The flipside of electrification of vehicles is all the extra metal they need to mine, which is highly environmentally destructive.
We don't even have the metal supplies to fully electrify car production, not even close, although I see South America is going to ramp up production substantially soon.
Afghanistan has something like $1T worth of lithium reserves. Who gets access and how it ends up being exploited remains to be seen but that country is not going to become some forgotten backwater anytime soon.
Which is not that great if you intend to export raw bulk goods (e.g. ore). You really want to have ports for that. The extra few percent efficiency of ship vs rail makes a huge difference because margin is so thin.
One of its neighbors will build out rail lines to their borders so they can take the position of lucrative refiner and exporter of a massive lithium reserve that only their infrastructure has good access to.
Abandonded mines (with the environmental carelessness) and the coming revelation of abandoned oil/gas operations leaking greenhouse gases is just a slice of history on repeat.
Most of the issues with abandonded mines can be confirmed in several countries, but the profits from pump and dump do afford positive GDP (superfund cleanups, etc).
The ROI while in operation keeps it going and keeps the "we need renewables now" crowd focused on (someone elses) goal(s) :)
The oil and gas industries have already started transfering ownership to smaller companies to bypass obligations, so the cycle continues, with new lithium mining just coming on the heels of two other unresolved climate catastrophes.
Capitalism exists in every country today. You would not have chinese billionaires today if they were not a capitalistic country. They are socialist in almost name only these days; they are clearly not interested in redistributing wealth or favoring the health of the collective over the wealth of the elite. IMO there aren't many great examples of socialist governments, since many of the historical examples we've seen have been from a powerful elite using the mass appeal of the socialist message solely to put themselves in charge of an authoritarian state and use that position to further their own personal interests, versus to focus on collective benefits.
Actually no. Im not describing anything about capitalism than what I see and hear on the broadcast/cable news and from the people who parrot it.
Congress wants to pass a law making it illegal to torture children by throwing them into piles of burning puppies? Cue talking heads rambling on and on about economic impacts. Politicians on the other side talking about how $market_segment will suffer. Ceos/business owners talking about how it hurts them or worse, helps the competition. All with the terrifying footer note "opponents say this move will hurt profits".
I'm not imagining anything, I'm merely saying what happens. If you want to claim that I'm stupid for saying what I see, call me Forest Gump and keep pretending you can't see what's in front of you. I'm sure your emperor is wearing clothes or whatever other fantasy makes you feel smug and safe.
You're the one making a non-sequitur. Capitalism is an ideology about maximizing profits. You can make a lot more profit if you externalize all your costs. "Privatize the profits, socialize the losses" is a way of saying that corporations have a lot of magical legal devices that let them avoid responsibility for externalities they themselves created once the revenue stream is no longer flowing.
Can't you think of time and again examples of this? For instance, all fossil fuel using companies are participating in this exercise in real-time today; they certainly are not paying anything for the massive pollution damage they are creating. Corporate fraud never leads to meaningful punishment of the executives and they often make a profit even after "punishment".
>Corporate fraud never leads to meaningful punishment of the executives and they often make a profit even after "punishment".
No, this is a meme that needs to die. Please link examples where profits from a specific activity did not outsize the profit from that activity.
People get confused when some international massive company made a profit overall after some big fine and think the illegal thing was therefore profitable. This is never the case and the fines drastically exceed the profit from the specific activity (every country levying fines structures them explicitly this way).
BP absolutely did not make a profit on the deep water horizon.
>all fossil fuel using companies are participating in this exercise in real-time today
Red herring in a discussion about fraud. This is purely because governments don’t charge for CO2 (quite bafflingly).
>Corporate fraud never leads to meaningful punishment of the executives
Enron, Madoff, Theranos, Worldcom, Tyco, Qwest, Rite Aid… the list goes on.
>Localised environmental destruction is such a pittance compared to global environmental catastrophe that its comical people even bring it up.
While every environmentalist ever talks about "the greater good" they pouted and whined and tossed the plate on the floor when there was nuclear energy on it. You'll have to forgive the general public for not taking you (as a group) at your word.
I think the issue with nuclear energy is the combined threats of local destruction and global environmental catastrophe. They may be overblown, but mining lithium to make electric cars doesn't increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, for example.
100% true. But objections to resource extraction for lithium should just be ignored. There are literally 1000x larger extraction sites for other purposes, especially iron and aluminum, but also table salt, laundry soap, etc. There are nation-sized areas of America that have been scraped flat for oil and gas production. The land sacrificed for lithium extraction is so far down the list of important environmental issues that it can't even be ranked more precisely than "tied for last place".
Keep in mind that you have to move your population to higher density housing. Essentially to really prompt public transit in the US you will have to introduce draconian laws that prevent the creation of single family houses and their future sales. This is if you work from the idea that we only have 9 years left until we can’t prevent the climate damage.
Is that necessarily true? I'm a more optimistic about gradual densification. Across the US, we've seen an increase in offices moving to the periphery of cities [1]. I think we keep reinventing mini-cities in the suburbs and will eventually end up with an American-style polycentricity, especially in the South and West [2]. Remote work will increase these pressures.
Let's look at the sprawling suburbs of Houston, Texas. These suburbs have necessities covered within 10-15 minutes by car. If you look at this map [3] and this one [4] of a newer neighborhood in Katy, TX (about 30 miles) from downtown Houston, you'll notice a few points:
* The schools and stores are already close to the neighborhoods. Biking to the store takes ~12 minutes vs 8 mins driving
* It's ~4.5 mi (7km) to the park & ride. Biking takes ~22 mins vs 12 mins by car.
* There's several food places, dentist offices, and doctors offices along the way.
This neighborhood is following the same developmental pattern as the earlier neighborhoods, which some iterative refinements. Of course there is still some low handing fruit that could be addressed:
* This area could add bike lanes whenever they did planned road expansions (which is often)
* Add safe bike and pedestrian over/underpasses for the freeways & busy intersections
* Connect existing paths that connect neighborhood amenities (i.e. parks, schools) to inter-neighborhood paths
* Prevent commercial and industrial site boundaries from harming neighborhood inter-connectivity
These fixes would allow an extremely car-dependent area more "transit options" at very little cost. These would not require rezoning, rule changes (i.e. parking minimums), or forced increases in density. The market repeatedly identifies that people want the same things basic things nearby. But the chosen zoning and local car-centric ordinances perpetuate this car centrality. Parking minimums set a floor on store size, which limits store density, which undermines convenient access by any means other than cars. Builders don't know how the commercial sites are going to be used and exactly what-for.
Within the neighborhoods, access to locals schools and parks are considered in the planning stages. That's why it's common to see schoolchildren riding their bike or walking home from school in groups -- sometimes with chaperones / crossing guards. It's designed to be convenient, for example adding shortcuts between streets to the school [5]. Making these slightly larger to explicitly accommodate bikes, especially for accessing nearby essentials is not a tough sell. This is largely a consequence of builders' presumptions about homeowners' expectations/preferences. It has taken a while, but these same builders are finally starting to run fiber alongside or instead of coax to these newer neighborhoods -- a convenient selling point post-covid.
