Matt's always big on cost effectiveness, so while stopping lead poisoning is definitely a good thing, this this seems like pretty small beer to the millions of people who die prematurely, mostly in developing countries, from the effects of air pollution from combustion (mostly from fossil fuels, but also from biomass).
As others have noted, lead-acid batteries are likely to disappear of the scene pretty quickly because LFP batteries are now so cheap, thanks to Chinese manufacturing.
Good article but I don’t understand why the title isn’t “Vehicles in Poor Countries are creating a huge Lead Pollution problem.” The chart within the article shows that to likely be the majority of the problem. Guess that would be too boring, but sloppy title feeds the perception that somehow solar is bad for the environment
I think as of 2026 Li-Ion batteries cost the same or less up front compared to lead acid. In 2025 ~50% of deployments in Africa were Li-ion and growing.
This seems basically solved on a go-forward basis as Li-ion will keep reducing in price vs a dead technology like lead-acid.
If you want to improve it investments that reduce Li-Ion market costs is the best bet.
In our defense, comments come primarily from argumentation. What's the argument to have here? There's not really a pro lead battery contingent to engage with.
SB is feeling really irrelevant these days. I didn’t bother to read this article not because I don’t think it’s a valuable topic but because it’s so far removed from anything anybody is going to do stuff about now, nor is it part of a sustained campaign to change the politics and understanding of an issue like Halina’s housing reporting.
At some point, if your a professional blowhard, you gotta blow at the issues of the day
I ran this by someone I know who runs a solar business in West Africa who had this to comment:
“This piece is out of date. No one uses lead-acid batteries anymore. The cost per kilowatt-hour of lithium batteries fell below that of lead-acid batteries in 2023. I know because I witnessed it. Currently, the cost of Lead-acid batteries runs roughly $150–$250/kWh, while lithium batteries cost $65 ex-factory in China, making them $70/kWh delivered. Considering that lithium batteries last 10 times as long as lead-acid batteries, the cost ratio falls to $ 6.5/kWh to $150 in favor of lithium. That's a cost ratio of more than 20:1 in favor of lithium.”
Yes, and this trend is set to intensify as Africans continue to move towards electric vehicles, as they are doing for example in Ethiopia, which has banned imports of internal combustion vehicles to avoid wasting currency on oil imports and make use of their shiny new hydro dam.
I came to make a similar comment. I don't know any African solar installers but I know the price of lithium batteries is going more or less straight down. Also mostly from china, same as the solar panels, very convenient. With any luck this will dramatically reduce new lead coming in, then they only have to wait 30 years for it to wash out of the environment and then watch crime plummet.
sounds right - certainly it's absolutely spot on for anything at scale. I can imagine some back marginal cases but the idea that one can take macro solar PV imports and back into mega usage of basically car batteries is nonsensical (leaving quite aside at least in my world what I see driving is industrial self-gen for the major megawatts
now from a technical PoV let me comment that I find the hand-wringing over the lead-acid batteries risk based off an extrapolation of
A. Solar panel imports as macro level on nationa
B. Extrapolation of that as household or vilage
C. with lead acid battery / village usage
To be several presumptions too far. And mistaking Africa for the Poverty Porn of Oxfam and the like.
From my professional side and data, I would caution that it appears to me that there are large drivers of business installations, which are not villages, not households, but grid connected business users in Sub-Saharan Africa who are doing Behind The Meter .5-2Mw range self-gen investment as subsitution away from the expensive diesel gensets that are de-rigeur in SSAfr due to utterly shitty grid reliability.
While certainly there are village and household, taking top-line explosion of PV panels for Africa and naively extrapolating village usage doesn't match what I see. [also ETA extrapolating car batter usage, see below]
Of course I have my own data bias as the world I operate on is industiral scale - utility scale. However re Africa, northern and souther, large drivers are business (industrial, commercial, service) doing substitution given battery (whether LI or LFP) and panel pricing now is a very tsolid grid pricing and grid stability mitigation investment. And very bankable for financing.
