Latest Lithium Related Articles, page-796

I want to start this by first pointing out that the future of lithium sales seems to be in electric vehicle uptake and sales of portable devices. To a lesser extent grid storage but is there anyone at all out there who is relying on this for their projections? I would treat the impact of small and large scale battery storage as all bonus. EVs seem to be the main driver for me.

So that point made, this is the agreement:
- Paris Agreement -
You can read about what is designed for in Article 2.
(a) seems to be about global temperature.
(b) objective to increases ability to adapt to adverse impacts of climate change (not sure how this objective has anything to do with lithium uptake)
(c) making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilient development. I think this is the point you are concerned most with.

So, how are countries CO2 emissions measured? This is an important consideration because if you don't need to disclose emissions from vehicles then it's all a moot point.

The link below is to a page on what the convention requires:
GHG data from UNFCCC
Basically it is by each parties own submission.

For Australia
Tracking Australia's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
I looked at a few of these and they seemed to be on energy production, industry processes and waste processing, agriculture, land use and forestry. I couldn't find a single sentence about governance of vehicle sales.

Australia has a few Acts, such as the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 and Australian National Registry of Emissions Units Act 2011. I may be corrected but I think both of these relate to operations of assets, land use and factors mentioned before, not country vehicle emissions.

Side Note: under these sorts of conditions Australia and USA could still achieve its targets by reducing emissions from its own assets (like closing power stations) while at the same time increasing exports of fossil fuels to overseas countries, provided it ties with their own strategies.

So back to actual lithium sales. The narrative for lithium is that there will be market share uptake on electric vehicles and portable electronic devices, not necessarily large scale battery storage. China's recent EV programme seems to be about controlling air pollution and clean air, rather than climate change which would mean it is not actually affected by the Paris agreement. I have not heard much of a story for the next big thing affecting lithium sales being battery storage, although those stories do exist, I don't think anyone has taken them seriously for their projections.

Lithium sales with the exception of China seem to be market driven, not Government driven. I haven't heard any stories from America about how the Government was planning on forcing a rollout of EV's (maybe I will be corrected on that as well) just that there was general public buzz over being able to have the option to buy them.

I guess in conclusion I don't care if USA withdraws from the agreement or not because I think the selling points of EVs and therefore lithium products will be economically related, not climate change related.

As always, dyor and GLTA