Exposing zero carbon fantasists

Nearly 7,000 years of lithium mining needed for green goals

- JAMES HICKMAN

IN 1958, Leonard E. Read wrote the book I, Pencil.

As the book’s title suggests, this is the story of a pencil, told from the pencil’s perspective.

The pencil traces his beginnings — from the cedar forests of Northern California and Oregon — to the mill in San Leandro, California, where specialised equipment cuts the logs into pencil-length slats.

Next, the newly cut slats move to the pencil factory, where machinery cuts eight grooves into each slat and inserts graphite.

Read goes on to further describe each part of the pencil manufacturing process.

His point: even something as simple as manufacturing a pencil is a highly complex process. Yet left to the free market, profit incentives allow individuals and companies to efficiently combine raw materials and produce any in-demand product.

No committee of central planners is required any time during the manufacturing process.

So, if central planning cannot produce something as simple as a pencil, how can governments expect to coordinate and control a product as critical and vital as energy, whose production is exponentially more complex than a pencil?

They can’t. But they’ll still try.