Elon Musk Is Trading Tweets for Lithium; Power Metal in the Washington Post!; New Lives for Old Blades

And more about the human and environmental costs of renewable energy and digital technology—and how we can do better.

Sep 05, 2024

I was reading up this week on Elon Musk’s battle against Brazil’s shutdown of X/Twitter, and in the process learned about something I hadn’t much noticed before: how Musk is using X to suck up to Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, in a transparent bid for access to that country’s enormous reserves of lithium.

Just this Tuesday, Musk felt it necessary to tell his 196 million followers that “President Milei is doing an incredible job restoring Argentina to greatness!” Milei quickly responded with thanks. That continues a pattern of mutual sycophancy that’s been going on since Milei was elected last November. “Ahead of his inauguration last December, Milei praised Musk as an ‘icon of freedom.’ Musk gushed over Milei’s speech lambasting socialism at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, commenting ‘So hot’ with a meme of a couple having sex while watching Milei speak,” reports the AP.

It’s no secret why Musk professes such fuzzy feelings toward the leader of South America’s second-biggest country. “Elon Musk is extremely interested in the lithium,” Milei told a television interviewer last year. The batteries in every single Tesla require well over 100 pounds of the metal. The company buys lots of it from Argentina—and would like even more, of course. Which it looks like it will get. Milei recently pushed through legislation that provides tax cuts and other benefits for major foreign investors, which will likely benefit Tesla’s lithium suppliers and turbo-charge Argentinian lithium production across the board.

Milei isn’t the only politician with whom Musk uses X to curry favor. The list includes Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Narendra Modi. “On the platform, Mr. Musk has backed their views on gender, feted their opposition to socialism and aggressively confronted their enemies,” reports the New York Times. “Mr. Musk, in turn, has pushed for and won corporate advantages for his most lucrative businesses, Tesla and SpaceX. In India, he secured lower import tariffs for Tesla’s vehicles. In Brazil, he opened a major new market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service.”

And let’s not forget that Musk has recently become one of Donald Trump’s most prominent boosters.

So here we have the world’s richest man using one of the world’s most important social networks to propagandize for political leaders in exchange for economic favors. This is a very, very bad development. Particularly in the context of Latin America, there’s a long and ugly history of American companies using their influence to cajole countries into giving them access to natural resources, from Chiquita Banana in Honduras to Anaconda Copper in Chile. Those arrangements tend to work overwhelmingly for the benefit of said American companies and local elites, not to the people who actually live where those resources are extracted.

Sure, all big corporations try to get political leaders to cut them favorable deals. Many even try to influence other countries’ politics. But Musk is unique: he’s not only the richest man in the world, and not only the head of the world’s most important electric car and space-rocket companies, but also in effectively sole control of a communications platform that has influence all over the world. No individual should have that kind of power. And certainly not one as erratic, petty and unaccountable as Musk.

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Power Metal in the Washington Post!

It’s one of “this season’s most anticipated books,” says the paper…though apparently not anticipated enough to merit a photo! You have to scroll way down the list of 41 books to find my name, a little below Hillary Rodham Clinton but right above Cher. Ah well, fame is a fickle mistress, as both those eminent ladies can attest. The book comes out November 19, but you can preorder it right now.

Not, in fact, a real picture of Hillary Clinton, Cher, or my book!

How We Can Do Better: New Lives for Old Blades

Wind turbines don’t spew out any carbon, but they do create a lot of garbage—mostly in the form of their colossal blades, which can’t be recycled once they wear out. Turbine blades are generally made from fiberglass, which nobody wants, so they end up chopped into pieces and tossed into landfills. It’s a headache for the industry. At this rate, more than 43 million tons of blades might wind up dumped by 2050.

Now, though, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have come up with a way to keep those blades from becoming waste—by making them out of waste in the first place. As they detail in a recent paper in Science, the researchers developed a new material made from extracts of wood, plant remains, used cooking oil and agricultural waste. Blades made with this material appear to work just as well as the conventional type, with the bonus that they “can be recycled by dumping (them) into a bath of methanol heated up to around 440 degrees Fahrenheit, which turns (them) into an elastic liquid that can be molded into a new shape,” sums up the New York Times. Nice! Making blades out of this recyclable material, however, will likely cost more than the fiberglass version, which will certainly be an obstacle to the wind industry actually adopting this technology at scale.

In the meantime, a few companies are coming up with clever ways to reuse old blades. In Europe and the US, worn-out blades have been converted into brand new bicycle racks, playgrounds, park benches and pedestrian bridges. I guess if you jog across one of those that makes you a blade runner?