Regarding densification, there are already apartments [6] built nearby the highway, adjacent to these new neighborhoods. Changes that would require more effort than the points mentioned above include:
* Allow duplexes and small apartments to be built within the neighborhoods
* Apartments and duplexes [7] are currently like standalone "communities," isolated from the surrounding neighborhoods
* Let small shops and offices be built within the neighborhoods, not just immediately adjacent
Note that a lot of these zoning changes only require changing builder presumptions. Often they're building in unincorporated areas. You can see an increasing mix of home-types and nearby shopping in very new communities like Bridgeland [9]. There's even a "desired path" emerging behind this Lifetime Fitness [8]. This path isn't even possible in the older neighborhoods. Basically, builders are rezoning large areas (often displacing cows), so better inter-mixing of stores and community centers (for transit stops) can be done ahead of time.
I know this is a low value comment before I write it, but I just cannot see any possible future where americans buy smaller cars. This level of societal innovation feels inaccessible now.
In the face of severe climate and weather events, I can hear the buyer still thinking "yes, but the larger model is safer in a storm or fire..."
Steel and aluminum prices didn't rise 12x in the last 2 years [1]. It doesn't matter how much that lithium weighs on a scale. It matters how much it weighs against your wallet.
No, that doesn't seem likely to me at all. Lithium prices are high because the industry is not very well developed and the demand is skyrocketing. Borax is co-located with lithium deposits (in some places) and is extracted by a similar process at similar scales and it costs 100x less than lithium. And for some reason nobody looks at the gigantic land scar at a borax mine and starts screaming about the environmental cost, because there's no oil billionaire astroturf fund dedicated to whining about boron.
Lung cancer rates are higher near major roads due to air pollution from cars. Fossil fuel cars basically means every highway is a superfund site. We just don't talk about it.
Given the choice between toxic waste at a mine and toxic waste in millions of homes, I'll take the mine.
I am optimistic as well but let's not forget the asphalt (major pollutant during construction and repair), breaking and tire degradation that each contribute to this.
Keep in mind that EVs with their regenerative braking use their brake pads effectively never. Modern EV brake systems actually have to deliberately not use their regenerative braking once in a while in order to exercise the brake pads and make sure that they don't rust into uselessness from utter disuse.
Most of that localized pollution comes from stuff like tire dust which is increased as we buy new heavier vehicles to do the same old getting around. The big win with fuel air quality was the move away from leaded gas and the clean air act, for decades now the major sources of pollution from a car have not been from the tailpipe.
It’s a classic false dichotomy. There are plenty of options in between - from plug-in hybrids to funding public transit. In my ideal world, I’ll drive a sports hybrid for fun and take a well maintained public transport to work.
You'll take the mine because you don't live near the mine.
I think what the parent comment was really hinting at is the need to move towards a less car-dependent life. Of course, electrification is important, but it's not environmentally neutral in any way.
It would be better if we had trains, strong public transport, walkable and cyclable cities rather than electric cars. I think that's kind of what Europe is doing and the USA should try to do similarly. Cars are extremely important for rural life but they're really unnecessary in cities... unless your cities are build as urban sprawls.
We will all be dead before America becomes a city planning utopia. Not because it can't, there's just so much work involved to reconfigure everything. I believe if you fixed your zoning though, it would eventually gravitate towards that on its own as people flee suburbia for the more livable cities. That doesn't mean don't vote for it though, even small improvements to one location can improve livability.
Maybe think of EVs as a stop-gap because if you want clean air for millions in the next 30 years that is our best option. Even the famous Shinkansen took longer than that to build, and they had the benefit of a miracle economy, cities already configured for density and mixed zoning, and a government that could actually achieve things on a horizon longer than 3 years.
Just to note, that is making pretty questionable assumptions to get to the conclusion that there are not enough metals. For example, they assume that there is a set need of cobalt/nickel per kWh of lithium batteries, which obviously is completely false (see LFP chemistry). They also use 2018 reserves as the yardstick, completely oblivious to the fact that already by 2021 the lithium reserves had increased compared to 2018 by more than what their own numbers say a generation of EVs need.
In 8th grade I read a book on Zinc and it projected the world's supply would run out by ~1985. The book was published in like 1970 and I was reading it in 1994. Since then I've had a big of skepticism of "it's running out" when it comes to raw industrial materials.
> We don't even have the metal supplies to fully electrify car production,
Okay, I need to say that you are not even wrong. Yep, I am slightly irritated on this blatantly false claim that has started popping up. If you think your claim has any merit, could you please provid the metal that you think we are lacking, estimat the amount needed and compare that amoun to the amount in earth's crust. If you get anything but infinitesmally small needs compared to what here is, please explain why that metal can't be replaced.
Rare earth mineral and lithium extraction is going to be the greatest disaster the world has ever seen because ocean floors will be plundered - the damage to the planet whether at sea or on land will be unprecedented.
It is surreal how naive people are about both this plus the huge lithium batteries high temperature fire risks and associated high voltage electrocution.
There is a reason we went from high pressure steam power to a lower pressure oil and gas based economy after the Victorian era.
Why is lithium extraction bad for the environment?
Any type of resource extraction is harmful to the planet. This is because removing these raw materials can result in soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and an increase in global warming.
But when we think of extraction, we think of fossil fuels like coal and gas. Unfortunately, lithium also falls under the same umbrella, despite paving the way for an electric future.. Lithium can be described as the non-renewable mineral that makes renewable energy possible - often touted as the next oil.
But it isn't lost or scattered into the atmosphere. It's kept well contained in a nice container which can be moved around easily with a forklift. The metals can be reprocessed and turned back into more batteries.
Even first generation Leaf batteries are still being sold for reasonable sums of money so we haven't even reached the stage were we are recycling them in ernest yet.
As lithium batteries degrade they become more unstable and fire prone. I'm sure you're familiar with what happens to your laptop battery as it ages - shorter and shorter life, swelling etc.
You're thinking of a particular kind of battery with a flammable electrolyte. Other popular chemistries (LFP being the most obvious) aren't anywhere near as fire-prone.
And of course, laptop batteries get worked -much- harder and treated to much harsher environments than any EV battery.
Lithium is non-renewable (we have a finite supply of it), but it's also not a consumable so this is rather less of an issue. Lithium in batteries is more comparable to steel in car bodies than fossil fuels.
There is still some steel in the core load bearing areas of modern vehicle but they are predominantly alloys. I'd say around 60% alloys, 35% plastics and 5% steel would be an average
1 Ferrous metal blends with other materials are increasingly the main components of vehicles. MMC etc. Where body shops used to straighten collision damage on jigs to pull out damaged steel chassis, bodyshells etc the modern composites are very hard to repair, containing all sorts of materials including steel, alloys, plastics etc. They are also hard to recycle.
"Ferrous metals" means steels of various kinds, or pure iron, which isn't used much these days. 65% is more than 5%.
"Manners" in this forum means providing credible sources to back up your claims. If you have credible sources that contradict Transport Geography, supply them.
