This piece by Jacinda Bowler at Cosmos:

A modelling study looking at electric vehicles has found that the resources to produce them will be significantly strained in the next few years. The researchers suggest that to stop the worst of the bottleneck will take an overhaul – we need to change the way we think about our cars and cities.

“It seems very likely we’ll have a shortage,’ says Fernando Aguilar Lopez, a renewable energy researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

“The key lies in the demand. The demand needs to decrease to avoid long-term supply problems.”

The researchers used a model called MATerIaL Demand and Availability (MATILDA) to analyse at how lithium and other elements will be available from the extraction phase, all the way through to production, use, and scrapping. They looked at more than 8,000 scenarios in the paper has just been published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling.

Although there’s plenty of lithium, cobalt, nickel and phosphorus in the ground, the problem lies in mining. An older paper from 2022 suggested it can take up to 30 years from the initial exploration to be able to use the elements in electric cars.

“The ‘technology metals’, such as cobalt, lithium, rare earths and platinum group metals, are generally produced in much smaller amounts (hundreds to thousands of tonnes) from a small number of mines worldwide,” reported the older paper.

“We will require a massive and rapid increase in the production of technology metals, essential to the function and performance of electric vehicles (EVs), if we are to meet the targets of governments and the car industry.”

Worse, the researchers for this new paper have suggested that recycling won’t be solution in the near term as there are not enough electric vehicles being scrapped to reuse as a replacement for the bulk of new materials.

while interesting is hardly surprising. Many others (including me) have been saying things along those lines for 40 years. The article goes on to discuss reengineering cities to require less transport. Easier and cheaper than that would be to abandon the centralization, sprawl, and commute model we’ve been following for the last 75 years. It’s going on even as I speak.

For the last two years my employer has been located in London. I never went there, remaining here in the U. S. For the two years prior to that I rarely went into the office. I strongly suspect that work from home AKA remote and/or the “hybrid” model are here to stay. There are also lots of small towns that have practically been vacated as the manufacturing that used to support their economies has vanished overseas. Lots of room there.

None of that is what went through my mind as I read the article. Dovetailing with a post of mine from yesterday, I think we’re going to see a flurry of investment and innovation not just on recycling but also in refining and extraction from seawater, etc. These are among the many reasons that the strategy we’re using for carbon emissions reduction (reducing the production of energy and/or replacing it with less concentrated approaches) is foolhardy. There are all sorts of things that are possible with more power (as Tim Allen used to say).

Last week a pair of organizations with ties to newly-inaugurated Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (yes, I know, the T-shirts are already being offered for sale) issued a proposal for increasing taxes and decreasing expenses. The Johnson Administration was quick to distance itself from the proposal. A little. Despite all of the proposals having been things that Mayor Johnson ran on. Inspiringly, the proposal had the title of this post as its title.

The editors of Crain’s Chicago Business have some recommendations for Mayor Johnson:

The proposal, authored by two grassroots organizations with ties to Johnson — Action Center on Race & The Economy and the People’s Unity Platform — calls for measures such as a city wealth tax, an income tax, deep cuts in police spending and an end to all tax-increment financing projects. While these ideas may sound good to many of the Chicagoans who voted Johnson into office, it’s important to read the fine print and understand just how many middle-class Chicagoans — not just fat cats — would be hurt if many of these notions became policy.

As Crain’s Greg Hinz first reported, a few of the proposals these groups are espousing match up with concepts Johnson himself campaigned on, most notably:

• Reinstating the “head tax” of $33 per worker on companies with at least 50 workers, netting $106 million a year.

• Boosting from 5 cents to 14 cents the tax per gallon on jet fuel used at Chicago’s airports, raising $96 million.

• Raising the real estate transaction fee on sales of at least $1 million by 1.9 percentage points, a move the group estimates would generate $163 million.

Beyond that, the progressive advocates also propose:

• Imposing a city income tax of 3.5% on any household with income above $100,000 a year. This tax would apply to Chicago residents as well as money made by suburbanites employed in the city. Here in Chicago, at least a third of city residents would end up paying at least some city income tax under this plan;

• Creating a 0.4% annual wealth tax on the richest 10% of Chicagoans.

