Keep in mind that the ~1.5B cars + trucks in the entire world combine for only ~10% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Also, if your electricity is made by coal power plants there's no point using EV.
Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
261–270 of 400 posts
Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people of Iran are currently in the process of liberating themselves. I hope they succeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_Iranian_prot...
Great, can't wait for another democracy that is doomed from the start.
Why would it be doomed? What reasons do you see for this to happen?
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran has a long and recent history of being a highly orderly society.
How democratic it would be is another question, but very likely it at least is not going to be as oppressive. Even if the resulting state were closer to Singapore than to Switzerland, it would still be a serious relief for the population.
Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#263Are we simply not looking hard enough in Europe, or is the European soil truly useless for competitive amounts of natural resources?
Extracting natural resources in a cost effective way involves a lot of pollution that Europeans would rather happen somewhere else
Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dense is a subjective term, and solar is without a doubt a dense enough energy source. Compare the amount of land needed to power the US with solar to the amount we use to brew a small amount of ethanol as a minor energy sourced. We can completely power the US with a fraction of the land that we currently use as a subsidy for corn farmers, who grow more corn than we can eat.
While I'm less optimistic than you on solar power, you're absolutely right about ethanol, which is easily one of the worst and most inefficient power sources we could have possibly chosen to invest in. It's a significant indictment of the US political system that so much money was shoveled into it.
I'm not sure why you are subjectively calling my number-based argument "optimistic." What do you mean by that?
Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
western economists unironically call it the resource curse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse examples include Saudi Arabia, Norway and Alaska. Oh no wait bad examples.
Alaska doesn't count because it was part of the US, which was already a developed (for the time) economy. Saudi Arabia, Norway and a few Gulf min-states (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain) are the rare counterexamples that kind of prove the rule. There's a great FT article[1] about the Iraqi man who helped lead Norway's oil revolution in the proper direction, and it was really not obvious. Why Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahra…
norway is the only example of someone who broke the curse.
Saudi, gulf monarchies and all other examples that you can come up with(except maybe russia, but it's a very big and not that simple to analyze), either already fucked by the curse, or still in the process(which is pleasant enough, so most people think it's ok), the metric is that other parts of the economy have meaningless growth rate compared to resources extraction, at best. Sometimes it's negative. Add growth of corruption and inequality to that as well.
Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I think you are close to the truth, but Iraq war was not seen in a very negative light by US citizens, or people in EU for that matter. Which was what media pushed. But people can think on their own. Somebody in the thread may want to argue that the war was a good or necessary thing, somebody will say otherwise and maybe the first one will check Wikipedia, and learn new facts that may change his mind in t…
> but Iraq war was not seen in a very negative light by US citizens, or people in EU for that matter. Millions of Americans protested the Iraq war[0]. Globally it resulted in the largest protests in the world at that time. It didn't matter. Of course you're correct about the zeitgeist of the US at the time, the government, the media and the American right were pro-war and they controlled the narrative. And I have to…
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Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people of Iran are currently in the process of liberating themselves. I hope they succeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_Iranian_prot...
Large scale protests like this are frequently externally influenced. I really wouldn't be surprised if in 50 years time when top secret documents are released to archives we don't find that these protests are being financially supported or organised by USA/Israel/the west. It wouldn't be the first time [1][2][3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am…
If you had the chance to talk to iranians you'd knew they're against any kind of external help, they remember too well how it went last time
Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#268Are we simply not looking hard enough in Europe, or is the European soil truly useless for competitive amounts of natural resources?
This is what I've always wondered especially re. Germany - is it possible to quantify how well a country has been prospected?
How much is "resource poverty" a matter of low resource concentration vs (exploration)-absence?
How do the economics change with changing energy and labor prices?
What is the relationship between resources and the building of infrastructure, in terms of logistics and also permanent settling?
Are many extraction and refining methods monopolized through patents or other mechanisms?
Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#269Keep in mind that the ~1.5B cars + trucks in the entire world combine for only ~10% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Also, if your electricity is made by coal power plants there's no point using EV.
The most important reason to use EV is that nuclear cannot be safely miniaturized and used in vehicles.
as to coal plants, there is none.
Re: Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
#270Keep in mind that the ~1.5B cars + trucks in the entire world combine for only ~10% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Also, if your electricity is made by coal power plants there's no point using EV.
Incorrect. Even if your power grid is the rare case of 100% coal power, an EV running on that grid would account for about as much CO2 as a ICE vehicle getting 50mpg which is better than most gasoline powered vehicles.
Since almost all power grids use a mix of fossil fuels and carbon-free sources, the actual numbers are much better than that worst case.