16 March

A trick people use is to suggest that going electric will take some enormous amount of minerals (which they imply either don't exist, or will cover the world in mines). Lithium is one of the key elements mentioned. Australia supplies about half the world's lithium, and should be able to make a fortune from it. Here's the basic fact that is never mentioned by the doubters (because they don't know it). The world needs about 2 million tonnes of Lithium per year. That sounds huge, but to put it in perspective, the world mines over 2 BILLION tonnes of coal each year. In Australia, we shift 5 to 8 BILLION tonnes of waste rock every year, just to get to the coal. Once coal mining is shut down, that leaves a hugely lower impact on the environment from lithium mining. And on top of that, unlike coal, lithium can be recycled from batteries. We won't need to mine millions of tonnes of it every year. The Tesla factories for example already include battery recycling as part of their process.