The biggest pollutes are not cars or airplanes, it is poor people burning wood and dung in homes for fuel, but the Obama administration and the Biden one that followed him told the World Bank they'd provide no loans for centralized energy unless it was solar or wind.
That was a huge mistake and it is why Democrats are directly responsible for the climate change issue they now claim only they can fix.(1) Dr. James Hansen, the Godfather of Global Warming, said over 15 years ago that clean coal was enough to stop CO2 emissions. Clean coal technology that was already in existence and just had to be implemented at a fraction of the cost of solar and wind. Democrats blocked it and even came up with a Clean Power Plan to make solar look better by making natural gas look worse. It failed, because the private sector met the 2025 Clean Power Plan target by 2017, before the Supreme Court had even declared it illegal.
Larger particles in cathodes can't make Li-ion batteries into 21st century technology, but they may some day get cheaper. Image: Han-Ming Hau/Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley
Nuclear was the last bastion of Boomer Progressive Environmentalism still standing. With resistance to that collapsing due to young people asking awkward questions about why France was not the setting for the Fallout video game if nuclear was awful, the stage is set for clean energy to take hold.
But legacy tech is not going down without a fight, there is too much money involved. The problem with solar and wind is they are useless when people need them. To try and solve that, expensive, environmentally-hostile batteries are needed. But just as solar panels have not improved in decades, batteries are stuck in the Clinton era of peak anti-nuclear thinking. Lithium-ion batteries power cell phones but cell phones are five generations ahead. For small stuff, where you don't care about plugging it in every few hours, they are fine. To save solar, they are not ready. Yet the whole solar industry is propped up by mandates and subsidies. Car companies abandoned their electric car charging program when the Biden administration stated that they had caused so much inflation with their last stimulus plan they couldn't do another one unless they won the election, so the program was abandoned. Batteries are in the same boat. Why pay one company's shareholder money when 330,000,000 taxpayers may pay for development? If they pay solar panel companies to import them and rich people to buy them, batteries should not be left out.
They're right. It's bad business to invest billions of your own money in new technology when everyone else gets rich selling old technology thanks to taxpayers not expecting more from government.
Batteries are not improving any time soon. Like solar panels and cable TV, government control means no innovation and high costs. That means no private sector innovation. Yet they could at least get cheaper. Right now, nickel and cobalt in cathodes are expensive because they are limited. Manganese, however, is the fifth most common metal we have. A new study showed that disordered rock salt won't need to be crushed to to nanosized particles, at obscene energy cost, if manganese is used in cathodes.
Scientists extracted lithium ions from the cathode material and then heated it to about 200 degrees Celsius. Two days is still not cheap, nor fast, but it's better than three weeks. More importantly, a look under an electron microscope showed its semi-ordered structure improved battery performance. That was followed up by a look at how battery cycling causes chemical changes to manganese and oxygen, which will lend insight into how manganese-based cathodes may improve battery materials.
It's only proof-of-concept, and a government lab, so all taxpayers are still on the hook for it even though they don't get anything. Yet it's better than solar panels which have not really changed since 1960s, or batteries which have only gotten incrementally better than when President Clinton and Senator John Kerry banned clean energy to thunderous applause.
NOTES:
(1) See also, student loans. In the 1980s, Democrats in Congress saw statistics that a college degree meant higher lifetime earnings and declared in true populist fashion that a degree should be a right. So they made student loans unlimited. Now, 5,000 PhDs are janitors, those promised a better life discovered that when everyone has a degree it's just a high school diploma they paid to get, and now Democrats say only they can fix the problem they created.
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