Thank you. I didn’t know that.

I’m not arguing for oil. Yet the current production costs for lithium batteries, compared to their lifecycle, rivals that of combustion propulsion. That doesn’t mean we should stop researching and finding better methods. But it’s far from as “environmentally” friendly as you think it is.

Oh, and Europe have oil. Plenty of it. Where would you like start? The coast outside Norway? The vast natural gas reserves in western Russia? The ocean outside of Scotland, maybe it just happenes to be a shit ton of oil under Greenland which is 100% unrelated to why Trump wants to own it.

I’m still not arguing for or against oil. I’m saying Europe isn’t following the US, and Europe isn’t interested in following China either. Europe is interested in carving out sustainability for themselves without US or China.

Yeah, they just found it late last year. And still working out how they should bring it up. They’ve made estimates on the amount, i’m not qualified to verify their estimates.

If they can actually bring it up we have security in the materials required to make the research worth it.

But no, we have not dug up all of the ground to get oil. Oil is a lot more liquid than lithium ore. We can pump up the oil without having to excavate the entire surrounding area.

I’m not saying that to defend oil. But the funny part about it is that if they had dug up all of the ground to get it, they would have found their lithium deposits sooner. Because they found it in an oil-field.

You can research all you want, but the periodic table is not changing, and Chinese R&D is decades ahead of the West.

What does that even mean? Do you have any idea how long ago it was since we found the last naturally occurring element? Should we have just stoped all research I the early 1900’s because “the periodic table is not changing”. Dumbest shit I’ve heard all years. And yes, I did hear about Trumps email to Norway. You still win.

It is a lot more complex than “Europe is actually following America more than China in this”.

Europe have very limited lithium deposits compared to China. Europe is trying to be as self sustaining as possible, especially now that the US have shown themselves to be a highly unreliable partner.

So exchanging one dependency for another is a poor lateral move at best.

You can’t just start digging up the entire ground and make car batteries out of all lithium you find.

European universities all over are researching alternative battery technology that doesn’t rely as much on lithium.

There’s this really neat thing called nuclear reactors that produce an enormous amount of energy. It’s only been around for ~70 years but they look promising.