Jeremy Grantham: evaluation

Transcript context

…Can’t we get much more lithium from Australia, from Argentina, develop better ways of mining lithium, cheaper ways? Why is that harder, say, than developing fracking? It’s harder because they’ve been looking for lithium now quite a few decades, and we have a pretty good idea where the best reserves are, and they are totally inadequate to the task. The lesson we draw from that is, we have to change the task. We have to redesign our way around lithium. The Grantham Foundation, I’m happy to say, has a promising investment in extracting three or four times the lithium from brine, and extracting 50 percent more from the rock of the kind that occurs in Australia. But even with those improvements, we’re not close. This is not going to be a closely run battle. We’re just going to have to find another way to make lightweight batteries using something other than lithium, and potassium and sodium are very good candidates and will probably do it. There are hundreds of times more sodium and potassium around than lithium. If we take away, say, the last 20 years — the era of explosive Chinese growth — isn’t the long-term trend for commodities prices really pretty modest? I know China is done growing; longer-term elasticities of supply are high; the world will be depopulating, as you’ve pointed out. Thus, we should think commodity prices, overall, will be falling for the next 50 years.…

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