AHSS is essentially steel at its core but is very hard to move once damaged, unlike 16 or 18 gauge pure stamped steel in an early 70's era car for example, that was superseded by the high strength low alloys (HSLA) in the late 1970's. If you hammer and dolly the older pure steels there will be a 'memory' of the original stamping it will reconform too. The newer HSLA alloys were much less malleable
It is amazing how fast this world has evolved in the last five years.
High strength 'steel' has a low alloying and carbon content to retain formability and weldability, with copper, titanium, vanadium, and niobium added for strengthening purposes. These are complex alloys that replaced the earlier HSLA and are both very hard to work and also to recycle.
> Why is lithium extraction bad for the environment? Any type of resource extraction is harmful to the planet. This is because removing these raw materials can result in soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and an increase in global warming.
Are you trying to argue that using fossil fuels is better for the environment? It’s not clear if you’re using this opportunity to complain about mining in general or if you’re arguing that we are better off with petrol cars.
If we develop a proper biofuel then we are going to wish we still had carbon powered cars imo. The issue with carbon fuel is that it gets put into the atmosphere and not recaptured, thus warming the planet and disturbing ecology. Once a method is used to capture this carbon organically, however, then carbon just becomes a transient used delivery device and a store for solar energy that powers the underlying photosynthesis to restructure atmospheric carbon into solids. A tree trunk or a pound of green algae becomes a fungible unit of energy. Everything changes.
Risks to Emergency Responders from High-Voltage, Lithium-Ion Battery Fires Addressed in Safety Report
Actions sought by the NTSB in the four safety recommendations issued Wednesday include:
Factoring the availability of a manufacturer’s emergency response guide, and its adherence to International Organization for Standardization standard 17840 and SAE International recommended practice J2990, when determining a U.S. New Car Assessment Program score.
Continued research on ways to mitigate or deenergize stranded energy in high-voltage lithium-ion batteries.
Continued research on ways to reduce the hazards associated with thermal runaway resulting from high-speed, high-severity crashes.
Manufacturer emergency response guides modeled on ISO standard 17840 and SAE International recommended practice J2990.
Incorporation of vehicle-specific information in emergency response guides for:
Fighting high-voltage lithium-ion battery fires.
Mitigating thermal runaway and the risk of high-voltage lithium-ion battery reignition.
Mitigating risks associated with stranded energy in high-voltage lithium-ion batteries during emergency response and before a damaged electric vehicle is removed from the scene.
Safely storing an electric vehicle with a damaged high-voltage lithium-ion battery.
Providing information and available guidance to first responders and other crash scene workers about fire risks associated with high-voltage lithium-ion battery fires in electric vehicles.
Fires in electric vehicles powered by high-voltage lithium-ion batteries pose the risk of electric shock to emergency responders from exposure to the high-voltage components of a damaged lithium-ion battery. A further risk is that damaged cells in the battery can experience thermal runaway – uncontrolled increases in temperature and pressure – which can lead to battery reignition. The risks of electric shock and battery reignition/fire arise from the “stranded” energy that remains in a damaged battery.
SAE is using terms differently, abusing, re-defining terms that have been in use for a century. This mixed use of the same word for different things can be extremely dangerous.
Not as dangerous as the free pass LFP batteries have been getting despite trapped energy, thermal runaway and very high heat fires that are extremely hard to control and extinguish. There needs to be far, far more oversight of the battery industry.
Where in that link were LFP batteries mentioned? One of the advantages of LFP over nickel-manganese-cobalt chemistries is lower heat evolution when punctured or ruptured. Do you have other evidence for your claim of very high heat fires from LFP batteries?
Australia is like the Saudi Arabia of mining. Such a big continent with very few people. Politically stable and smart enough to exploit itself and keep most of the profits. The lucky country indeed.
Mmm idk about keeping most of the profits - we could have done so much more in that regard over the last two decades. Missed opportunity to create something like Norway’s national oil wealth fund. Instead of offshoring most of the gains.
Only if you can show a population dense country like Japan spends comparative amounts on infrastructure to supply the gas than a population sparse country like Australia.
In other words, only if you're lying is it corruption. Costs are not like for like, not even close. The gas itself is relatively cheap. The infrastructure and OpEx is not.
I imagine this is usually because these countries sign long-term supply agreements at fixed prices. This is good because it guarantees stability of demand for companies, but obviously bad if gas prices go up after signing said agreement.
The future fund exists solely to pay public servant pensions and even then by it's own account it won't be enough to fund expected liabilities, the average person will never see a cent of it.
Aussie and NZ are rather alike. We sold nearly all our sawmills to overseas owned companies that only bought them for the associated contracts to purchase timber.
The sawmills were promptly closed, and the raw logs exported in bulk to Japan and China as a form of protectionism / subsidised employment. They take the inefficiencies to keep portions of their population employed that might otherwise not be.
Then there's the fact that nearly all of our dairy exports are milk powder. It's hardly value add.
Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.
Maybe we’re a bit better now (particularly after the last election) but it doesn’t really mean what everyone thinks it means. Basically, historically, we have failed upwards. Still, there are very few places I’d desire to live in
Our leaders are way more aware of events that surround them now.
But we do have a first rate health care system, high employment, decent weather and relatively stable government. We didn’t do anything stupid like leave important regional organisations, nor have we ever had our leader forment violent insurrection.
This is a surprisingly comprehensive and well-written article, worth reading. For example, the authors note that the majority of Australia's lithium ore is refined to metal in China, although there's a push for local Australian refining. For more details on the current state of lithium battery production globally, this is good:
(Jul 2022) "Tracing the origin of lithium in Li-ion batteries using lithium isotopes", Desaulty et al.
This in particular is interesting, using a blockchain to track sourcing:
> "Major car manufacturers like BMW group, Tesla, and Volvo recently announced that they will increase the transparency of their supply chains for EV batteries, and ensure responsible and sustainable sourcing of raw materials. Some companies (BASF, Volkswagen, Fairphone) have started a partnership for sustainable lithium mining in Chile. Carmakers also explore the usefulness of blockchains for improving the scrutiny of supply chains. A blockchain is the control of chain-of-custody systems, based on the shipping documentation that is included in online databases, to allow real-time raw materials tracking and electronic tagging. However, document-based traceability systems can be falsified, and must be independently controlled and audited to provide credibility."
Blockchain allows you to to trace every transaction to its source and prevent double spend, if it is public. It does not have to be decentralized though, can be a closed system where every node has to go through a certification.
I assume that a certified mining facility would be closely watched to ensure that the amount of lithium they mine matches what the sign for in transactions. And on the output, battery manufacturers are required only buy lithium they can trace to a certified mine and sign every device the make, including how much lithium it contains.
If the ledger is public, anyone can verify that input=output + balance. It is not going to be decentralized, but it can be publicly verifiable.
Blockchains are not really of any use of an authority of any type can be identified. If it’s not going to be decentralised, then it doesn’t add anything but complexity.
Looks like somewhere else people will try to crobar it in.
> This is a surprisingly comprehensive and well-written article, worth reading
Well, maybe. But it’s a bit ridiculous to have an article about mining without a single map or any links to maps. How many people reading the article know where Kalgoorlie or the Pilbara is? (or even Perth?)
