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In my opinion, all of the first-world countries who don’t have natural carbon-absorbing resources like the Congolese forests or the Amazon should be paying the countries who do a tidy sum to maintain them. It feels like the sentiment is ‘Well, you owe it to the world to maintain these resources! We’re all counting on you!’, when many other countries could have had similar resources if we hadn’t already cut them down to make way for housing or industry or whatever else. We profited off of ours and now expect the few countries who have them remaining to just take one for the team. We should give them a strong incentive to do so.
This will be used as justification for future lithium wars. “We need to intervene to save your forests and so we can extract your minerals. This is to save the planet, we promise. Carbon footprint of war? Never heard of it.”
Like, how about fuck off, the US.
There has been relatively little exploration for lithium. I don’t think we have a clue where the largest deposits are at this time.
And? The US is saying this one is important, and that’s all they’ll need. The truth doesn’t exactly matter to them.
Consent for future wars won’t be manufactured on “spreading democracy” bacause that lie has lost whatever credibility it once had. It will be done exactly how this article is building the case for it: “fighting climate change”.
Why would the US invade Australia? Besides, this is about the DRC, which doesn’t even produce lithium. They mine a lot of cobalt, which is used in personal electronics, metal alloys, oil refining, and some high end EV batteries, but not lithium. Moreover, unlike oil once things are built up nations won’t need a constant supply of lithium to keep operating the core of their economy like they do oil, it’s not like the lithium is destroyed in use or anything.
What? Australia? What are you talking about?
Okay so… the only way I can make sense of this, is that you went through my post history to figure out I was Australian, then… somehow decided I was telling the US to fuck off… out of Australia?
It’s the somehow that is fascinating to me. Do you actually think that the only thing anyone should be concerned about is their own nationality? Is that the logic here?
Is your internal world actually so solipsistic and consumed with nationalism that you can’t imagine why a human being would be concerned about the fate of other human beings of another nation? That you would delve into another user’s history to find out their nationality, and you think that’s an actual reply that other people should care about? That we shouldn’t be concerned about the fate of the world which is made worse by lithium wars, not better?
Is that you? Seriously? What the fuck is going on your head?
I need an answer to this before I can talk to you about anything else. I doubt you’ll give me a real answer. If you actually can explain yourself to any satisfying degree I will be amazed, because I have never spoken to someone like you that knew anything other than blindly asserting their will on a conversation.
What? No. I had no idea that you were from Australia.
I mentioned Australia becuse it’s the worlds largest lithium producer by a significant margin, producing 63% more lithium than the next largest producing nation.
I was hoping to point out the folly of assuming that military force was the only way to get mining rights, or that related one that lithium in particular is only produced by heavily exploited miners in poor nations.
I figured why I mentioned Australia would be self evident, as climate wise the nation is mostly known for Lithium and Coal mining, as well as having a lot of solar potential and a very big reef that’s going to disappear in fifteen to forty years.
I see, well I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions then. I’m glad you’re at least open to discussing things. In future maybe don’t just assume everybody knows that when you say “Australia” you’re referring to the lithium that’s here unless it’s been mentioned before. It’s not at all obvious.
Of course, when I say “lithium wars”, I’m not only talking about the extraction of lithium, I’m talking about all of the minerals required for electric car and battery production. This is an established term with a specific scope, as opposed to “Australia” which is, you know, an entire country and means a lot of wildly different things to a lot of people.
This paper talks about the lithium wars - which are not yet literal wars and also not literally only about lithium - and namedrops the Congo in the title, even though the Congo primarily mines cobalt: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/8/4215
Either way, this is a purely semantic distinction. The OP article explicitly talks about the US’s efforts to “secure supplies of strategic minerals”. That is exactly the way they talk about strategic petroleum supplies. They are laying the groundwork here for manufacturing consent for war, and those anticipated wars broadly are called the “lithium wars”. They are also laying the groundwork for justifying these wars by appealing to climate change.
Of course, electric cars aren’t the solution to climate change. If you want to reduce your personal footprint, the best thing you can do is keep your current car running because the production costs of new cars - especially when you take into account the wars that will be fought to secure their raw materials - are enormous. Electric car hype isn’t about helping the climate, it’s about selling us a product whilst doing nothing to address the systemic problems that are actually causing climate change.
