EVs: Lithium Dreams and Empty Cribs
If the first automobiles were electric why didn’t automobiles stay electric?
Are EVs at the nexus of rising wealth-inequality and falling fertility rates? Let me ease into it…
Whatever automobiles run on, gas or electricity, it’s doubtful that sufficient steel could have been produced without the development of practical coal-fired furnaces in the 1850s.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius pointed out those furnaces were raising CO2 and would warm the Earth (though he thought that a good thing).
Let’s look at the fuel. In the 1750s, a man could spear a whale and boil the fat into oil. During moonless nights, his family could use oil-lanterns to read Moby Dick, published in 1851.
Shortly after Herman Melville put down his pen, one could find places where one could drill a hole and fill buckets with oil. In time, chemists separated out gasoline. In 1956 a man could pour it into his car and drive to the theater and watch Gregory Peck star in Moby Dick.
Around that time M. King Hubbert predicted we’d reach peak-oil in 1970.
Fracking bought some time, but it didn’t solve a seldom-discussed problem. Fossil fuels were burning more and more of the same fossil fuels they were extracting — to do the…
