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Mining Lithium from sea water...

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Lithium (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 11:18 (#2SF0)

What do we even use lithium for? Other than horrid pscyhological meds, and batteries, anyway. As for the psych meds I understand they do almost as much harm as they do good. As for batteries, I'll be happy when we find an alternative battery technology. Lithium is better than NiCd and similar, but it sure does come with a lot of downsides, and the explosive fires are just one of them. Time for new tech?

Re: Lithium (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 17:53 (#2SFM)

Barring any revolutionary advances in the field, lithium batteries are our current best energy storage technology for mobile applications (i.e. phones, laptops, electric cars) and will be our best bet for the foreseeable future. If we are ever to wain ourselves off of fossil fuels, we must implement, in large scale, renewable energy storage.

Simply put, if everyone in the U.S. decided to junk their gas guzzler and buy an electric vehicle, there simply wouldn't be enough known lithium deposits on this planet to handle the demand. In fact, according to the popular Do the Math blog, not even known lead deposits (for the older lead-acid batteries) would be enough.

Re: Lithium (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 19:20 (#2SFR)

The same math shows that if the Chinese consumed at a level equivalent to the United States, the earth wouldn't produce enough food/energy/etc. to sustain it. Point being the USA consumption level is not sustainable across a larger swath of human population.

Re: Lithium (Score: 2, Insightful)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-17 04:10 (#2SFX)

That kind of hypothetical is always nonsense. If the current population of the US all built log-cabins like the first settlers, there wouldn't be enough trees on the Earth...

The market takes care of such thing. You can hardly fault people for eating tasty steaks when they cost about an hour of labor... When there's 2 billion more people demanding steaks, and the price shoots up through the roof, Americans will eat far fewer of them, and maybe a lot more rice.

But in the mean-time, trying to shame Americans into changing their habits today, to match some distant future hypothetical scenario is silly and futile, and also completely unnecessary.

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Time Reason Points Voter
2014-09-19 00:50 Insightful +1 bryan@pipedot.org

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