The lithium wars are going to be about providing that new market with cheap minerals by outsourcing the costs on the poorest and most vulnerable nations who have been made that way by centuries of exploitation. As they say, the cheapest land - or in this case minerals - are paid for in other people’s blood.
Now you can say that lithium is different to oil in that one respect, but that doesn’t actually matter. The point is that they will use this excuse as justification for war, not that the excuse makes sense. They don’t give two shits about the truth.
Given you brought up a specific mineral, I assumed that refrancing the largest producer would make sense in context. It’s not at all clear that when your reference lithium you actually mean all the various minerals required for an EV, especially since not all production EVs even use lithium batteries in the first place.
There’s also nothing particularly sinister about the term strategic resource, all it means is something is rare, valuable, and difficult to imitate or substitute. When a finance manager starts talking about the value of their organization’s strategic resources, they arn’t laying the groundwork for hiring a bunch of mercenaries to shoot up a competitor’s business and kidnap their experienced line managers.
It’s also worth noting that while it does take a lot of carbon to produce a basic car, and about twice that for an electric one thanks in no small part to refining the raw materials in the battery, it’s only about two to three years worth of burned gasoline. Half that of you have to buy a new car anyway because you got in a wreck or the frame rusted though. Your average car will produce over twice it’s weight in carbon dioxide every single year it’s on the road, it’s not hard to beat.
Given the current useage is massively destructive and can not by its nature be continued, I assume you are pushing for synthetics? While gasoline and diesel can be synthesized useing renewables and atmospheric carbon, the current market price for such fuels is two to three times natural ones, and may not even be able to be scaled up to the needed production in the time remaining anyway. When you do, there will be a lot of industries like airlines who will take priority for that fuel based solely on not having any other physically viable alternative.
While price is not the only factor, for low income workers who live in places without appropriate mass transit and who already struggle to pay for fuel, that is a big ask, especially when an equivalent amount of electricity goes for half to a quarter of that. While scaling up mass transit itself, especially things like suburban trollybusses, metros, and high speed intercity rail is obviously ideal, there is a limit to how low a population density it can support.
Moreover even your very walkable small Swiss village that was never connected to the national road network still has small EVs, because you need delivery, emergency, taxi, etc, and you can’t practically do that without independent vehicles. Are EVs a perfect answer, no. Are they the best answer reasonably possible, yes.
You talk about how these minerals will inevitably come from the poorest and most vulnerable nations while the nation you apparently live in is both the worlds largest producer of said minerals and the tenth richest in the world in terms of GDP per capita.
Practically, modern wars tend to be religious or politically motivated, not resource motivated. A dictator might use one to distract from their own failings, but offhand I believe the invasion of Kuwait was the last purely resource driven war, and that pretty spatacularly failed both to gain any resources and laid the seeds for the eventual destruction of the people who stated it.
Most nations, especially liberal democracies, will much rather just buy what they need than embark on a ruinously expensive war that will inevitably fail and even if successful would make the resources nearly impossible for anyone to acess anyway between destroying decades of expensive infrastructure and the inevitable resistance movement.
You could say that none of that matters because it’s all about just having a public reason for a war, but nations do not go to war for the hell of it, and this would be massively more effort than they’ve put into any excuse before. Moreover, surely the actual reason for the war would matter far more than the PR exercise.
So again I ask, why are the US and Europe apparently putting so much effort into manufacturing an excuse to invade Australia, the worlds largest lithium producer by a considerable margin?
It is really hard to take you seriously when apparently you haven’t been paying attention to anything the US has been doing for well over a century now. Like you actually think wars are ideological? You think states don’t want war? What the fuck do you think the Iraq war was about?
Those aren’t my words, that’s literally the headline, and it’s not an editorialised opinion, the US was extremely open about their reasons. Their words are right there in the article.
You should also read about the military industrial complex, because it turns out that if you can socialise the harms and privatise the rewards of war, you can make a fucking killing, and that’s a large part of why the US is rarely not at war. Shit’s wild, yo.
This is a very old idea. Smedley Butler was a major general and basically the US’s golden boy veteran way back in the day and he wrote War is a Racket in 1935. It’s 14 pages long, it’s a pamphlet, and unless you’re Ethan Klein you really should try to read it. This shit is a very old playbook and it is not that complicated.
Next, you should spend some time with Manufacturing Consent. That is a seminal work by Noam Chomsky, who is amongst the most cited scholars in history, let alone currently living scholars, explaining exactly how the media does the exact thing I am explaining in my original comment, laying groundwork and building the case specifically for modern wars, and he explains this in simple, observable, material terms. He never appeals to conspiracy at all.
