The lithium conundrum

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Editor's note: To adhere to the Paris Agreement and limit the average rise in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2 degrees Celsius at the most) compared with pre-industrial levels, we must wean off fossil fuels—oil, coal, natural gas—that have become embedded in the global economy since the Industrial Revolution. We must expand renewable sources of energy like solar and wind that do not emit greenhouse gases while exploring the deployment of new, clean sources of energy. At the heart of this transition to a green future is a silvery-grey metal: lithium. It’s the light metal found in devices such as laptops, smartphones and rechargeable batteries. And I’ll argue that after carbon, lithium is the most important element in the periodic table when it comes to sustainability. A battery is essentially any device that stores energy. There are many kinds of batteries, the most popular of which store energy in chemical form. The lead-acid battery has been around for over 150 years, but it is not capable of storing the amount of electricity needed to run a vehicle. Lithium-ion batteries, which …