Why are lithium prices collapsing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#381

Post by tomp » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #378

tomp wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General non-discriminatory carbon tax. Investing heavily in nuclear. Just 2 obvious ideas that noone is even trying.

Investing heavily in nuclear isn't going to remove 99.99% the sources of greenhouse gasses. Adding some taxes will reduce some of the usage but not 99.99%, unless you price the tax so high nobody can realistically afford jet fuel or diesel or propane or steak or bacon. Increasing the price of concrete might make projects more expensive, but they're probably still going to use concrete. Neither of these are 99.99%. Pr…

I disagree.

Most of climate change is caused by fossil fuels. The rest are caused e.g. by factory farming (plant & animal - e.g. pesticide rundown), plastic pollution, etc.

If we had boundless nuclear energy, not only would fossil fuels become price inefficient, we could devote the extra energy we generate into synthetic fossil fuels, carbon capture, reducing pollution, etc. Almost all of these are energy bound right now.

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#382

Post by bluefirebrand » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #234

bluefirebrand wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it time and you'll be seeing plenty of the reusable bags littering instead In theory they are supposed to be reusable but in practice I think they are going to wind up being single-use for most people. Maybe we'll start using them as garbage bags as they accumulate around the house.

I live in an area that's banned plastic bags. Given enough experience, grabbing a reusable bag out of the car before going into the store became an unconscious programmed action.

Unless you empty your groceries in your car to leave the bags there, at some point bags need to make it from your house to your car, so that you have some to take into the store.

That's the part I struggle with.

Also, if you order groceries for delivery, they bring your order in reusable bags. Which you then keep.

My point is these re-usable bags have a tendency to accumulate over time. Maybe not at the same rate as plastic bags would otherwise, but once you have dozens of these bags at home it starts to be tempting to just use them as bin liners and toss them, just like we did with plastic bags

Which sort of defeats the whole purpose, right? The ideal is people would buy as many as they need and use them for years.

But that isn't going to happen any time soon imo. If ever.

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#383

Post by pas » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

Tagbert wrote: post #325

latency-guy2 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's deliberate, and I extend that to any sort of mining - after all it comes from the stance of misinformed "environmentalists" not being able to tell the difference because any of that type of action is bad

There are certainly people reposting comments that mix up lithium and cobalt and keep asserting that all EV batteries use cobalt and how terrible that is. They are not all environmentalists. A lot of them are just using those talking points as a way to oppose the move to EVs. They also like to post a photo of an open pit gold mine in Australia and claim that it is a lithium mine while complaining about the massive en…

not to mention that there is no fundamental problem with open pit mining with recultivation.

the problem is the brine. which is cleanable with a lot of energy.

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#384

Post by notjes » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:20 PM UTC

nickpinkston wrote: post #376

The quote from the article below [1] demonstrates why the doomers, degrowers, Neo-Malthusians, etc. keep getting resource scarcity wrong. They keep quoting the "proven reserves" numbers [2] that only count what is extractable with current tech at current prices, factoring out new technologies / techniques, as well as reserves not discovered yet or discovered but not yet "proven". [1] "But while demand for lithium has…

Yes, resources are infinite. That is why the carrying capacity of the earth is also infinite. Because the ingenuity of humans is infinite.

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#385

Post by bawolff » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:21 PM UTC

newswasboring wrote: post #52

RandomLensman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you measure the amount of unnecessary vs necessary gambling?

Necessary gambling is what helps the market figure out the real long term availability of something. I have not seen any necessary gambling in my years in manufacturing. So in my view all speculation on commodities seem unnecessary.

That's kind of begging the question.

Essentially you are saying 100% of bad things are bad. Which is true, but also meaningless statement. Since it would still be true in a utopia with no bad things.

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#386

Post by fiftyfifty » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:22 PM UTC

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #247

aintgonnatakeit wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happens with the gas stove threads. I can’t believe that actual people are that invested in burning hydrocarbons.

The gas stove bans are idiotic and petty to defend based on environmentalist principles. The amount of gas burned by those stoves makes roughly zero impact compared with all the other hydrocarbons we burn.

