Anything is possible, but I don't foresee any flip-flopping. Charlie Munger has a lot of great investing quotes, but my favorite is:
“Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” The incentives are the main reason my concern on permits has been, and remains, low. It's why I'm utterly unsurprised to see the PM coming around on mining, and why I expect support to only continue building in the future. Here's how I see the incentives:
For:
- The European Auto Industry has committed billions of dollars to domestic battery plants. They literally cannot afford to sink all that capital and then fail to produce batteries. So, they are highly incentivized to use whatever influence they can muster to advance any battery material project that has even a small chance of reaching production by 2025.
- The E.U. has made major financial and legal commitments to green energy and low emission targets. They're counting on the sector for jobs, tax revenue, etc, and the battery is the foundational technology. So, they are highly incentivized to secure access to the necessary raw materials and to see that they're extracted in the greenest and cheapest way possible.
- Vittangi is the highest grade JORC compliant graphite resource on the planet - meaning you get more anode for less mining. For comparison, Kringel (Leading Edge's best deposit - also an awesome deposit) will need to mine more than 2x as much ore to produce the same amount of anode as Vittangi. So, if the goal is to do the least amount of mining possible, you're highly incentivized to mine as much as possible from Vittangi.
- Talga has massive profit potential which means tax revenue and job creation for Sweden and its people. Having local supply lays the foundation for Sweden to have one of the the only soup-to-nuts battery industries in the world. So, strong financial incentives for Sweden to go forward.
Against:
- The mine will be an inconvenience for the Sami people and their reindeer
- Rain water contamination is a risk to the nearby Torne river
I look at those incentives and to me the outcome seems obvious. I don't think in absolutes, but I'd peg it at 98%+ this project gets permitted. We may need to spend millions on water catch basins and drainage to protect the river. We may need to spend extra on a reindeer fence, noise muffling, underground mining, etc. Hell, maybe we will need to make annual contributions to a "save the reindeer" fund that compensates the Sami people. But, the project will go forward, because the incentives on the "for" side of the equation are a lot stronger than those on the "against" side.
(20min delay)