Cornish Lithium and the failure to understand capitalism
Cornish Lithium is a plucky little attempt to extract lithium - that new “white gold” for EV batteries - from the geothermal waters underneath Cornwall. With our weird metals hat on yes, there’s lithium under them thar’ hills, yes it can be extracted. Whether it can be done economically, well, that’s going to be the interesting bit.
At which point we’d like to mutter something about how the country’s got a much greater problem than local lithium for local people. For the three major papers that we might hope would understand at least something about business and the economy seem not to. The FT, The Times, The Telegraph. They’re all bleating about how Cornish is giving off an alarm signal, that it might go bust!
Err, yes, this is how capitalism works. In order to do some new thing, in order to try to do some new thing, it’s necessary to have a big pile of money. Capital. Which is gained from other people - the capitalists. When you’re trying to sort out some new method of extracting lithium you might burn through £50 million - £100 million! - of that capital, that other peoples’ money.
The aim, of course, is that at the end there will be lithium which can be sold to provide a return to the capitalists.
However, at this stage of this game the process, the organisation, simply eats capital. Which it needs to gain a constant supply of. For no one funds a project to completion, it’s always funded to stages. Is there lithium in the water, can it be extracted, can we get licences to do so and so on - each is a funding stage. For failure at the earlier stage means there’s no point in bothering to fund later ones.
Every junior miner (that is, one not producing yet) is, by definition, in danger of going bust if the next chunk of capital doesn’t turn up. Always has been, always will be because that’s the way the system works, that’s capitalism.
And as we say if we’ve the three major broadsheets (no one expects The Guardian to understand this sort of stuff) can’t even recognise capitalism in action then we’d suggest that we’ve something of a societal problem. You know, given that we are, at least nominally, still a capitalist society?