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Bolivia Is the Saudi Arabia of Lithium
tcd004 writes "You can literally scrape valuable lithium off the ground of many Bolivian salt flats. The country is poised to be the center of world lithium battery production, reaping the benefit of the metal's skyrocketing value. 'The US Geological Survey says 5.4 million tons of lithium could potentially be extracted in Bolivia, compared with 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and just 410,000 in the United States. ... Ailing automakers in the United States are pinning their hopes on lithium. General Motors next year plans to roll out its Volt, a car using a lithium-ion battery along with a gas engine. Nissan, Ford and BMW, among other carmakers, have similar projects.' However, the government fears foreign countries might exploit their natural resources, so for the time being, the salt flats remain untouched."
I generally lean towards advocating market based solutions and free trade in most economic situations. Coming from rural southwestern Virginia, however, and seeing the grip the coal industry has on politics in some areas around here I know how people can really be disadvantaged by mismanagement of natural resources. I also think back to the damage done by the informal imperialism in the Middle-East at the hands of BP (formerly known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and their like. In this case I can't help but be supportive of Morales' efforts to put these lithium reserves to work for the Bolivian campesinos. Having mineral resources has proven to be a curse just as often as it has been a blessing in modern history. Here's to hoping one Latin American government can get it right.
I got a catholic block.
There's a lot of concern from everyone about "peak oil".
Why is there not just as much of a concern about "peak lithium". If we really make a push to convert all cars to being electric, that's a ton of lithium required - and it's used in a lot of other applications too.
That's why solutions like hydrogen as truly alternative fuels make more sense to me that rushing to consume a metal which is truly a non-renewable resource, unlike even coal and oil (which are simply slow to produce but are produced over time).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Probably will be. A very cursory web search brought up this. Seems likely that given some time, other reasonable deposits will be found. This actually makes it harder on Bolivia - they have a fairly small window of time (likely years) to figure out how to maximize revenue and hopefully minimize social and environmental issues.
Being the cynic I am, I'm sure it will come out helping some fat cats and mostly screwing over everybody else. But that's just me.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Lithium batteries are quite recyclable.
But there is certain to be some loss over time from repeated recycling. And recycling does not help if the total amount you need is greater than the total amount available. That's why it may be important to consider using a resource you can actually renew, as in create.
You may not think it's a big deal, but that's the problem - who actually knows if it's practical in the end to have all cars run off lithium batteries? If not, then it would make more long terms sense to direct efforts into fuel cell research for cars than improving batteries specifically for car use, which is a very different running scenario than smaller consumer batteries go through.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
0. Evil Bolivian liberals start talking about using the proceeds from sale of lithium for things like national defense, highways, electricity, water plants, schools, research facilities, health care, a functional judicial system - all this first-world stuff they could only dream of affording previously
1. Coup
2. Generals clean out subversives who think Bolivians should own their own natural resources, and make country safe for U.S. and European mining co's
3. Generals sell off complete and exclusive rights for pennies on the dollar - no taxation or local businesses involved; Generals get rewarded with nice personal kickbacks
4. Generals provide local labor for cheap. Very cheap. After all, they have a virtually infinite supply of desperate people willing to work for subsistence wages
5. After 10-20 years as the locals revolt because of the total sell-out, generals escape to a first-world life in luxury
6. As the locals refuse to accept the previous BS deal they kick out foreign mining co's and nationalize the resources
7. U.S. decries evil commies and does its best to destabilize said evil commie government, by interfering with elections, supporting "freedom fighters" (read: insurgents and terrorists), and generally attempt to turn back the clock. The pretext is demanding "free elections", which of course can be rigged to practically restore the previous order
8. After a generation everyone eventually gets tired of conflict, forget what they were fighting over in the first place, and things are allowed to return to some semblance of where they should have been at point 0. Only with a lot of bad history.
Been there, done that. Got the t-shirt.
Latin America has had a few goes at this sort of thing in the past. One common outcome is that leaders looking to better the the quality of life for their people by maintaining fairly tight controls on these kinds of resources are called communists. Certainly some of these efforts have been ill conceived or terribly implemented or blatant power grabs but their governments are often overthrown violently by dictators aided by outsiders in exchange for the right to pillage those resources.
I don't see why lithium should be any different but for their sake I hope so.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
the recent attempt at Morales' life and the struggle of some of Bolivia's provinces to get full autonomy...
Of course, Bolivia doesn't have access to ocean ports because Chile took Bolivian coast by force.
Democracy is so much more than just elections...
Pick it Up!!
Bolivia cannot possibly pull that off, not in a million years. That country is way too corrupt, even by Latin American standards. And the current president is, to put it mildly, a populist idiot who thinks it's better to bedazzle the masses with short-term bullshit than to try to create foundations for long-term growth.
It's stupid to claim that the wealth is "staying here" when it's just being "stolen here" anyway.
Now most countries are corrupt, including mine of course. But Bolivia is especially special (sorry) in that department.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Their own governments are just as guilty, if not more so, than foreign corporations.
In many cases that is certainly true. In other cases of governments that were not corrupt (or at least, wanted to keep power and wealth inside the country rather than sell it out to a foreign company), the government of the country the foreign company was from would overthrow the insufficiently corrupt government and install one that was sufficiently corrupt. In which case the guilt of the foreign corp and their government is not just exploiting a poorer nation's national resources, but subverting their sovereignty itself.
The enemies of Democracy are
Ask in Bolivia if they have forgotten.
How shocking, that, whenever you have a permanent class that decides how money is allocated, that they should allocate it to themselves.
That fact is central to socialism; anyone who claims to be socialist in order to gain support for such policies is a liar and a hypocrite.
Nick