• Levying a tax on luxury-apartment vacancies that’s designed to pressure landlords into lowering rents to more affordable levels.

• Taxing financial transactions at Chicago’s financial exchanges.

On the spending side of the ledger, the plan calls for eliminating all vacant positions in the Chicago Police Department, and then cutting the police budget another 9% a year. All new TIF spending would be eliminated, with efforts to renegotiate or file lawsuits against existing TIF deals, such as the one extended to the Lincoln Yards development. And a new city bank would issue debt at lower than private-market costs, a move the proposal’s authors contend would save the city money.

Undergirding all of these ideas are two faulty premises: one, that Chicagoans aren’t taxed enough, and two, that we have plenty of police to keep the city safe. Johnson would be correct to add even more space between himself and both of these notions.

CME Group chief Terry Duffy has already threatened — on the day of Johnson’s inauguration — to move the exchange out of town if the tax situation becomes too burdensome. Major employers such as Caterpillar, Boeing, Citadel have already headed out of the city, with Guggenheim Partners apparently poised to follow on their heels.

It’s unlikely this report’s authors or the people who are aligned with them concern themselves overmuch about these departures. These are big, bad corporations, after all. But perhaps the report’s authors should consider how these taxing ideas will affect constituencies they care more about: Chicago workers and families.

As Crain’s Jack Grieve reported on May 1, Chicago residents need to earn an annual income of $172,600 for their purchasing power to equal that of the average American taking home $100,000. And in order to sustain households bringing in even that much of a salary, the city needs a base of employers able to create and support decent-paying jobs. Head taxes undercut job growth. And wealth taxes seem likely to hit middle-class families saving for goals like college and retirement.

When pressed for insight on the mayor’s own attitude toward these proposals, a senior adviser told Crain’s, “if we were for these ideas, we would have said it.” And yet, given many opportunities to express opposition to these measures, the adviser said only: “Everybody should have a right to put their ideas into the public square.”

That’s not exactly comforting. Nor is the pushback from some observers who have been quick to argue these are merely fringe ideas that would be dead on arrival in Springfield, where many of these measures would have to be blessed before they could be implemented. Messaging matters — especially at a time like this, when investor and employer faith in Chicago as a great place to do business is faltering. If the mayor truly isn’t considering things like a city income tax, a wealth tax, a financial transactions tax or any of the other ideas contained in this report, he ought to say so, loudly and unequivocally.

I wanted to make a few observations. First, Chicagoans are among the most highly taxed people in the country. Sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, and fees are all high. Chicago’s problem is not that taxes are too low but that we don’t get value for what is received in city services. That more than 20% of Chicago’s budget is devoted to public employee pensions, making up for years of non-contribution, doesn’t help.

Second, the fuel tax would require an act of Congress and the city earnings tax, head tax, and wealth tax would require action by the state legislature. To paraphase German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, they could do it. The question is whether they could keep their jobs if they did it.

Third, taken together those taxes make the city even more dependent on those earning the highest incomes while providing them with very little incentive to stay.

I want to commend this article by Raphael S. Cohen at War on the Rocks to your attention. I found it thought-provoking. Here’s a snippet:

Above all, the Ukraine conflict shows that wars are fundamentally unpredictable. In Ukraine, a war that nearly everyone thought would be over in a matter of days and offer a relatively clean Russian victory has ended up dragging on for well over a year and put the Vladimir Putin regime on increasingly shaky ground. That’s an uncomfortable implication for all leaders thinking about using force in the future — no matter whether they are sitting in Moscow, Beijing, or Washington.

At some level, the critics of U.S. support for Ukraine have a point. Deterrence vis-à vis China is eroding. Unlike the American-Russian military balance, at least some military trends are going in China’s favor. As a result, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, unlike President Vladimir Putin, can afford to be patient. No matter what the United States does in Ukraine, in the long run, China will be more difficult to deter as its power and ambition grow.

As a matter of policy, however, the key question is how the United States will use the tools it has today to maximize its deterrent effects. From an operational perspective, the Ukraine War has not hurt the military balance versus China. In fact, the United States has demonstrated that it can continue to pursue its Indo-Pacific-focused capabilities while still aiding Ukraine. Moreover, the Ukraine War may even help in the long run if it spurs both the United States and its allies to understand that industrial warfare is not just a topic for the history books and to prepare accordingly.