Anyway, here are the mines referred to in the article, with links and/or Geohack
It’s not a uniquely Australian issue. India also exports a lot of iron ore to China to be made into steel and sold back. This was also how imperialism was funded - take raw materials (cotton) and sell back finished goods (clothes).
It is about having "less economic growth, less democracy, or worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources". Australia is an advanced services based economy. No one would consider them as an example of a country under a "resource curse"
By your measure, Japan also has a resource curse because services makes up 22% of exports?
Here is a more interesting graph https://www.rba.gov.au/education/images/explainers/trends-in... from [1] which shows Australia’s resource exports increasing drastically by percentage over the years, and the percentage for the other export sectors declining (agricultural, services, manufacturing, other). That graph seems to show services have dropped to ~12% of exports which is stunning.
Whether that graph says anything about Australia and the resource curse is graduate level analysis - I don’t have any opinion either way.
I felt your reply was a strawman, or putting words in my mouth? I only pointed out a figure with no implication of analysis, because your figure of internal services was completely irrelevant. Note even countries with the resource curse still internally have cafes, and concerts, and mining support crews.
I think I skipped a few steps in my first comment. Let me break it down.
1) Countries are considered to be under a "resource curse" if they are unable to reach advanced economy status because of hindered growth over long periods of time caused by an abundance of resources. If a country is an advanced economy, it is not under a "resource curse"
2) One measure of how advanced an economy is is the GDP per capita. I don't think this is really sufficient tho because you can imagine a country that is so abundant in, say, oil that they do nothing but extract oil and STILL reach a GDP per capita of $30k. They can do this all without any advancement of their economy, and they can use imports to satisfy their desire for consumption.
3) So I actually prefer an alternative measure of "advanced economy" - the majority of the economy is service based.
Because Australia meets criteria 3, it is an advanced economy. (Australia also has a high GDP per capita, in case criteria 2 is more convincing to you).
You could propose that Australia will become resource cursed in the future if its other sectors stop growing over long periods and resource extraction continues to grow - eventually to the point that the services sector no longer represents the majority of output. I think this is possible but unlikely. And it would take a very long time....
To repeat myself: you are arguing against a point I have not made, and I am certainly not saying that Australia has resource curse.
That said, I will respond to yet another of your non-sequitur comments: the first heading in the Wikipedia article is about a type of resource curse called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease which does apply to advanced economies and could be relevant to Australia.
My guess is that samatman is just saying that Australia’s increasing dependence on resource exports could have negative outcomes - a grey area rather than black & white thinking one or t’other. I would guess he isn’t suggesting 100% resource-curse (or Dutch Disease), but that the needle could move from 10% resource-curse to 30% resource-curse. The graph of percentage agricultural exports in the link I gave is what should be worrying - could resources have the same trend in value?
Given that there are other first world countries (like Norway and petroleum) that seem to be managing their resource wealth, hopefully Australian politicians can avoid problems too.
Australia’s people rely on exports and imports for their first world benefits. How many years would it take to become third world if the borders were closed?
Disclaimer: I am not an economist, nor do I respect most people in that profession, but there are a few economists who are amazing and it can be a science.
Give it enough time and you can all provide services to the Chinese, in exchange for technology and goods.
I'm sure they need services, and not just raw materials they can turn into products and sell to everyone, rather than Australia in particular. But you'll service them with services.
Australian services, to be clear. Very in-demand trade good. Much like raw lithium, and batteries, that way. Everyone wants Australian services.
Even the trains have been automated, which I assume has been historically difficult only because of unions and safety regulations. A bit easier to pull off in the remote outback I suspect.
Isn't that true of almost everything humans do? When I get a tank of gas, I'm basically paying to have a bigger problem in the future. I do so because it solves a problem I have in the present.
This doesn’t seem very plausible to me. You are proposing that there could have been an alternate universe where, for example, instead of sending iron ire to China for steel production, Australia could have become the steel producer. This has many assumptions - firstly, that China would buy Australian steel as opposed to finding another ore producer and doing what they do now anyway. You also assume that this would be a good business in Australia. Quite possibly, the economics don’t play out due to energy/labour costs.
You're far more correct in that China would far rather buy the iron ore and coal from Australia and make steel in China.
Why? Social stability, and the security of the party. Even if it's less efficient to import the ore and coal, the steelworks keeps people employed, particularly young men who might otherwise grow restive.
Why lithium is not considered in the same category as fossil fuels? I mean, it is technically used as a fuel that you need to keep "energising" and it becomes "spent" after nth "energising'. Whereas e.g. diesel comes "pre-charged" and is "spent" after first use?
I read conflicting articles which one is more environment friendly.
How the process of recycling looks like in terms of energy needed to perform it, use of chemicals like solvents in the process - can these be recovered too?
I see I am being downvoted. It's like walking on eggshells asking these questions these days.
It feels that you are arguing in bad faith. Because transitioning to lithium/electrification is not perfect, we should just shutter the idea entirely? Will it take more energy/metal/resource extraction to transition away from fossil fuels? Yes. Will the be some amount of novel environmental damage (different from what happens for the petroleum economy)? Yes. Long term does it seem the best possible option available to humanity? Yes.
Thats just because we don't care about reusing spent carbon. If we wanted to sequester all carbon into trees that we use again for fuel, for example, you can cycle atoms of carbon infinitely, and therefore power your vehicle purely from the sunlight energy that structures the chemistry of your woody carbon fuel without needing to build and replace solar panels every few decades.
There are quite a few technologies that attempt to use chemical energy storage, but none of them are as well developed as electricity/batteries:
- The hydrogen economy. Currently hydrogen generation is very expensive and there's no distribution system yet because of H2's physical properties.
- Biodiesel. Looks promising, but basically limited by inputs.
- Fuel cells can potentially be run reversibly, so you could have the same chemical medium being converted back-and-forth with a charger instead of lithium. I'm not very familiar, but I understand physical and chemical constraints mean this mode is difficult to manufacture and operate in practice.
You can make fuel with yeast today and power your car with it. Go to the grocery store, buy a packet of bakers yeast and some granulated sugar, and distill your sugar wine into liquor. In fact you can probably use any locally available plant material; people make hooch from grass even. The issue is just that gallon for gallon, subsidies make things like corn based ethanol or natural gasoline cheaper. Subsidies can change however, and incentives will shift and behavior will change accordingly.
The issue with lithium is it is effectively illegal to process in most of the world that knows how to do it. The subtext in this article is that Australia is a major lithium producer ... because it has easy access to the Chinese refining pipeline which refines the cheap and dirty way.
If it were practical to refine lithium in the cheap way we know how, then countries with large lithium reserves (US & Europe) would be large lithium suppliers.
