No Batteries Required
“Young people especially have been angry, depressed, or just apathetic because, they’ve told me, we have compromised their future and they feel there is nothing we can do about it. But while it is true that we have not just compromised but stolen their future as we have relentlessly plundered the finite resources of our planet with no concern for future generations, I do not believe it is too late to do something to put things right.” - Jane Goodall
In recent years, talk about climate has risen in public attention. Unfortunately, discussions on this issue are no better than any other reaching mass attention – one reason reforming, reviving, and evolving democracy is a core environmental issue. In the US, most talk on climate revolves around preserving our resource-intensive, energy wasteful economy, but doing so without impacting the climate. That's simply not possible.
The best example of a supposed climate solution is electrifying American car culture. The idea of electrifying American car culture is what's known as a nonstarter. Let’s start and finish with the current favorite flavor, Tesla. These automobiles weigh between four and five thousand pounds to move a person weighing a hundred to two-hundred lbs. The vehicle is 30 times the weight of the passenger, meaning 30 times more energy must be expended to move the person. This is simple Newtonian physics.
When might this be considered a good transportation system? When there’s oceans of oil that can be cheaply drilled up, while not worrying about any of the environmental consequences, none of these factors exist anymore. Batteries are another factor important to the electric car equation.
The Financial Times has an excellent piece on battery problems. First, lithium production and the toxicity of mass scale use of large batteries are problems big enough to justify just keep burning oil. Unfortunately for American car culture, there is no more cheap oil, nor it appears cheap lithium either. The FT writes, “A shortage of lithium salts essential for producing batteries for mobile devices and electric vehicles is putting the energy transition at risk.” This was never a transition.
FT continues, “In January 2021, according to S&P Global Platt’s, lithium carbonate cost about $9,600 per tonne. At the end of this January the same material was quoted at more than $50,000 per tonne. That is panic buying, not rational price discovery.” Such that markets ever provide “rational price discovery,” but hey, it’s the Financial Times.
But let us get to more existential issues, the FT writes, “The new Chilean government is insisting, reasonably, that using virtually irreplaceable fossil water to produce more lithium salts in the Atacama Desert is environmentally and socially unsound.” — Wow! I don't think even two years ago you'd see such reasoning in any financial press. Hope springs eternal Sisters and Brothers!
For many years, I discussed with my environmental friends there'd be no great tech breakthrough with batteries. They’ve been around two centuries, remember Signor Volta, you know of volt fame, his first battery was in 1799.
The FT continues,
“Magical thinking will not help. As Christophe Pillot, a batteries consultant and the director of Avicenna Energy in Paris, says, there is no equivalent in batteries of ‘Moore’s Law’, which states the number of components that can be crammed on to an integrated circuit doubles every year.
“'Energy density, battery lifetimes charging time and so on improve, but there will be no revolution in the next five to ten years.” – or after.
Electricity doesn't like to be stored. It gets generated, then wants to move, you know, like lightening. Energy storage, which is possible in all sorts of ways, needs a lot better thinking than batteries. First and foremost, the answer for the United States is using less energy, a lot less energy. There's huge amounts to be gained relatively easily, but it means doing things differently. With transportation, it includes walking, biking, and electrified mass transit. We need to redesign our automobile dependent infrastructure, making how we live more conducive to these other means. Most importantly, everybody can slow down, nobody's going anywhere.
The final thought goes to the wonderful Ms Goodall. If you want to start thinking about what to do and where we can go, start here:
“If we respect nature, if we respect animals, if we respect one another, things would be very different. I want a future where we’ve learned to live in harmony with the natural world, where we develop new ways of living, ways of growing food, ways of making money. You know we’ve got to lose this arrogance that just because we’ve got a brain that can design a rocket to go to Mars, that doesn’t mean that we have any more right to be on this planet than an octopus. We need to realize that we’re part of this natural world and our lives depend on it.”