It is absolutely true that a large lithium deposit has been found in Appalachia (in the USA). It's also true, however, that sodium-ion battery chemistry is now beginning to take off (CATL, China) and it requires no lithium.

Even more interestingly, Donut Lab (Latvia, I think) is now shipping its Verge motorcycles with a solid state battery that it claims uses no lithium or "crisis minerals" at all. Which means no cobalt, either.

Thus, the value of lithium may be wildly over-estimated at the moment, given that other promising battery chemistries may render lithium economically obsolete.

Even if the alternative battery chemistries don't achieve the same energy density, they are on target to achieve astonishing economic efficiencies that could result in EV battery packs for vehicles costing 1/5th the current price.

I'll cover this more in my podcasts next week...

New article - Why Green Energy Can't Simply Replace Hydrocarbons: A Matter of Survival
https://www.naturalnews.com/2026-05-01-why-green-energy-cant-simply-replace-hydrocarbons.html

ANALYSIS: Not sure how many people realize this, but DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen (all China-based open source AI engines) are putting U.S. AI companies out of business at a rapid pace. My own spending on Anthropic's engines has dropped by hundreds of dollars per day as I switched to China's engines, now spending a tiny fraction of what I used to spend. The results are nearly as good, but there are still some special cases where I use Anthropic.

The only way for Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, etc., to survive will be:

1) Dramatically leapfrog China's AI technology (highly unlikely, as China has the best engineers, and lots of them).

2) Get massive subsidies from the U.S. government in exchange for turning over their AI for weaponization against humanity. (This is what Google and OpenAI have already agreed to do, essentially.)

The U.S. AI industry, in other words, has only ONE future: Getting folded into the SkyNet architecture as a weapon against humanity. AI-powered surveillance and human extermination 'Terminator' functions are only a matter of time.

Google has long functioned as an enemy of humanity, btw. Soon it's going to take physical form as Google AI powers deadly Terminator drones, robots and cyber entities.