In the episode “Mudd’s Women” in the original series Star Trek, Harry Mudd and the three women he was taking to sell as wives to settlers are detoured to a planet inhabited solely by dilithium crystals miners. Captain Mudd tells the three women that they’ll now be wives to “lithium miners, rich lithium miners”. Who knew that this might actually be prescient?

As President Biden and his supervisors Administration push zero-emission automobiles, and have proposed to ban the sale of gasoline-or-diesel-powered personal vehicles by 2035, many people have said that this could only drive up the cost of such vehicles. 2035 is still a long (?) way off, but sales of electric vehicles in China are already having an effect. From The Wall Street Journal:

Electric-Car Demand Pushes Lithium Prices to Records

Driven by a surge in Chinese electric-vehicles sales, the sharp rise in a key commodity for batteries could slow adoption of EVs globally

By Joe Wallace and Hardika Singh | Wednesday, September 21, 2022 | 5:30 AM EDT

Surging prices for lithium are intensifying a race between auto makers to lock up supplies and raising concerns that a shortage of the battery metal could slow the adoption of electric vehicles.

Lithium carbonate prices in China, the benchmark in the fast-growing market, stand at about $71,000 a metric ton, according to price-assessment firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. That is almost four times as high as a year ago and just below the record set this March in yuan terms.

Lithium is an outlier in commodity markets that have broadly retreated in recent months, reflecting gloom over an economic outlook dimmed by the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases and stuttering growth in China and Europe. Brent crude oil and copper—commodities used throughout industry and transportation—have fallen about 15% and 7%, respectively, this quarter. Even European natural-gas prices, propelled higher for much of 2022 by Russia’s move to cut supplies, have dropped by 10% over the past month.

But lithium keeps rising, driven by a pickup in electric-vehicles sales in China, the world’s biggest market for EVs. Car purchases jumped after Shanghai eased Covid-19 lockdowns in June, juicing demand for lithium-ion batteries. The China Passenger Car Association forecasts six million new EVs will be sold in the country this year, double the 2021 level.

“Lithium is really following the Chinese EV market and that’s just taking off,” said Edward Meir, a metals consultant at brokerage ED&F Capital Markets. “This is a preview of what could await us in the U.S.”

Draining supplies further, power outages caused by a heat wave in central China curbed output of refined lithium carbonate and hydroxide, which go into battery cathodes. Suppliers in Sichuan province—which has a third of China’s lithium processing capacity—closed factories for several days and ran down inventories to meet their sales commitments, said Rystad Energy analyst Susan Zou.

There’s a lot more at the original.

The final quoted paragraph notes a temporary problem, though one which could always recur. But the steadily increasing demand for lithium, something the proposed policies in the United States will only exacerbate, is not going to be a temporary thing.

Plug-in electric vehicles are already expensive. In Economics 101 theory, increased demand generates increased production and supply, which should bring the costs of electric cars down, but that’s theory only. The basic theory does not account for shortages of essential materials for increasing production and supply, and the lithium shortage will not be the only one which will force the prices of electric cars higher. For example, as the demand for electricity greatly increases, and more transmission lines are needed to get the required power to homes across the nation, the price of the aluminum used in power transmission lines. The price of aluminum is already increasing, due to the increased demand for canned goods, and it can only go higher.

No one who knows the first thing about economics can be surprised at this, but it sometimes appears that the environmentalists don’t know that first thing. One thing is certain: they don’t actually care about the economics of what they want, and don’t care about how the costs of their proposals will affect Other people, especially the working-class people of this country.