Peter Zeihan

Yeah.

environmentally, chemically, and socially.

I didn't top off my study for this.

A big one's graphite.

Graphite's basically a synthetic form of carbon.

There is a natural graphite, which is vastly preferred, but the chemical structure is very limited to a few specific mines, so the cost goes up as more of it's used.

There's a synthetic version.

Basically, you're using it for the electricity

regulating the electricity flow in a battery.

And if the graphite is not the right kind, you basically get the electricity starting to leak out into the battery itself, which can get a little blammy, but more likely it's just going to be a huge efficiency loss.

Copper, obviously.

Anything that uses electricity is going to use a huge amount of copper, lithium we've already covered, cobalt's a mess, manganese, using a lot of alloys for both copper and steel.

Sometimes you're going to put this in the electrodes as well.

There's a lot of moving pieces.

And that's one of the reasons why I'm a little hopeful, because a lot of people are playing with a lot of different chemistries to see if they can come up with something better.

Lots of countries have announced that either for their cities or for their countries.

And unless they're willing to subsidize it to a huge degree, it's not going to happen anywhere.

That doesn't necessarily mean that I have a problem with those goals.

Let me use the California example.

California gets a lot of shit.