81–90 of 400 posts
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The degree to which we’ve been blessed with resources and opportunity to do the right thing (and have consistently chosen to do the dumb thing) never fails to amaze me. Infinite power from the sky that’s cheaper than fossil fuels; vast reserves of lithium to help oil-producing nations smoothly transition us away from oil; huge and unusually-enriched Uranium deposits we could use to build power (but instead used to bu…
> Infinite power from the sky that’s cheaper than fossil fuels but it isnt though, if it was, it would be happening all over, without massive subsidies and strongarming from government.
None of this is to say that solar power is bad, just that we should have measured expectations.
A strong argument for the existence of a diety is hilarious-if-true outcomes like the Ayatollah getting to have both oil & lithium to remain fully hedged through the EV transition. Too improbable for a fictional movie, but here we are. Life, as always, is stranger than fiction.
I don't see how this is a strong argument. You could just as easily make the same counter claim about Norway, both rich in minerals, oil and gas.
A strong argument for the existence of a diety is hilarious-if-true outcomes like the Ayatollah getting to have both oil & lithium to remain fully hedged through the EV transition. Too improbable for a fictional movie, but here we are. Life, as always, is stranger than fiction.
I don't see how this is a strong argument. You could just as easily make the same counter claim about Norway, both rich in minerals, oil and gas.
A strong argument for the existence of a diety is hilarious-if-true outcomes like the Ayatollah getting to have both oil & lithium to remain fully hedged through the EV transition. Too improbable for a fictional movie, but here we are. Life, as always, is stranger than fiction.
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> Infinite power from the sky that’s cheaper than fossil fuels but it isnt though, if it was, it would be happening all over, without massive subsidies and strongarming from government.
Correct--while the sun sends an enormous amount of free energy our way, it's maddeningly diffuse and requires enormous investments of energy and materials to capture it in a usable and reliable form. The Wynn in Vegas has a 160 acre solar farm in some of the sunniest land in the country and it provides...almost enough energy to power a single large hotel. None of this is to say that solar power is bad, just that we s…
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Maybe they wouldn’t have done it had the US not bailed out on the Iran nuclear deal.
Maybe. Most probably they would have cheated. It is moot either way. There is no such thing as "fair" in geopolitics. I don't see how a sane person thinks Iran getting the bomb is a good development or viable.
And look at those who actually developed nuclear weapons and ensured they have a strong defense deterrent (such as North Korea).
You're looking at it with a very north-atlantic centred perspective.
And besides that Lithium is even harder to transport than oil is. You need blue team to occupy the mines and secure a perimeter so that red team cannot disrupt not only extraction but also transportation to the nearest port.
It's a little bit sickening that so many of these initial comments are joking about the US going to war over the lithium.
> US going to war over the lithium. there's nothing strange about a country going to war over a resource. Has been happening for a long time in history, and there's no reason that anything in the modern world changed human nature. Except that lithium isn't valuable enough to go to war over at the moment. Now, the threat of being able to develop and fire nukes, on the other hand, is something that might be war-worthy.
That doesn't make it any less sickening. War is always a travesty.