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The problem with lithium
Motor Mouth, National Post
… Then there’s the least talked about problem on our road to electric transportation — the source of all that power. I don’t mean the massive amounts of additional electricity needed to power the approximately seven million cars a very optimistic Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s CEO, estimates will be sold annually by the year 2020 but the actual batteries that will store all those portable electrons. Just as we already have a problem with peak oil having caused last year’s massive price spike at the pumps, there may be a similar paucity in the world’s capacity to produce lithium, the miracle metal key to so many automakers’ future plans for hybrid and electric vehicles.
… There is already discussion of how much oil remains interred beneath the Earth’s surface and whether we are already suffering shortages because of the peak oil problem — essentially a theory stating that the amount of the world’s oil reserves is irrelevant since we have already reached our maximum ability to easily extract it. Now there may be problems with how much lithium the Earth holds and how quickly it can be mined.
On the pessimistic side, there is William Tahil, author of the research paper The Trouble with Lithium, who estimates the world’s lithium reserves at about four million tons. He claims the production of hybrid and electric cars will soon tax the world’s production of lithium carbonate. At the other end of the spectrum is Keith Evans, who has released An Abundance of Lithium, a report estimating there are 28 million tons of the base metal to be had, plenty enough to go around. Somewhere in the middle of these two opposing viewpoints is the United States Geological Survey’s somewhat dated estimate of 11 million tons.
Part of the discrepancy is due to how economical and easily each group thinks the mining of lithium will be, dividing their estimates between “reserves” (think of easily obtained Saudi Arabian oil literally bubbling to the surface) and the more difficult to process “base reserves” (think Canada’s Athabasca Oil Sands). Even the optimistic Evans allows that, like oil, his more generous prediction is based on the price of lithium rising in order to make increased mining cost-effective. This is not good news to automakers since it’s estimated that these new high-tech batteries already cost as much as US$10,000.
(1 May 2009)
Boris Johnson unveils blueprint for London’s ‘cycling revolution’
Alok Jha, Guardian
Londoners will soon be able to hire bikes in the centre of town for short journeys, under plans announced today by the mayor, Boris Johnson.
From 2010, the capital’s cycle hire scheme should be open with around 6,000 bikes in central locations. Today, Transport for London (TfL) began applying for planning permission for the 400 docking stations, where people will be able to pick up and drop off bikes around central London.
(27 April 2009)
Fatal Pace
Hans Noeldner, Entropic Journal
Oregon, Wisconsin USA
Our failure as a community to support and reward those who attempt to go about their lives at a walking or bicycling pace is bad enough. But the recent cyclist fatality near Brooklyn, Wisconsin reminds us that we-the-drivers often pose a life-and-death threat to non-motorists. The swift, the powerful, and the heavily-armored so thoroughly dominate most of our public thoroughfares today that merely walking or bicycling across them can be hazardous. (Walk or bicycle along them? Forget it!)
Our pervasive (if unintentional) disregard for the “least among us” – i.e. those annoyingly slow, small, vulnerable creatures called pedestrians and bicyclists – represents one of the most flagrant injustices in our society. Rather than joining the anthropogenically-motivated, we’ve made things even worse by withdrawing ever more frequently into our supersized vehicular exoskeletons. Many of us now consider a three-ton armored personnel carrier a practical necessity for conveying our youngster to extra-curricular activities. “My child needs to participate just like other normal children, and I need a big SUV to keep her safe!”
Unsurprisingly, our police and highway departments won’t slow drivers down enough to make it feel safe and be safe for non-motorists on our roads and highways. A more human pace would surely throw a wrench in our speed-addicted economy, and a voting majority that has become almost totally dependent on the automobile would not suffer any such disruption to the “Happy Motoring” way of life.
I cannot end this with a pep talk and some bullet-points. Not only is the Brooklyn cyclist’s death a tragedy; our sprawling, hyper-mobile, resource-gobbling way of life is a tragedy as well. And so long as we cling to our steering wheels; so long as our leaders deploy American troops all over Earth to ensure an uninterrupted flow of cheap energy into our tanks, nothing will change.
(30 April 2009)
