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As for the scale of replacement, I think there are many who don't realise how major the shift from ICE to electrical will be. We're talking about large changes

As for the scale of replacement, I think there are many who don't realise how major the shift from ICE to electrical will be. We're talking about large changes in everything from critical national infrastructure, the job market, long-term plans for national defense, the environment, public transport, voter approval ratings, food production, and the list just keeps on going. There's a large number of ifs, buts and maybes involved, and lithium availability is just a small piece of that. All this is supposed to happen within the next 15 years, at least according to quite a few politicians. Increased lithium prices is a good thing since it means that recycling will be financially viable once prices of freshly mined-lithium increases.

slfnflctd 5y ago
> I think there are many who don't realise how major the shift from ICE to electrical will be Could not agree more. With all the things we're talking about using batteries for (electrifying almost all wheeled transport and some aviation, huge amounts of grid storage to smooth out rough solar & wind inputs, grid-independent installations), this is going to be an absolutely massive, sprawling industry. Batteries are likely to be a bottleneck for a long time. We will find ways to reuse and recycle the ones from old cars because there will be enormous incentives to do so. The downside to this is that I'm not expecting battery prices to really drop much for quite a while. They may even go up. These aren't microchips after all; the laws of physics prohibit any significant miniaturization.