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> There’s plenty of lithium to electrify the world multiple times, but it’s just an element so you can literally recycle it for billions of years. Recycling li

> There’s plenty of lithium to electrify the world multiple times, but it’s just an element so you can literally recycle it for billions of years. Recycling lithium is typically more expensive than extracting it through mining. Recycling companies claim a recovery rate of 95-98% so certainly lithium is lost and that's ignoring that smaller batteries often don't even end up in the recycling stream. But the important bit is the cost - if it's more expensive than mining then the recovery isn't economical then either there's a government subsidy or the lithium ends up diluted in the trash stream. You'd have a point about nickle or cobalt because they're particularly valuable but lithium is not so it is effectively being consumed. > 0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels But it's not even clear that biofuels reduce CO2 due to production, processing & transport as well as land clearing for scaling it up. [1] suggests that biofuels can actually end up emitting more CO2 than the fossil fuels they replace (for example here's an earlier study [2]). And that's ignoring the substantial scaling challenges that SAF faces on the production side. I hope it works out but the lesson with huge risky bets is that many don't pan out and all we have now is large risky bets left which makes me pessimistic we'll succeed just because we run out of oil (assuming we even do which again seems highly unlikely to me because that's not how economics works). [1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-should-we-measure-co2-emissions-biofuels-and-bioenergy https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-should-we-measure-co2-em... [2] https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climate-mistake-heres-why-64463 https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...

Retric 2y ago
Calculating Biofuels today is irrelevant when we haven’t removed fossil fuels from the rest of our economy. They are currently a farming subsidy not an environmental panacea. Long term they can’t be a net carbon producer because that carbon would need to be endlessly produced from nothing. As to lithium being consumed, we’re talking hundreds to thousands of years from now before mining becomes an issue, current economic issues are largely meaningless. Unlike oil, these are the early days of the lithium economy. Making a big battery pile somewhere is perfectly reasonable form of recycling. The incentives for a government subsidies for lithium recycling are strategic. Reducing dependence on foreign imports is inherently useful, but a stockpile and battery pile serves the same basic need.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  > Long term they can’t be a net carbon producer because that carbon would need to be endlessly produced from nothing As noted in the MIT article: > Since most natural ecosystems absorb and store carbon, while farmland in active use tends to produce it, this land use change can create more climate-warming pollution Basically the land is changed from a carbon store to a carbon producer for biomass meaning you're no longer sequestering the carbon which is where you get extra carbon in the ecosystem even if you're not having any carbon in the transportation & production.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Only in the short term. Farmland and forests are approaching different equilibrium points. There’s a few forests that have stayed that way for millions of years. Go to Daintree in Australia, dig down a deep as roots go, count up the carbon in a given acre, and divide by a 180 million and you get essentially 0/year as the long term sequestration rate. Transitions between forests and farmland basically store or release a fixed quantity per acre though it’s a slow process for deep root systems. In that context sure you can look at farming as releasing carbon because of the recent expansion of farming, but the numbers aren’t a fixed constant.

Retric 2y ago

Calculating Biofuels today is irrelevant when we haven’t removed fossil fuels from the rest of our economy. They are currently a farming subsidy not an environmental panacea. Long term they can’t be a net carbon producer because that carbon would need to be endlessly produced from nothing. As to lithium being consumed, we’re talking hundreds to thousands of years from now before mining becomes an issue, current economic issues are largely meaningless. Unlike oil, these are the early days of the lithium economy. Making a big battery pile somewhere is perfectly reasonable form of recycling. The incentives for a government subsidies for lithium recycling are strategic. Reducing dependence on foreign imports is inherently useful, but a stockpile and battery pile serves the same basic need.

vlovich123 2y ago
> Long term they can’t be a net carbon producer because that carbon would need to be endlessly produced from nothing As noted in the MIT article: > Since most natural ecosystems absorb and store carbon, while farmland in active use tends to produce it, this land use change can create more climate-warming pollution Basically the land is changed from a carbon store to a carbon producer for biomass meaning you're no longer sequestering the carbon which is where you get extra carbon in the ecosystem even if you're not having any carbon in the transportation & production.
- Retric 2y ago
  Only in the short term. Farmland and forests are approaching different equilibrium points. There’s a few forests that have stayed that way for millions of years. Go to Daintree in Australia, dig down a deep as roots go, count up the carbon in a given acre, and divide by a 180 million and you get essentially 0/year as the long term sequestration rate. Transitions between forests and farmland basically store or release a fixed quantity per acre though it’s a slow process for deep root systems. In that context sure you can look at farming as releasing carbon because of the recent expansion of farming, but the numbers aren’t a fixed constant.