A good paper in the NY Times raises the issue of lithium provision that I mentioned in a previous post. Lithium is needed for car batteries and half of the proved deposits are in Bolivia, a country that has moved agressively in recent years to protect its sovereign rights over extractive resources. I guess the looming electric future will have to take a long deep look at material and political issues around electricity production and storage before coming of age. The geography of raw materials (esp. mining) is staging a comeback — both as a topic and as a subdiscipline within geography (see Gavin Bridge‘s work, for example). That’s great news for many reasons, one of the them being that mining resources and raw materials are great to map!
Géographe — Lyon, France