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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

Remember Peak Oil? It has been wrong during the whole industrial period, in which civilization has run on fossil fuels and worked relentlessly to extract more.

Now we have CEOs who know only the fossil fuel supply chain announcing Peak Lithium before civilization has even tried to extract and use it at scale.

This guy seems well-intentioned, but he doesn't seem to understand what civilizational change looks like.

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New technologies have proven peak oil off by quite a number of years, but not wrong perse.

It is a finite resource after all and if we don't reach a peak through depletion, climate change will force us to greatly reduce extraction.

Peak oil isn't wrong, it is inevitable.

Doomsday preachers would love your argument here. They've been wrong over and over, but doomsday is eventually coming! The sun will explode, heat death of the universe... sooner or later, something will spell doom for the human race. Doomsday isn't wrong, it's inevitable!

This is such a ridiculous argument, I don't even know where to begin.

I mean, do you imply that every thing that is bad which we can see coming is not going to happen because 'doomsday preachers would love it'? I hope you can see how absurd this is.

I think you're missing the point. It's not helpful to demand constant attention to a bad thing that is eventually coming if you are always extremely wrong about the timescale, and it is in fact much further off than you have said. The mere point that something bad will eventually happen is trivial and doesn't help civilization prioritize.

"X is technically still coming" protects the credibility of the end-of-X preacher, instead of engaging with the more important point that the end-of-X preacher has been hopelessly wrong to the point that it's no longer helpful to listen to them.

Yes and at some point the sun will destroy earth. If Peak oil just means 'all resources are limited' then its an insight that an empty bottle of water could have made. It has no relevance for the real world.

Lithium is abundant yes but it's a rare earth metal which doesn't mean it's actually rare but that the ore content is super low. Meaning practically speaking you have to move a whole lot of earth to get a little bit of lithium.

This makes a lot of extractions very difficult for ecological reasons.

Lithium is not a rare earth metal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

It behaves like one though. It is only found in low concentrations and never in pure form or easily accessible ores.

Lithium brines have concentrations of well over 50 ppm. That sounds low, but given that many other minerals are economically viable when measured in ppb, 50 ppm is not low at all.

You're basically referring to noble metals and the like. We use them because they are useful in very small quantities. That's not the case with lithium.

I look forward to 10-15 years from now when lack of scalability is proven and comment sections will say exactly what you're saying here as if everyone knew it all along.

Can we mine lithium in national parks and on federal ground in the US yet?

Why would we do that? We can’t clear cut or build condos in those places either, but we still have wood and houses.

It's literally his job to lie to people, give him a break.

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