I think EU expansion is a good thing but it makes even well intentioned comparisons difficult if e.g. Germany re-absorbs East Germany, or other nations join the EU

Poland was about 20% of the USA by PPP in the 90s, 40% when it joined the EU and 60% now.

Is that a success or a failure? It can definitely make some stats look worse.

I'd guess if the numbers for grid energy fed to batteries and the output from were compared it might be possible to discern if there was a source of energy that didn't go via the grid and so didn't show up on the stats.

Europe generally does well on solar, now and historically. And wind too. Though you may well consider that "climate change doomerism".

There are segments of their politicians, industry and populations who seem unaware that the EU imports basically all its oil and gas and so sabotage this progress at every step.

We have evidence he was still doing this decades later when he colluded to depress wages with Eric Schmidt at Google when he felt Apple employees were being offered too much in salary.

I'm happy to assume he was stealing money from people at every point in between because he was, quite famously, an asshole.

> The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they’ll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.

> I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn't actually do this — that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we've seen all three.

Now he's claiming he's trained all these billionaires and they are a blessing to the world, not avaricious sociopaths.

If you add pollution impacts, cars double the yearly deaths of guns.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/franz-kafka/the-castle/wil...

People used to say this a lot about Bootstrap.

Someone set up a bootstrap or not? guessing game and the real surprise was that you not only failed to spot some bootstrap sites you also guessed a lot of non-bootstrap sites were bootstrap because they all used the same modern UX paradigms.

Battery section makes no mention of sodium ion, for example.

The same org has published more recently on the same topic.

Their "Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025" suggested that demand has risen but supply has risen faster leading to lower prices "especially for battery minerals".

They've moved onto other worries. We will have enough minerals but "we" here means China 95% of the time.

Presumably China saw reports like this and said "we should locate and secure more minerals" rather than "this is all hopeless let's just burn oil which will never run out".

The US killed it.

The US and Israel attacked Iran causing chaos in oil markets and put it back on track.

https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/pressbriefings/pages/imo-...

If you were feeling generous you could credit then with the entire existence of modern EVs given their support of the nascent industry for decades in California.

But sure, let's focus on the mote in Democrat eyes and ignore the insanity across the aisle. That's what got us into this situation, so why stop now.

But it saved consumers 140 Billion by lowering demand for gas and so cutting prices.

So a 10x multiplier.

And that is 3x more carbon intensive than ethylene production.

Sound like a decent use case for a Carbon Border Adjustment to protect local business. But they apparently didn't want to make that argument.

Maybe it's a bad idea for some reason the journalist know and didn't feel like telling us.

Maybe it s a good idea for some reason that they didn't feel like telling us.

That's evening peaker gas plants in most places. After batteries push gas out of that market they go on to morning peaks and so on.