Read the whole thing.

I wish I were as confident about what’s happening in Ukraine (and in Russia, for that matter) as the author seems to be. The only contribution I can make to the discussion is that IMO deterrence is less likely to be effective when you’re talking about a strategic opponent’s core interests and, like it or not, we can’t dictate to them what those core interests are.

I have a pretty simple question: why is California Sen. Dianne Feinstein continuing to serve? It’s highly unlikely she has no other interests—she was already, shall we say, very mature when she was first elected to the Senate. It’s not a matter of partisan loyalty—another Democrat would be sure to be appointed and then elected.

Maybe she likes being a senator but I doubt she likes it as much as she did, say, five years ago. IMO the most likely explanation is that she has the insecurities so common among members of the Silent Generation. She’s afraid of what will happen to her, to San Francisco, to California, and to the United States should she stop being a senator.

It’s not that I don’t like Sen. Feinstein—I do. I would have gladly voter for her for president in preference to Al Gore, for example.

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle remarks on a study of what happened during the student loan payment moratoria:

A working paper out of the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics by economists Michael Dinerstein, Constantine Yannelis and Ching-Tse Chen compares what happened in households that had loans eligible for the moratorium with those whose loans were privately held, and thus outside the emergency pause.

Some of the effects were unsurprising: People who didn’t have to make payments had more disposable income and fewer delinquencies on student loan debt; as a result, their credit scores were on average somewhat higher. They also, of course, ended up with higher student loan balances — around $1,500 worth — because unlike their counterparts with private loans, they weren’t making payments to reduce the principal.

Somewhat more surprisingly, the pause on student loan payments didn’t do much for delinquencies on other kinds of debt — people whose loans were on hold mostly don’t seem to have used the breathing room to get caught up on their credit cards or mortgage payments. Rather the opposite, in fact: Mortgage, auto and credit card debt all rose by an average of $1,200. Overall, household indebtedness not only didn’t improve for those who benefited from the pause, but deteriorated to the tune of almost $2,700.

Now that isn’t what I would have done. I would have used the available cash to pay off other debts but I hate debt. It’s the way I was brought up. We live below our means.

Ms. McArdle continues:

A few takeaways follow from this. First, while we often talk about a policy working, or say it doesn’t work, reality is more complicated: Policies can work on one dimension and fail on another. Pausing student loan payments can boost the economy, quickly, by keeping people spending. On the other hand, if you think of student loan relief as a way to help upwardly mobile households build generational wealth, these results are much less encouraging.

A second observation is that it’s hard to get people to save more. Yes, we managed during the pandemic by firehosing money into bank accounts at a time when there was a lot less to spend it on — but as things began reopening, the personal savings rate dropped to well below its pre-pandemic average. And in more normal times, policymakers struggle to raise savings appreciably — economists are still debating whether tax-advantaged savings accounts such as 401(k)s, one of the most popular savings programs of all time, actually increase the savings rate.

Which brings us to the third and most important lesson, or rather, a reminder: While people do respond to incentives, they often respond somewhat unexpectedly.

I certainly wouldn’t have expected it.

Something we should keep in mind is that saving is a perverse sort of behavior. You are delaying present gratification for later gratification or in case of urgent need. Unlike spending saving has no immediate reward. Both living beyond your means and saving are habits and saving is a much harder habit to acquire.

Exxon is getting into the lithium-producing business. From a report in the Wall Street Journal by Benoît Morenne and Collin Eaton:

Exxon Mobil is bracing for a future far less dependent on gasoline by drilling for something other than oil: lithium.

The Texas oil giant recently purchased drilling rights to a sizable chunk of Arkansas land from which it aims to produce the mineral, a key ingredient in batteries for electric cars, cellphones and laptops, according to people familiar with the matter.

Lithium is far removed from the fossil-fuel business, which has powered Exxon’s profits for more than a century, and signals the company’s assessment that demand for internal combustion engines could soon peak, the people said. It would also mark a return for the company to an industry it helped pioneer almost 50 years ago.

