Not everything is as it seems.
On the one hand it’s the centre of healthy living.
On the other hand it’s the centre of gluttony.
We’re talking about California.
To be precise, we’re talking about the important parallel between Californians’ eating habits and a key resource 7,889 kilometres to the south east of your editor’s current location…
We’ll try to avoid sounding too high-falutin.
As your editor enters the second week of our three-week stay in southern California, it’s hard to get away from the fact that California is a state of contradictions.
Every time we come here we forget that one main course meal at a restaurant is usually enough to feed two people.
We forget that a small drink at an American fast-food outlet is the equivalent of a large at an Aussie fast-food outlet. What appears to be two litres of Diet Coke in a big cup with a straw really is more than enough for one person.
But California is also the home of the ‘beautiful people’. You don’t have to stroll around for long in southern California to see that.
That got us thinking. Is it possible to have one without the other – gluttons without the glamorous? And in a similar vein, is it possible to have clean energy without the adverse consequences of pollution?
It seems like a crazy question. But it’s something many in the green lobby fail to realise.
Want a Better Environment? Prepare to Pollute
Here as in Australia it’s impossible to avoid the ‘green propaganda’. Trade in that gas-guzzling car and get an electric car instead.
But the propaganda goes further. The next step is the plea to ditch the car and ride a bike to work instead. By necessity that means living closer to the main business areas – usually the centre of town.
That typically means living in higher density areas. That means building taller buildings. That means more resources – more steel and concrete.
That means digging more stuff from the ground. It means using iron ore and coal to produce steel. It means powering huge furnaces and releasing pollutants into the air. It means drilling for oil to power the huge equipment needed to dig and process the raw materials.
But at least the inner city dwellers that ride a bike to work are supposedly reducing their ‘carbon footprint’! But with all that inner city high-density building, perhaps they aren’t reducing it by as much as they think.
(By contrast, suburban homes, while larger have timber frames from timber plantations, which help the environment. Most also have gardens, which help the environment too.)
But anyway, what’s our point?
Our point is that when it comes to new technology and shifting to ‘green’ energy, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you want cleaner living and less pollution in urban areas (doesn’t everyone?) it doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating pollution or harming the environment, it may just mean shifting the problem elsewhere.
Take this report from the BBC:
‘Lithium, a key ingredient in lightweight batteries, is already powering the modern world, and could be key to getting the world to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.
‘Look at a satellite image of South America. Halfway down on the left-hand-side is a distinctive white splodge.
‘Close up, that splodge turns out to be one of the most extraordinary and unspoilt places on earth, the world’s biggest salt flat…
‘This is the Salar de Uyuni and this hauntingly beautiful place could be part of the key to tackling climate change, helping to wean the world away from fossil fuels.
‘Which is why, pristine as it may be, the chances are that 50 years from now it will be all gone – dredged, crystallised and then carted away.
‘That’s because under its thick salt crust, the Salar de Uyuni is also the world’s biggest single deposit of lithium, accounting for perhaps a third of the world’s resources of this alkaline metal.’
You can see a satellite image of the area below:
Without lithium you wouldn’t have lithium ion batteries. Without lithium ion batteries you wouldn’t be able to read this email on your lightweight laptop, tablet computer, or smartphone.
As Technology Improves, Demand for Lithium Will Grow
That’s the payoff. In order to achieve technological improvements and the convenience of staying in constant contact with friends and acquaintances, it will likely mean the destruction of a large area of pristine land.
We wonder what position the likes of Greenpeace would take on that?
It would surely be against the destruction of this natural environment. But then again, Greenpeace also promotes its activities through the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. All of those media have grown in popularity in line with the growth of tablet computers and smartphones…big users of lithium.
As we say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you want progress, and less pollution in major population centres (where most people live) it means causing an adverse impact to other areas, mainly where only a few people may live.
Technology is improving all the time, becoming more lightweight, and more portable. In order to keep this trend going and in order to help with the shift away from fossil fuels the world will need to rely more and more on other resources such as lithium and rare earths that have their own impact on the environment.
Life here in southern California may be a life of contradictions, but the same goes in the search for the ultimate in green energy (of which Californians seem to approve, despite the criss-cross of car-loving freeways). Lithium and the mining for it will be a key part of the shift away from fossil fuels.
And as unlikely as it may seem, perhaps the best way to profit from ‘green energy’ is to place a bet on a specific part of the resource sector – lithium.
Cheers,
Kris+
PS. Jason Stevenson is following one of the best lithium plays on the Aussie market. There’s little doubt that as technology becomes lighter and more portable that there will be a bigger demand for lithium in the use of lithium ion batteries. You can check out more of Jason’s work here…
