Michael

We invest in battery tech that utilizes supply chains with slavery and child labor to make those disposable cigarette batteries - and they just go straight into the landfill.

Lithium-ion batteries are absolutely not anything to be proud of - it’s a rare material and not scalable like other emergent technologies.

Lithium-ion has the potential for fire/explosion, is hazardous, and has poor cold-weather performance when compared with sodium-ion batteries.

And earlier this year and late last year in Northern California, we had two lithium battery plant fires that very likely contaminated a significant amount of our agriculture and soil.

The contaminated farmlands produce 70% of America’s greens and vegetables (a.k.a. the Salad Bowl of America). We were ill-equipped to address this situation or remediate it - see Status Coup News’ reporting to see how it affected the health of residents in a 50-100 mile radius.

Even if we stored it properly (away from anything it could contaminate including people), lithium-ion is simply not viable for energy storage.

There’s only ifs because powerful forces (that do not represent the will of humanity) do everything they can to suppress or derail renewable energy efforts and divert our collective focus to war and conflict.

China is proving sodium-ion batteries are viable. Sodium is abundant and the batteries seem cheap to produce. Solar panels are also cheap to produce.

Instead of economic war or other forms of conflict, we could cooperate on these technologies and move forward as a species.

It’s all very easy when you realize that war and conflict are not in anyone’s best interest, with consequences that could spell the end of our planet’s habitability, and could cause death and suffering that make previous World Wars look like child’s play.

We already know fossil fuels are undesirable for the planet and we’ve already had plenty of nuclear disasters.

Let’s worry about expanding nuclear technologies when we achieve fusion and the world achieves stability.

If we got our head out of our ass and invested into battery tech - e.g. sodium-ion batteries or proton batteries, we could very quickly build sustainable energy storage instead of relying on technology that is potentially dangerous or continuing to rely on fossil fuels.

I’m glad that the SLRPNK community loosely resonates with the ideology that I have argued in support of, for many years. Thanks for providing this space and instance. Libertarian socialist perspectives are underrepresented in online discourse and are often silenced or smeared.

In my experience, whenever I have been able to beat the censorship and shadowbanning and successfully cut through the propaganda, my personal perspectives have strongly resonated with many people.

In my opinion, it is the only path forward for the human species to move past barbarism, to move towards establishing human rights, to move past exploitation. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m naïve. I’m open-minded, though. Regardless of ideology, let’s make the world a kinder and more free place to live in!