Exxon bought 120,000 gross acres in the Smackover formation of southern Arkansas from an exploration company called Galvanic Energy, according to some of the people. The price tag was more than $100 million, people familiar with the matter said, a relatively small transaction for a company of Exxon’s size.

This is good news. More EVs doesn’t make a great deal of sense if we’re importing batteries and/or the stuff needed to make them from countries that emit lots of carbon in the process. I expect more of these diversifications.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Sounds like our own time, doesn’t it, rather than two centuries ago? The title of this post, of course, doesn’t come from A Tale of Two Cities but from Pat Moynihan’s famous wisecrack: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Except today, of course, there’s such a deluge of information that everybody does, indeed, have their own facts.

That’s one of the things that leapt out at me when listening to the talking heads programs this morning in the commentary about the debt limit. The Republicans said that the House had produced the one and only proposal to raise the debt limit. That is true as far as it goes. The Democrats said

1. President Biden published his budget back in March
2. What good would it be for the Senate to produce its own bill? The House would just reject it anyway.

The first of those assertions is also true as far as it goes. The second is an opinion rather than a fact. The problem is that’s the way our system is supposed to work: the House passes a spending bill, the Senate proposes its spending bill, there’s a reconciliation process, the president signs the resulting compromise, and the spending bill becomes law. Pretty much Schoolhouse Rock.

Something else the Democrats have said which is true as far as it goes: McCarthy is in a weak position. What so far has remained unsaid: Schumer is in a weak position, too.

The debt limit isn’t the only subject on which everybody has their own facts. Yesterday a commenter lamented:

You can apply this statement to almost everything in the “news” today: Patriot missiles, Durham Report, FBI collusion with dems, COVID statistics, climate change predictions and fears, the circumstances surrounding the J6 protests and illegal surveillance by the FBI, Norstream sabotage, the 2020 & 2022 election malfeasance, the current debt ceiling Dem/Republican debate, for starters.

to which we might add the Battle of Bakhmut. Has Bakhmut fallen or not? It depends entirely on who you listen to and, echoing President Clinton, how the meaning of “fallen” falls.

I’ll go on the record with my opinion about each of these. Note that these are just opinions—I wouldn’t elevate them to the level of facts.

• I don’t think the Patriot missile has shone in Ukraine. I think it may have reduced the damage of some Russian attacks but a lot of Patriot missiles have been expended in the process and/or lost. And they’re expensive.
• There was no “smoking gun” in the Durham Report but it did support the claim that the FBI needs reform.
• The greatest likelihood is that Poland and Ukraine sabotaged the Nordstream pipeline, Seymour Hersch notwithstanding.
• I think that anthropogenic climate change is a risk but not an issue, i.e. it hasn’t already happened but it may. There is no workable solution that doesn’t involve fewer imports from China (and India), more nuclear power, and CCS.
• The breaching of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 was unacceptable. Some of the participants may have thought of it as an insurrection but most didn’t. Keeping it in the news has helped Democrats.
• “Ballot harvesting” is a problem; voting machines do not appear to be. Joe Biden was elected president in 2020. There was no “red wave” in 2022 because Republicans screwed up and Trump was a big part of that.

I want to close this post with one more thought. Josh Billings was right: “I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain’t so”. That was true 250 years ago and it’s just as true now. With the sheer volume of information not to mention large language model “artificial intelligence” and deepfakes telling true from false is harder than ever but that doesn’t make ideologically-based reasoning more effective or make discerning the truth less necessary.

All of the approval ratings above are from the Morning Consult (for consistency). I don’t know that there’s ever been a weaker showing among the G7 leaders.

In a sense just attending a summit probably helped them—looking statesmanlike is always good.

I don’t know that it would be possible for me to disagree with Con Coughlin’s column in the Telegraph, repeated here at MSN, more. His thesis is that

• China is a threat
• China is preparing for war
• “We” in the West are preparing to surrender

I don’t believe that any of those is true.

Quite to the contrary I think we—the United States—are our own biggest threat, that there is a risk of China’s being big, strong, and aggressive enough to threaten us, and that we’re responding by continuing to dismantle our own industrial infrastructure, import more of what we consume from China, redefining consumption as investment, and bickering among ourselves about matters that can only puzzle most of the world.