It's not a good idea to conjecture and argue from total ignorance. There are commonly used battery chemistries, such as LiFePO4/graphite, that simply do not use any scarce resources.
Re:Rivian S-1
by theduder99 on Saturday October 02, 2021 @09:01AM
(#28728241)
welcome to hackernews. also why don't the car battery manufacturers go the lifepo4/graphite route?
They do. Everyone in China is using them. Tesla is starting to use them outside of China as well.
Other materials are mildly better and not too scarce. Tesla is moving some of it's production to LFP, but that's probably mostly because they want to scale up production faster than nickel mining can scale.
Re:Rivian S-1
by lukeschlather on Saturday October 02, 2021 @10:58AM
(#28729066)
Lithium is not a scarce resource. This is pretty obvious because when looking at commodity prices lithium is measured in $/metric ton rather than actually scarce elements like gold where the price is in $/troy ounce.
Mold in a petri dish grows at an accelerating rate, until it doesn’t
My conjecture is that there’s not enough lithium/etc in the world to store the energy the transportation sector requires
small cars, passenger trains, sure. but freight is a different animal. we’ll see.