> The issues with lithium mining in Australia are no different to those experienced in the industry more broadly: open-cut mining carves deep scars in the landscape, often within ecosystems that are already under pressure
This is one of those "we just don't like living in an industrial society" complaints that NIMBYs come up with. It doesn't say anything and it is wilfully ignorant of the practicalities of maintaining the complex and raw-material-hungry world we live in. If you want products made using materials, you have to extract those materials. The environmental damage of open pit mining operations is nothing compared to the environmental damage and visual pollution of a large city. And you know what? Almost everyone chooses to live in a city. The costs are well worth it.
There are no alternatives. If you restrict open pit mining, you will not have products made of metal. We need industrial processes to maintain 21st century living standards.
As an Australian, you’re forgetting one really key part of the puzzle.
Australia is a FUCKING ENORMOUS lump of mineral rich dust. The country is literally tinted red when viewed from space because of all the iron in our dry, desolate, empty-ass country.
There is one, and I do mean ONE, advantage to being a developed western country that is also fucking empty and inhospitable.
All the NIMBY’s are atleast 1000km away from your mine…
You could put hundreds of open cut mines all over WA, SA, NT, and nobody would even notice because there’s fuckin-nuthin out there.
We could, but that is a lot less economic. Open pit mines are for bulk commodities and if you put them in the middle of nowhere then the transport costs get extreme. It makes more sense to put them distant but proximate to an existing train line or city. Somewhere like the Pilbara is a bit of an exception because there are 300m high blocks of iron, so sure, we can afford to build a few new tracks.
And Europe/the US/Africa/Asia aren't exactly small places. All the continents are big and an open cut mine is actually pretty small compared to the amount of land we put aside for, say, farming. The Earth isn't short of spare earth.
Australia has an incredibly dense population basis around the seaboard. There is virtually no one in the centre. I don’t know of any other continent like this.
Just. No. Leaving aside the massive pastoral leases, that is the ancestral land of the oldest continuing cultures on the planet.
Mabo vs Qld was handed down in 1992 and the idea that “nobody is out there” was formally and legally abolished then, and should be condemned to Australia’s regrettable, racist past.
The Kwinana lithium hydroxide refinery will start processing soon and keep some of the value-add in Australia, and provide local raw materials for battery production.
I dont know if all that will end up cost competitive with what is already established in China though.
> The environmental damage of open pit mining operations is nothing compared to the environmental damage and visual pollution of a large city
Eh? These processes liberate vast amounts of heavy metals, arsenic and other environmental contaminants, making byproducts like poil and tailings are super toxic and expensive to deal with, and mining companies have a tendency to vanish before the cleanup is done. When these leak or fail, they often do so into water supplies for cities or isolated communities who have the serial insults of being displaced and then poisoned. Have a search for “tailings dam failures” or superfund sites, for that matter.
The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”
There are complex and intersecting interests here, and the tech industry acting like resources in someone’s country are there for the tech industry to exploit as of right, are a really good example of how colonialism continues to cause suffering and the inequalities it promises to emancipate us from.
> The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”
This perspective, while common, is a baffler in context. Start by assuming Aboriginal Australians aren't stupid. Note that whoever owns the land will, assuming they are intelligent or compassionate, develop it to support the the seething mass of humans who need steel.
Aboriginals don't live like poor people because they have a deep philosophical connection to lousy accommodation and dodgy services. They live that way if and only if they are poor. We can respect that, we can acknowledge the dignity of generations of a lifestyle without the comforts of industrialisation, we could potentially accept that there is no need to integrate them into an industrial culture by external policy (I argue we should leave them to it as far as government policy goes, but I tend to lose that sort of argument). Give them standard ownership rights a vast amount of valuable land and they'll choose to live like people who own vast amounts of valuable land. Particularly given that there are about a billion people in Asia who will be vastly better off if they have more cheap steel - that argument should melt any heart, particularly given the amount of profit involved as a motivator. The minerals will get mined.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadWe don't even have the metal supplies to fully electrify car production, not even close, although I see South America is going to ramp up production substantially soon.
Fun neighborhood. Nothing could go wrong with the above countries fighting for their share of Afghanistan's mineral resources.
I'm guessing India would claim that it does. Pakistan would argue otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Agreement
Which is not that great if you intend to export raw bulk goods (e.g. ore). You really want to have ports for that. The extra few percent efficiency of ship vs rail makes a huge difference because margin is so thin.
To give an example every day I see convoys of trucks coming from Zambia to South African ports. These should be transported by train!
The solution is smaller, more efficient cars, electric bikes, public transport and things like that, not expensive 3 ton Tesla cars.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/aba...
It looks like insufficient bonds and bankruptcy just shifted cost burdens for cleanup to government.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cleaning-abandoned-coal-mi...
https://apnews.com/article/business-mountains-environment-an...
Most of the issues with abandonded mines can be confirmed in several countries, but the profits from pump and dump do afford positive GDP (superfund cleanups, etc).
The ROI while in operation keeps it going and keeps the "we need renewables now" crowd focused on (someone elses) goal(s) :)
The oil and gas industries have already started transfering ownership to smaller companies to bypass obligations, so the cycle continues, with new lithium mining just coming on the heels of two other unresolved climate catastrophes.
That's the goal of capitalism, privitise the profits, socialise the losses.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...
The psuedo-environmentalists getting played like a 2-bit....crypto investor (not my 1st word choice, but still relevant) is funny though :p
That’s like saying the goal of socialism is to starve everyone.
In socialism, attempts to change the status quo are not met with "but fewer people will starve this way"
Whether or not the GP is correct, it's silly to feign ignorance of how this idea could come about.
This is laughably stupid. The entire point of capitalism is to constantly disrupt the status quo of competitors to eat their margin.
What you’re describing is some state run capitalism or state guaranteed monopolies where the only possible disruption could come from the government.
Congress wants to pass a law making it illegal to torture children by throwing them into piles of burning puppies? Cue talking heads rambling on and on about economic impacts. Politicians on the other side talking about how $market_segment will suffer. Ceos/business owners talking about how it hurts them or worse, helps the competition. All with the terrifying footer note "opponents say this move will hurt profits".
I'm not imagining anything, I'm merely saying what happens. If you want to claim that I'm stupid for saying what I see, call me Forest Gump and keep pretending you can't see what's in front of you. I'm sure your emperor is wearing clothes or whatever other fantasy makes you feel smug and safe.
Can't you think of time and again examples of this? For instance, all fossil fuel using companies are participating in this exercise in real-time today; they certainly are not paying anything for the massive pollution damage they are creating. Corporate fraud never leads to meaningful punishment of the executives and they often make a profit even after "punishment".
Benjamin Franklin (with a hint of Einstein) :p
No, this is a meme that needs to die. Please link examples where profits from a specific activity did not outsize the profit from that activity.
People get confused when some international massive company made a profit overall after some big fine and think the illegal thing was therefore profitable. This is never the case and the fines drastically exceed the profit from the specific activity (every country levying fines structures them explicitly this way).
BP absolutely did not make a profit on the deep water horizon.
>all fossil fuel using companies are participating in this exercise in real-time today
Red herring in a discussion about fraud. This is purely because governments don’t charge for CO2 (quite bafflingly).
>Corporate fraud never leads to meaningful punishment of the executives
Enron, Madoff, Theranos, Worldcom, Tyco, Qwest, Rite Aid… the list goes on.
