LG’s $4.4B Battery Plant, Taming Volcanic Brine And More Fuel Cells For Trucks

This week’s Current Climate, which every Saturday brings you the latest news about the business of sustainability. Sign up to get it in your inbox every week.

Last weekend, I read a fascinating essay by historian Bret Devereaux, who used scholarship to answer the question: why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution? In answering the question, Devereaux notes that the industrial revolution was never inevitable. There was, in essence, a confluence of factors in Britain that helped lead to industrialization, to wit: an abundance of coal and the absence of cheaper forms of energy, a need to pump water out of coal mines AND a thriving textile industry whose bottlenecks could be improved by machines that could perform repetitive rotary motion. (I’m definitely oversimplifying some of the points here–do read the whole thing.)

Basically, absent the unique circumstances of the 18th century British economy, it’s possible the industrial revolution might not have happened for centuries more–if ever. Devereaux argues that “each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact.“ Without that throughline of economic use cases, technology would surely have continued to advance, but without the acceleration and scale provided by industrialization.

Of course, the flip side of that industrialization was also a massive scale-up of environmental issues, from climate change to algal blooms to microplastics. But with so many companies, industries and capital investments into sustainable development, it makes you wonder: is there a confluence of economic circumstances somewhere in the world that could lead to a sustainable economic breakthrough as big as that of the steam engine? It’d be interesting to be able to see what historians centuries from now have to say about the economic and technological developments in our time.

The Big Read

California’s Lithium Rush For EV Batteries Hinges On Taming Toxic, Volcanic Brine

The Salton Sea region has one of the world’s largest known reserves of lithium, enough to power batteries for more than 50 million electric vehicles within a few years. But first it must be extracted from hot geothermal brine loaded with toxic material, a process that’s never been done before at scale.

Read more here.

Discoveries And Innovations

New research suggests Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet should push up global sea levels by about 10.8 inches even if the world slashes carbon emissions over the next century.

Midwest retail giant Meijer announced that it’s using robots and drones to help clean up plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

This week, Hitachi Energy unveiled an eco-efficient 420-kV circuit breaker that enables the transmission of high voltage electricity without emitting sulfur hexafluoride, a potent greenhouse gas.