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this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Right, but China has cheaper labor and few environmental regulations. Citizens of Oregon are less likely to send children and political prisoners into mines and factories.
So lithium is OK, so long as it's cheap and gotten off the backs of chinese?
Are you asking me what I would do given the keys to the nuclear arsenal? Or are you asking me what the current state of geopolitical affairs?
We won't win an economic trade war with China. China isn't the Soviet Union. We might win an actual war, but it would be the largest war ever fought on earth. China isn't Russia.
I don't want anyone mining lithium unless we can do it without destroying the planet where we live. I'd gladly trade my cell phone for universal human rights and clean water for my grandkids. But that ain't a button on my console.
Oregon is in the United States, a country where people expect life, liberty, and the pursuit of a jetski. The CCP treats its citizens like wheat for the thresher, and has zero qualms about turning some land into wasteland. Economically, you can't compete with that. If you want to place tariffs on Chinese lithium, let's do it. But we need to actually produce it here, and we have to be OK with the full, long-term cost of mining and manufacturing it, safely and cleanly.
Unless we do that, there's not much sense in acting like we're better than China. We just have a national NIMBY attitude, happily outsourcing our climate disasters and human rights abuses so we don't have to see it first hand.