I'm not defending the ban on gas stoves, but a much better reason to ban them is their impact on indoor air quality. Burning natural gas indoors emits all kinds of nasty stuff like carbon monoxide, nitric oxides, formaldehyde...stuff linked to all kinds of diseases from asthma to cancer.

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#387

Post by mejutoco » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #343

specialist wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and: One view is private vs public capitalism. USSR vs USA, respectively. Extreme wealth concentration at the expense of everyone else. Both are anti-democratic.

I think the USSR would object to being called capitalist, since they were one of the major Communist revolutions until their economic collapse. And in this vein, we shouldn't forget Mao's "four pests campaign" in China under Mao which caused mass starvation by killing sparrows which had been eating insects, leaving them with a literal plague of locusts. Mao would probably have murdered anyone who called him a capital…

It is irrelevant if the object of the calling agrees or not on the name. Otherwise nobody would ever be called anything bad.

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#388

Post by underbluewaters » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #367

13of40 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to share my own take, which is that one of the clearest, bluest skies I've ever seen was over North Korea. Because they sucked at doing "industry" compared to the South Koreans. In the 90s in South Korea, the rivers ran black and every corner you turned had its own putrid chemical smell from whatever fly-by-night entrepraneur had found a way to make a buck there. But that's an an…

Do blue skies matter when you are blind from malnutrition?

Yes. For many folks there is an intrinsic value to protecting the environment.

I find more and more that even within the NGO and environmentalist community people only care about how natural resources impact people in a utilitarian sense. I can respect that philosophical position, but it makes me equal parts angry and sad that it's taken as a given. I don't believe life on earth exists just to serve human needs.

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#389

Post by vel0city » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #381

vel0city wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investing heavily in nuclear isn't going to remove 99.99% the sources of greenhouse gasses. Adding some taxes will reduce some of the usage but not 99.99%, unless you price the tax so high nobody can realistically afford jet fuel or diesel or propane or steak or bacon. Increasing the price of concrete might make projects more expensive, but they're probably still going to use concrete. Neither of these are 99.99%. Pr…

I disagree. Most of climate change is caused by fossil fuels. The rest are caused e.g. by factory farming (plant & animal - e.g. pesticide rundown), plastic pollution, etc. If we had boundless nuclear energy, not only would fossil fuels become price inefficient, we could devote the extra energy we generate into synthetic fossil fuels, carbon capture, reducing pollution, etc. Almost all of these are energy bound right…

According to the EPA, agriculture accounts for 10% of GHG emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Building a nuclear reactor isn't going to make steak go away. So even if you solved.for transportation and industrial uses and everything else you're still only at 90%, not 99.99%.

> If we had boundless nuclear energy,

More of this "nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter" talk. Nuclear energy is more expensive than other sources, not cheaper. It won't be cheaper to make synthetic fossil fuels, it'll be more expensive.

> Almost all of these are energy bound right now.

They're all price bound right now, because the cost of energy is so high in comparison to alternatives. So high most would probably just avoid using it entirely. Spending trillions building a bunch of reactors isn't making it cheaper you're just committing to spending more of it up front.

Either way, making the synthetic fuels isn't the same as just building the reactors. We can have synthetic fuels without nuclear, we can have nuclear without the synthetic fuels, they're independent. So neither one is 99.99% on its own, it's no longer "one thing" like what the person I originally replied to stated. They supposedly have one thing that will solve 99.99% of GHG emissions. I'm not looking for something that will even solve 80% or 90%, why waste time with that when there's one thing to solve it 99.99%.

So once again I ask, what is one thing that will solve 99.99% of GHG emissions?

Re: Why are lithium prices collapsing?

#390

Post by m3drano » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

le-mark wrote: post #357

akira2501 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over 85% of lithium is produced by just 2 international corporations If I search google for this string, your post is the only one that comes up. How did you arrive at this figure? In the history of industry, when has it ever been a positive indication that only two players control the majority of the supply? Do these companies directly own the mines or are there partnerships and subsidiaries involved? What countri…

Google has noticeably deteriorated in recent weeks. Does anyone have insight into that? Like more or too much gpt? The first link here is an article from 2021: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Over+85%25+of+lithium+is+produced+...

I see plenty of results from Google about this string, from multiple sources and multiple types (video, news and classic links). Unclear about that deterioration.