So you have it from an historically influenctial academic source, a highly experienced and decorated general, and from the US leadership’s own mouths. If you keep trying to tell me that modern wars are about ideology and we all just peacably buy from one another these days, I’ll know you’re really not paying attention.
The Iraq war was about a lot of things. While reducing market fluctuations in the price of oil was a factor, it sure wasn’t the only one, and I would argue not even one of the larger ones. It’s not a coincidence that Iraq had just invaded its neighbor, looted all it could, and then created the largest intentional ecological disaster ever created.
Neoconservatives, especially the Think tank Project for the New American Century, had a large influence over Bush’s office and kept trying to elevate Iraq as a major threat to distract from their continuous economic failures and ensure Amarican hegemony.
Bush personally wanted to finish what he believed his father stated, and all of them saw 911 with this in mind, it’s not like he was the brightest mind of a generation.
Most administrators, bureaucrats, and even millitary staff were shocked by an attack they were sure had to have been a state actor and tended towards confrontation bias.
The American people as a whole wanted revenge for 911, but didn’t really care who it was they actually took it out on so long as they were arab. It was a lot easier to blame the aggressive dictator they were recently at war with than the Saudis.
The US wanted another ally in the region to mediate between and counterbalance Israel and Saudi Arabia.
A lot of well intentioned people honestly just wanted the unstable theocratic dictator to stop killing innocent people to prop up his own power and image.
Finally yes, OPEC and the US wanted Sadam to be more consistent in his supply a decade of sanctions had caused Iraq’s output to slowly degrade.
Nevertheless, it took nearly a decade to rebuild the infrastructure, the largest share of which now serves the US’s biggest geopolitical rival.](https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/crude-petroleum/reporter/irq)
So if the goal was to get oil as that Guardian article claimed than it clearly failed, especially since during all of this the US’s biggest suppliers have gone from the middle east to itself by becoming a net producer of oil, as has its bordering rich nation of Canada. Indeed, over time oil production has been continually migrating from poor nations to rich ones, the inverse of what you claim.
Also, while you said US top officials themselves said so in that article, none of the people or documents quoted did. They mentioned that Iraq’s supply was unstable and suggested reviewing policy in coordination with their major allies in Europe and Asia. Given that a lot of their major allies in Europe condemned the war, it hardly seems like it meant anything more than was actually stated.
There are a thousand other reasons and factorsl, which is why it is still a matter of debate in geopolitics to this day. Politics is at its core the interplay of billions of individual people and stories, all working with different worldviews and goals. States almost never have a singe goal in mind with a given action, how could they when it’s the result of thousand of actions and compromises? To reduce all of this to oil is to reject a complex reality for a simple narrative.
Finally, if you believe the Pentagon needs a big war to blow out its budget, I have a bridge to sell you. The US is perfectly capable of funneling money into the MIC no matter if the weapons are getting used in the middle east or left in a warehouse. There is no threat of any party in Washington trying to majorly cut the defense budget, all the while training, procurement, and a thousand other things can lead to highly profitable cost overruns. Like nearly all nations, US commits to having X, Y, and Z military capabilities, and buys what it need to fulfill them, that’s the profitable part, not actually using them.
It’s also entirely run by neoliberals who believe that the market has magic that makes things work out more efficiently than doing things directly, and that any price controls, negotiation, or in house management will stifle this magic. It can disappear an endless amount of funds to get something that sorta works, just like they do when they try and build a train halfway across California or fix a highway. They need no excuses to funnel contracts to places they plan to go get a well paying job at in a years, no involved.
As for the other half of your comment, I am well aware of Manufacturing Consent, and agree that the media worked hard to push the narrative they were being fed about WMDs and a connection to 911. Even if Noam Chomsky is a vocal genocide denier who’s understanding of geopolitics can be summed up as Amarica Bad any dictator that talks about opposeig Amarica good, there is a reason why his analysis of the factors that shape the media in Manufacturing Concent holds up to this day.
I am also well aware of the sustained campaign to manufacture the idea that EVs and any other climate solution that might cut into an oil company’s profit margin are just as bad for the environment as oil, as to muddle and prevent collective action and policy against climate change. They haven’t exactly been shy about their campaigns, nor the media outlets they fund.