While every environmentalist ever talks about "the greater good" they pouted and whined and tossed the plate on the floor when there was nuclear energy on it. You'll have to forgive the general public for not taking you (as a group) at your word.
The environmental destruction of climate change is almost certainly worse
Let's look at the sprawling suburbs of Houston, Texas. These suburbs have necessities covered within 10-15 minutes by car. If you look at this map [3] and this one [4] of a newer neighborhood in Katy, TX (about 30 miles) from downtown Houston, you'll notice a few points:
* The schools and stores are already close to the neighborhoods. Biking to the store takes ~12 minutes vs 8 mins driving * It's ~4.5 mi (7km) to the park & ride. Biking takes ~22 mins vs 12 mins by car. * There's several food places, dentist offices, and doctors offices along the way.
This neighborhood is following the same developmental pattern as the earlier neighborhoods, which some iterative refinements. Of course there is still some low handing fruit that could be addressed: * This area could add bike lanes whenever they did planned road expansions (which is often) * Add safe bike and pedestrian over/underpasses for the freeways & busy intersections * Connect existing paths that connect neighborhood amenities (i.e. parks, schools) to inter-neighborhood paths * Prevent commercial and industrial site boundaries from harming neighborhood inter-connectivity
These fixes would allow an extremely car-dependent area more "transit options" at very little cost. These would not require rezoning, rule changes (i.e. parking minimums), or forced increases in density. The market repeatedly identifies that people want the same things basic things nearby. But the chosen zoning and local car-centric ordinances perpetuate this car centrality. Parking minimums set a floor on store size, which limits store density, which undermines convenient access by any means other than cars. Builders don't know how the commercial sites are going to be used and exactly what-for.
Within the neighborhoods, access to locals schools and parks are considered in the planning stages. That's why it's common to see schoolchildren riding their bike or walking home from school in groups -- sometimes with chaperones / crossing guards. It's designed to be convenient, for example adding shortcuts between streets to the school [5]. Making these slightly larger to explicitly accommodate bikes, especially for accessing nearby essentials is not a tough sell. This is largely a consequence of builders' presumptions about homeowners' expectations/preferences. It has taken a while, but these same builders are finally starting to run fiber alongside or instead of coax to these newer neighborhoods -- a convenient selling point post-covid.
Regarding densification, there are already apartments [6] built nearby the highway, adjacent to these new neighborhoods. Changes that would require more effort than the points mentioned above include: * Allow duplexes and small apartments to be built within the neighborhoods * Apartments and duplexes [7] are currently like standalone "communities," isolated from the surrounding neighborhoods * Let small shops and offices be built within the neighborhoods, not just immediately adjacent
Note that a lot of these zoning changes only require changing builder presumptions. Often they're building in unincorporated areas. You can see an increasing mix of home-types and nearby shopping in very new communities like Bridgeland [9]. There's even a "desired path" emerging behind this Lifetime Fitness [8]. This path isn't even possible in the older neighborhoods. Basically, builders are rezoning large areas (often displacing cows), so better inter-mixing of stores and community centers (for transit stops) can be done ahead of time.
That's why I don't think the changes...
In the face of severe climate and weather events, I can hear the buyer still thinking "yes, but the larger model is safer in a storm or fire..."
1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
400k km in an ICE vehicule is 24000 liter of refined petroleum product.
Assuming 90% recovery rate for lithium (very conservative) in fine you compare 1kg of lithium to 24000 liters of refined petroleum product.
99% recovery rate makes it 100g of lithium vs 24000 liters of refined petroleum products.
It's quite a shock to me that people even discuss/compare when there is such a wide 5 order of magnitude difference.
Given the choice between toxic waste at a mine and toxic waste in millions of homes, I'll take the mine.
A while back I saw a video on youtube of someone mining road dust for platinum of all things.
Evs will be a likely improvement for the health of those near roads.
Tire scrub and brake pads produce larger particles that wash into stormwater drains and poison downstream aquatic life.
I think what the parent comment was really hinting at is the need to move towards a less car-dependent life. Of course, electrification is important, but it's not environmentally neutral in any way.
It would be better if we had trains, strong public transport, walkable and cyclable cities rather than electric cars. I think that's kind of what Europe is doing and the USA should try to do similarly. Cars are extremely important for rural life but they're really unnecessary in cities... unless your cities are build as urban sprawls.
Maybe think of EVs as a stop-gap because if you want clean air for millions in the next 30 years that is our best option. Even the famous Shinkansen took longer than that to build, and they had the benefit of a miracle economy, cities already configured for density and mixed zoning, and a government that could actually achieve things on a horizon longer than 3 years.
Ideally with a detailed breakdown for each potentially problematic material.
I keep seeing claims that go both way on that matter. But none were backed by serious research.
The cathode accounts for just over half a battery's cost: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...
- The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth (https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/16_2021.pdf)
Is there any reliable information on this?
Okay, I need to say that you are not even wrong. Yep, I am slightly irritated on this blatantly false claim that has started popping up. If you think your claim has any merit, could you please provid the metal that you think we are lacking, estimat the amount needed and compare that amoun to the amount in earth's crust. If you get anything but infinitesmally small needs compared to what here is, please explain why that metal can't be replaced.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-does-austr...
It is surreal how naive people are about both this plus the huge lithium batteries high temperature fire risks and associated high voltage electrocution.
There is a reason we went from high pressure steam power to a lower pressure oil and gas based economy after the Victorian era.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/01/south-america-s-li...
Why is lithium extraction bad for the environment? Any type of resource extraction is harmful to the planet. This is because removing these raw materials can result in soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and an increase in global warming.
But when we think of extraction, we think of fossil fuels like coal and gas. Unfortunately, lithium also falls under the same umbrella, despite paving the way for an electric future.. Lithium can be described as the non-renewable mineral that makes renewable energy possible - often touted as the next oil.
Even first generation Leaf batteries are still being sold for reasonable sums of money so we haven't even reached the stage were we are recycling them in ernest yet.
As lithium batteries degrade they become more unstable and fire prone. I'm sure you're familiar with what happens to your laptop battery as it ages - shorter and shorter life, swelling etc.
And of course, laptop batteries get worked -much- harder and treated to much harsher environments than any EV battery.
https://youtu.be/J6eS6JzBn0k?t=77
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/20/tesla-switching-to-lfp-batte...
https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/TWPKBV_TSLA_Q3_2021_Quart... (page 7)
Lithium is extremely hard to recycle.
50/50, actually.
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportat...
Ferrous metals 65%.
2 How old is that graphic?
3 Manners
"Manners" in this forum means providing credible sources to back up your claims. If you have credible sources that contradict Transport Geography, supply them.
1. https://www.metalsupermarkets.com/what-is-a-ferrous-metal/
https://matmatch.com/resources/blog/advanced-high-strength-s...
AHSS is essentially steel at its core but is very hard to move once damaged, unlike 16 or 18 gauge pure stamped steel in an early 70's era car for example, that was superseded by the high strength low alloys (HSLA) in the late 1970's. If you hammer and dolly the older pure steels there will be a 'memory' of the original stamping it will reconform too. The newer HSLA alloys were much less malleable
It is amazing how fast this world has evolved in the last five years.
