It's worth noting though; one can't defend a terrible children's right abuse by claiming that "if they weren't being abused this way they'd be abused another". We don't know that, and it very much doesn't make it ok.
> "I.e. the problem is that the country is poor. Fix that and kids will spent time in schools, not in mines."
Yes, The DRC needs capital to develop and support its population. It's worth understanding the problem with a little more depth, since it's complex.
The DRC has about half of the reserves of one of an incredibly important resource [3]. That's a very significant amount of latent capital. It also has a chokehold on the market, accounting for about 70% of the world's cobalt production [4]. That's power.
One can't just say that The DRC "is poor"; it is being "kept poor" by internal conflict largely enabled and stirred by outsiders (I quickly found some examples from a few years back but there's way more: [5][6]). It's also victim to an international community that says and does nothing about this, because the international community benefits a lot from the poverty in The DRC.
That's why we should talk about the children. For years African analysts have noted that the USA cares about "liberating" countries human rights abuses in some parts of the world, yet is very confortable with tyrannical dictators in others [7]. I don't know how much the West would hurt its own economic interests based on public outcry, but we should absolutely acknowledge the fact this is not ok, and Western (in the very least) indifference plays a role in it.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a394gp/smartphones-child-lab...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree...
[3]: https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-02-17/The-world-s-largest-co...
[4]: https://investingnews.com/where-is-cobalt-mined/
[5]: https://youtu.be/tEOmI5bc3HU?t=68
But I am not so sure about authoritarian regimes or tirany. South Korea and Taiwan 70 years ago were poorer that most African countries, have used child labor very extensively and had dictatorships when in Africa there were democracies at least on papers. Now these are the first world countries with working democracies. Even in China, when people became richer they started to care about environment and there were even protests again really bad pollution cases and there is much less child labor than 50 years ago. Yet Africa continues to be poor and use child labor extensively.
So perhaps some tyrannies are not so bad long-term.
I wonder if that was an intentional or unintentional pun.
There's "Li-ion" in 'lion'.
Capitalism is also only valid for voluntary transactions. Consider an event like illness- people do not choose to get sick. But we have put capitalism clothes on this beast.
Capitalism gaves us in the US ‘managed care’ , an administratively burdened healthcare system, and new burdens like corporate suites for healthcare with 7 figure salaries.
For example, corporate managers see empty beds in the hospital. They reduce staffing. Then there is a flood of illness clogging the ER. They need nurses in a hurry. They hire temp nurses (3 to 6 month minimum contract) that get paid double. The remaining staff nurses feel shafted. They quit and become traveling nurses too. The hospital goes from a 10 mill surplus to a 30 mill deficit. And the traveling nurses dont know where anything is so everything moves more slowly reducing throughput. Delays in Operating room (the major profit center) reduce case load further.
In such a system, a slow to change ‘centrally planned’ arrangement might actually be better