Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, last month added his voice to a bullish chorus predicting $100-a-barrel oil — double the price at the start of the year. He may have been showing restraint: Some traders are betting on an unprecedented $200 a barrel by the end of 2022. The return of a frenzied oil market is conjuring up unwelcome memories of a global petroleum goliath with the power to influence Western geostrategy and roil societies everywhere.
Yet this is the old story. We now stand at the precipice of the age of batteries and electric vehicles, technologies likely to steamroll fossil-fuel companies and petro states. From a few thousand fully electric cars sold around the world in the late aughts, consumers are on track to buy four million of them this year.
So far, the United States appears to be little more than a spectator to this revolution. While its battery and automakers are poised to produce cutting-edge batteries and popular electric vehicles, they will rely almost entirely on a supply chain controlled by China. Over the past decade, China has built up most of the world’s capacity to process the metals that make lithium-ion batteries — the heart of the electric vehicle revolution — work. It is this capacity that puts China in the catbird seat in the race for the future while America falls farther and farther behind.
Following the financial crash of 2008, the United States and China, along with Japan, South Korea and other countries, began an undeclared...
Read Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/opinion/electric-vehicle-climate-battery.html
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