High strength 'steel' has a low alloying and carbon content to retain formability and weldability, with copper, titanium, vanadium, and niobium added for strengthening purposes. These are complex alloys that replaced the earlier HSLA and are both very hard to work and also to recycle.
Are you trying to argue that using fossil fuels is better for the environment? It’s not clear if you’re using this opportunity to complain about mining in general or if you’re arguing that we are better off with petrol cars.
By copper mining. Lithium is unnoticeable in comparison.
I am not aware of any cars using high voltage [0] yet. But of course getting zapped by low voltage is bad enough.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_voltage
Risks to Emergency Responders from High-Voltage, Lithium-Ion Battery Fires Addressed in Safety Report
Actions sought by the NTSB in the four safety recommendations issued Wednesday include:
Factoring the availability of a manufacturer’s emergency response guide, and its adherence to International Organization for Standardization standard 17840 and SAE International recommended practice J2990, when determining a U.S. New Car Assessment Program score. Continued research on ways to mitigate or deenergize stranded energy in high-voltage lithium-ion batteries. Continued research on ways to reduce the hazards associated with thermal runaway resulting from high-speed, high-severity crashes. Manufacturer emergency response guides modeled on ISO standard 17840 and SAE International recommended practice J2990. Incorporation of vehicle-specific information in emergency response guides for: Fighting high-voltage lithium-ion battery fires. Mitigating thermal runaway and the risk of high-voltage lithium-ion battery reignition. Mitigating risks associated with stranded energy in high-voltage lithium-ion batteries during emergency response and before a damaged electric vehicle is removed from the scene. Safely storing an electric vehicle with a damaged high-voltage lithium-ion battery. Providing information and available guidance to first responders and other crash scene workers about fire risks associated with high-voltage lithium-ion battery fires in electric vehicles. Fires in electric vehicles powered by high-voltage lithium-ion batteries pose the risk of electric shock to emergency responders from exposure to the high-voltage components of a damaged lithium-ion battery. A further risk is that damaged cells in the battery can experience thermal runaway – uncontrolled increases in temperature and pressure – which can lead to battery reignition. The risks of electric shock and battery reignition/fire arise from the “stranded” energy that remains in a damaged battery.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Tesla-Prius-crash-int...
https://youtu.be/tuVxwmnhqP4?t=385
https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210328000109
Uncle Toby says lithium ion, so it's not LFP. He talks about a year old Tesla fire, so that was NMC, not LFP.
First, steam is not a fuel. Second, where did you get the idea that steam pressure is higher than what we see with oil and gas fueled machines?
https://petrotechinc.com/how-does-a-steam-turbine-work/
Unfortunately we are burning huge amounts of wood to produce electricity in this way. I prefer small modular nuclear reactors if we want to be environmentally efficient. https://www.wbdg.org/resources/biomass-electricity-generatio....
For example: Australian Gas consumers pay more to use natural gas in Australia, than people in Japan, using Australian LNG.
Would it be fair to call that blatant corruption, or could some argument be made that it is not?
Yes.
In other words, only if you're lying is it corruption. Costs are not like for like, not even close. The gas itself is relatively cheap. The infrastructure and OpEx is not.
...I feel like our governments had the same neoliberal consultants come in.
The sawmills were promptly closed, and the raw logs exported in bulk to Japan and China as a form of protectionism / subsidised employment. They take the inefficiencies to keep portions of their population employed that might otherwise not be.
Then there's the fact that nearly all of our dairy exports are milk powder. It's hardly value add.
Great book. Written in the 60s but it still holds today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.
Maybe we’re a bit better now (particularly after the last election) but it doesn’t really mean what everyone thinks it means. Basically, historically, we have failed upwards. Still, there are very few places I’d desire to live in
But we do have a first rate health care system, high employment, decent weather and relatively stable government. We didn’t do anything stupid like leave important regional organisations, nor have we ever had our leader forment violent insurrection.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31850-y
(Jul 2022) "Tracing the origin of lithium in Li-ion batteries using lithium isotopes", Desaulty et al.
This in particular is interesting, using a blockchain to track sourcing:
> "Major car manufacturers like BMW group, Tesla, and Volvo recently announced that they will increase the transparency of their supply chains for EV batteries, and ensure responsible and sustainable sourcing of raw materials. Some companies (BASF, Volkswagen, Fairphone) have started a partnership for sustainable lithium mining in Chile. Carmakers also explore the usefulness of blockchains for improving the scrutiny of supply chains. A blockchain is the control of chain-of-custody systems, based on the shipping documentation that is included in online databases, to allow real-time raw materials tracking and electronic tagging. However, document-based traceability systems can be falsified, and must be independently controlled and audited to provide credibility."
I assume that a certified mining facility would be closely watched to ensure that the amount of lithium they mine matches what the sign for in transactions. And on the output, battery manufacturers are required only buy lithium they can trace to a certified mine and sign every device the make, including how much lithium it contains.
If the ledger is public, anyone can verify that input=output + balance. It is not going to be decentralized, but it can be publicly verifiable.
Looks like somewhere else people will try to crobar it in.
Well, maybe. But it’s a bit ridiculous to have an article about mining without a single map or any links to maps. How many people reading the article know where Kalgoorlie or the Pilbara is? (or even Perth?)
Anyway, here are the mines referred to in the article, with links and/or Geohack
Cornwall Pit and Greenbushes mine, Greenbushes, WA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbushes_mine
(looks impressive in Google Earth: https://earth.google.com/web/search/-33.8567368,116.0649188/)
Mount Marion mine, south-west of Kalgoorlie, WA: https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Mount_Mar...
Earl Grey Lithium Mine, Mount Holland, WA: https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Earl_Grey...
Ball Hill Lithium and Tantalum Mine, WA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_Hill_Lithium_and_Tantalum...
Mount Cattlin mine, Ravensthorpe, WA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt_Cattlin_mine
Altura Lithium Mine, Pilgangoora, Pilbara, WA: https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Altura_Mi...
Wodgina mine, Pilbara region, WA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wodgina_mine
Finniss Lithium Project, near Darwin, NT: https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Finniss_L...
Relative to China.
I'd like this post to be more sarcastic than it is, really, I would.
The service sector makes up 62% of the Australian economy.
Total exports 2019-20: 383G$ goods, 92.3G$ services https://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/trade-and-investment/tr...
It is about having "less economic growth, less democracy, or worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources". Australia is an advanced services based economy. No one would consider them as an example of a country under a "resource curse"
By your measure, Japan also has a resource curse because services makes up 22% of exports?
Whether that graph says anything about Australia and the resource curse is graduate level analysis - I don’t have any opinion either way.
I felt your reply was a strawman, or putting words in my mouth? I only pointed out a figure with no implication of analysis, because your figure of internal services was completely irrelevant. Note even countries with the resource curse still internally have cafes, and concerts, and mining support crews.
