good GREAT Let's not mince words - the $4 trillion automotive industry exists because of a massive misallocation of capital by Americans in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. The Manhattan Institute has some bright things to say but insisting that cars are a public good because they make capitalists rich while mass transit is a "misallocation of capital" because it's socialism is why they're taken seriously so very, very rarely by the left. One need only compare the foreign aid heaped on petrostates vs. the foreign aid heaped on places without oil to acknowledge that the externalities of internal combustion are dismissed while the externalities of battery power are the only thing conservatives want to talk about. Which would you rather regulate: a lithium mine or a thousand frackers? I can tell you who the Manhattan Institute would rather regulate, because they'd rather not regulate at all and with the mine, they have less excuse.Ultimately, if implemented, bans on conventionally powered vehicles will lead to draconian impediments to affordable and convenient driving
and a massive misallocation of capital in the world’s $4 trillion automotive industry.
Obviously when you read something from Manhattan or AEI or whatever, you have to try to sift signal and noise, the ratio of which is pretty poor. I was mostly intrigued by their pointing out the unknowns contained in the ore quality degradation over time for the metals that are necessary to make EVs. Seems like not enough lithium is mined to ever make a guess over time, while the projections for copper are not very rosy even by the government's happy-faced guess, Ore quality is inversely proportional to energy intensity of extraction, so unless that energy comes from renewables, you're gaining less advantage over time. Even if Manhattan puts the direst possible spin on this issue, it's still something that needs to be worked through.
Lithium has only ever been envisioned as a transitory technology, however. It's the minidisc of materials - we needed more juice than alkaline, we needed more durability than nickel metal hydride, we know we need hydrogen fuel cells or something like it, but they're too expensive now so fuckin' hell let's string together a million cell phone batteries. "but what about the lithiummmmmmmmmmmm" has been the libertarian rallying cry for 20 fuckin' years. "It's all in Chyyyyyyynaahhhhhhhhhhhhh" as if we didn't build an entire Cold War defense program around Russian and South African titanium. A jeweler's adage: 95% of all the gold in the world has been recycled at least once. Copper recycles like a dream; that's why rural Russia is missing power lines. All of these papers are some form of "let's freak out about this one narrow and specific set of externalities because then my entire worldview doesn't look farcical."
But minidisc didn’t require a wholesale change in how the economy works. I guess that’s where I get hung up. Sure fuel cells are something to strive for if you can engineer a good capture and storage system for hydrogen that has range and doesn’t make the ford pinto look like a top class Volvo by comparison. But I think it’s a worthy endpoint, given the huge potential upside. In my estimation “EV” has become a heuristic for “I like the environment” without a lot of depth behind what they are and how they’re made in a practical sense.
You know what? It was a flippant fuckin' analogy but I've fallen in love with it. IN THE BEGINNING there were wax cylinders and they were good. Except they weren't, they were shit. So music went to shellac but it couldn't be re-recorded, so wire was used. Thus was God's Musical Universe bifurcated: there was forever recordings, which were quickly monopolized by large corporations who charged a royalty to listen to anything, and temporary recordings, which were always magnetic on whatever medium was tough enough. Shellac became vinyl and wire became reel-to-reel became 8-track became cassette and God was displeased! For the heathens had discovered that vinyl could be recorded on cassette and played without the monopolies getting their money! But they could also be played in a car and a walkman so now we can sell records and tapes! And God was pleased. But then vinyl became Compact Discs. CDs are digital. They are 1:1, forever. They do not wear out - apocryphally, Dark Side of the Moon finally dropped off the Billboard Top 200 only because people stopped wearing out their vinyl. But they aren't great for walking around with, never have been, never really solved that. DAT? Well we tried that but it so frightened the music industry that every DAT tape you bought included royalties to the major labels out of sheer fear and they were literally as technologically complex as a VCR (DAT is a helical-scan technology requiring micron precision) and it was never going to catch on. Digital is just data, we already have hard drives, shit we already have non-volatile memory! But ZOMG a solid-state player with enough memory to hold a song at 10.4MB per minute? - enter MiniDisc - Thing 1: it's a magneto-optical storage technology. It's half laser, half magnetic so it doesn't skip much. Thing 2: it's rewritable over and over again without loss, for a long time, anyway, but not forever. Thing 3: it's small and portable but will no way not in hell never hold an entire album of music unless you compress it! Huzzah! It's lossy! Like tape! I had a buddy who bought an I-shit-you-not minidisc deck for his car. "Hey let's listen to this new CD!" "Not until I've copied it by hand on mindisc." He bought it, of course, because Minidiscs were in Strange Days. And we took that car on a 2-week roadtrip around the southwestern United States and despite the fact that I brought down like 300 CDs? We had seven. Seven to listen to because seven minidiscs were all the time we had to make before we left. I had a minidisc recorder. I bootlegged off the board with it. I recorded environmental with it. And I did so because a Tascam PortaDAT was $4k. And the minute you could buy an SD card with like 32MB on it that shit was fucking done because MP3 existed and Tower Records ate shit and Napster ate the world and what was left bought iPods and suddenly the biggest music store in the world was Apple and Sean Parker bid on Warner Music Group just to piss on its grave. In the words of Joe Macmillan in Halt & Catch Fire - "It's not the thing. It's the thing that gets us to the thing." Minidisc didn't change the world. Neither did Friendster. Neither did Alta Vista. Neither did Compuserve. Neither did UMatic. No one has ever done that analysis for internal combustion cars and they never will. The fact that the Manhattan Institute and its ilk now demands everyone to understand lithium cradle-to-grave when they have never once in their lives given the first fuck about oil or emissions? Calls their authenticity into question.But minidisc didn’t require a wholesale change in how the economy works.
In my estimation “EV” has become a heuristic for “I like the environment” without a lot of depth behind what they are and how they’re made in a practical sense.