PS: NZ probably isn’t doing much better. Service exports seem lowish, and half of our service exports is tourism: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/nzl#trade-services
[1] https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/trends...
1) Countries are considered to be under a "resource curse" if they are unable to reach advanced economy status because of hindered growth over long periods of time caused by an abundance of resources. If a country is an advanced economy, it is not under a "resource curse"
2) One measure of how advanced an economy is is the GDP per capita. I don't think this is really sufficient tho because you can imagine a country that is so abundant in, say, oil that they do nothing but extract oil and STILL reach a GDP per capita of $30k. They can do this all without any advancement of their economy, and they can use imports to satisfy their desire for consumption.
3) So I actually prefer an alternative measure of "advanced economy" - the majority of the economy is service based.
Because Australia meets criteria 3, it is an advanced economy. (Australia also has a high GDP per capita, in case criteria 2 is more convincing to you).
You could propose that Australia will become resource cursed in the future if its other sectors stop growing over long periods and resource extraction continues to grow - eventually to the point that the services sector no longer represents the majority of output. I think this is possible but unlikely. And it would take a very long time....
That said, I will respond to yet another of your non-sequitur comments: the first heading in the Wikipedia article is about a type of resource curse called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease which does apply to advanced economies and could be relevant to Australia.
My guess is that samatman is just saying that Australia’s increasing dependence on resource exports could have negative outcomes - a grey area rather than black & white thinking one or t’other. I would guess he isn’t suggesting 100% resource-curse (or Dutch Disease), but that the needle could move from 10% resource-curse to 30% resource-curse. The graph of percentage agricultural exports in the link I gave is what should be worrying - could resources have the same trend in value?
Given that there are other first world countries (like Norway and petroleum) that seem to be managing their resource wealth, hopefully Australian politicians can avoid problems too.
Australia’s people rely on exports and imports for their first world benefits. How many years would it take to become third world if the borders were closed?
Disclaimer: I am not an economist, nor do I respect most people in that profession, but there are a few economists who are amazing and it can be a science.
I'm sure they need services, and not just raw materials they can turn into products and sell to everyone, rather than Australia in particular. But you'll service them with services.
Australian services, to be clear. Very in-demand trade good. Much like raw lithium, and batteries, that way. Everyone wants Australian services.
There were jobs around in the 2010’s during a mining “construction” boom, but once the mines were built 90% of the jobs went too.
This doesn’t seem very plausible to me. You are proposing that there could have been an alternate universe where, for example, instead of sending iron ire to China for steel production, Australia could have become the steel producer. This has many assumptions - firstly, that China would buy Australian steel as opposed to finding another ore producer and doing what they do now anyway. You also assume that this would be a good business in Australia. Quite possibly, the economics don’t play out due to energy/labour costs.
Why? Social stability, and the security of the party. Even if it's less efficient to import the ore and coal, the steelworks keeps people employed, particularly young men who might otherwise grow restive.
I see I am being downvoted. It's like walking on eggshells asking these questions these days.
It feels that you are arguing in bad faith. Because transitioning to lithium/electrification is not perfect, we should just shutter the idea entirely? Will it take more energy/metal/resource extraction to transition away from fossil fuels? Yes. Will the be some amount of novel environmental damage (different from what happens for the petroleum economy)? Yes. Long term does it seem the best possible option available to humanity? Yes.
[1] https://www.midtronics.com/blog/do-electric-car-ev-batteries...
- The hydrogen economy. Currently hydrogen generation is very expensive and there's no distribution system yet because of H2's physical properties.
- Biodiesel. Looks promising, but basically limited by inputs.
- Fuel cells can potentially be run reversibly, so you could have the same chemical medium being converted back-and-forth with a charger instead of lithium. I'm not very familiar, but I understand physical and chemical constraints mean this mode is difficult to manufacture and operate in practice.
https://www.ucf.edu/news/ucf-researchers-ethanol-fuel-cells-...
No. The lithium is the fuel tank, not the fuel.
If it were practical to refine lithium in the cheap way we know how, then countries with large lithium reserves (US & Europe) would be large lithium suppliers.
> The issues with lithium mining in Australia are no different to those experienced in the industry more broadly: open-cut mining carves deep scars in the landscape, often within ecosystems that are already under pressure
This is one of those "we just don't like living in an industrial society" complaints that NIMBYs come up with. It doesn't say anything and it is wilfully ignorant of the practicalities of maintaining the complex and raw-material-hungry world we live in. If you want products made using materials, you have to extract those materials. The environmental damage of open pit mining operations is nothing compared to the environmental damage and visual pollution of a large city. And you know what? Almost everyone chooses to live in a city. The costs are well worth it.
There are no alternatives. If you restrict open pit mining, you will not have products made of metal. We need industrial processes to maintain 21st century living standards.
Australia is a FUCKING ENORMOUS lump of mineral rich dust. The country is literally tinted red when viewed from space because of all the iron in our dry, desolate, empty-ass country.
There is one, and I do mean ONE, advantage to being a developed western country that is also fucking empty and inhospitable.
All the NIMBY’s are atleast 1000km away from your mine…
You could put hundreds of open cut mines all over WA, SA, NT, and nobody would even notice because there’s fuckin-nuthin out there.
And Europe/the US/Africa/Asia aren't exactly small places. All the continents are big and an open cut mine is actually pretty small compared to the amount of land we put aside for, say, farming. The Earth isn't short of spare earth.
We are freaking Arrakis.
Tony Abbott was a product of the Tleilaxu, that I'm sure of.
Mabo vs Qld was handed down in 1992 and the idea that “nobody is out there” was formally and legally abolished then, and should be condemned to Australia’s regrettable, racist past.
Eh? These processes liberate vast amounts of heavy metals, arsenic and other environmental contaminants, making byproducts like poil and tailings are super toxic and expensive to deal with, and mining companies have a tendency to vanish before the cleanup is done. When these leak or fail, they often do so into water supplies for cities or isolated communities who have the serial insults of being displaced and then poisoned. Have a search for “tailings dam failures” or superfund sites, for that matter.
The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”
There are complex and intersecting interests here, and the tech industry acting like resources in someone’s country are there for the tech industry to exploit as of right, are a really good example of how colonialism continues to cause suffering and the inequalities it promises to emancipate us from.
This perspective, while common, is a baffler in context. Start by assuming Aboriginal Australians aren't stupid. Note that whoever owns the land will, assuming they are intelligent or compassionate, develop it to support the the seething mass of humans who need steel.
Aboriginals don't live like poor people because they have a deep philosophical connection to lousy accommodation and dodgy services. They live that way if and only if they are poor. We can respect that, we can acknowledge the dignity of generations of a lifestyle without the comforts of industrialisation, we could potentially accept that there is no need to integrate them into an industrial culture by external policy (I argue we should leave them to it as far as government policy goes, but I tend to lose that sort of argument). Give them standard ownership rights a vast amount of valuable land and they'll choose to live like people who own vast amounts of valuable land. Particularly given that there are about a billion people in Asia who will be vastly better off if they have more cheap steel - that argument should melt any heart, particularly given the amount of profit involved as a motivator. The minerals will get mined.