ETa
cleaned typos
also to 2nd a comment lower down on someone mention having checked in w W African operator, LI batteries have crushed on pricing even at retail never mind scale car batteries.
While I don't work on small stuff, it's absolutely no surprise to read.
This is massively misplaced hand-wringing overall I think
As a general matter, utility scale grids development not small scale ad-hocing is vastly more economically efficient. Quite leaving aside the usage of these batteries at a crappy village so-called mini-grid
soMY is correct: "If you live, as hundreds of millions of people do, in a village that does not have a functioning electrical grid, the goofy environmentalist dream of a decentralized power system based on rooftop solar is incredibly appealing. I sometimes hear this characterized as “leapfrogging,” as if getting power in that manner is genuinely superior to having centralized utilities. I don’t believe that’s true. But it is absolutely superior to having no electricity at all."
The best solution and quite actionable is utility scale but not via the shambolic state utilities.
Not the topic of this post. But for the first time in a while, I actually opened up Twitter and you had a tweet noting that your readers are more hawkish than you are and I have to say as one of your regular commentators...what in god's name are you talking about?!
I'd be lying if I said I read literally every single comment. But vast majority was pretty skeptical if indeed outright against this war we unnecessarily started/joined. The top comment regarding your "The anti-antisemitism movement is failing" post was decrying how much the ADL seems to have undermined their credibility by way too liberally using the antisemitism charge to shut down criticism (a take I agree with btw). I wouldn't say this comment is anti-Iran war per se, but I think it's reasonable to take this comment as a criticism of how some of the war's biggest supporters are acting (or have acted that helped get us to this point).
Your discussion post later in the day featured prominently a post noting that it's kind of silly to criticize Trump's complete lack of coherence regarding justification for war but not as some sort of defense of Trump's actions, but rather a criticism regarding the "cult" that has formed around Trump himself (again, agree with this). And most of the follow up comments were noting it is important to point this out because there are actually a lot of voters beyond the hardcore MAGA base who were "soft" supporters or "swing" voters and even if a small percentage of them can be swayed to "jump ship" so to speak that can be an enormous difference in swing districts and swing states (again a take I agree with).
Point being, given your comment section is quite active and varied (something I appreciate), not surprising just by statistical chance there are some hawkish voices in favor (or at least not outright hostile) to this war. However, it seems very clear to me majority of your commentators are the very least skeptical if not outright flat out against launching this war from what I can tell.
So seriously, where did you get this impression your commentators are so hawkish?
matt et al could implement a poll in the next post to get to the bottom of this, or we could do it in the comments. I am definitely more `hawkish' than matt on this one issue.
100%. Put a poll in your post before putting that take out there. Forget Twitter, I'd be just curious myself. As usual with issue polling, he'd have to be careful with question wording (going to guess you're going to get a lot more approval (including from me) if the question is "Do you approve of US/Israel military actions resulting in the death of top Iranian leadership" as opposed to "Do you approve generally of US/Israel military actions"? Not exactly shedding a tear for any leader who lets their security forces murder their own citizens completely unnecessarily).
But assuming he can get good question wording (and Matt I'm sure has contacts with polling firms) it would be interesting to see results. My guess would be 75% disapprove and 25% approve. But that's kind of as speculative as Matt's Twitter take.
If he's going to put takes out there, especially to journalists and pundits who respect his opinions and takes (and therefore may themselves get a wrong impression of how much support or non support for this military action there might be), let's get some more accuracy please.
'going to guess you're going to get a lot more approval (including from me) if the question is "Do you approve of US/Israel military actions resulting in the death of top Iranian leadership"'
If I see a question like that I'm going to say "no" not only because I'm contrarian but more that that kind of question is poison. It assumes we can put people's opinions into neat little boxes, existing independently from any other thought they might have and creating the impression that people are in fact simple minded.
If you're going to ask people's opinions on such weighty matters, you need to go all the way and lay out reasonable scenarios for them to consider. Oh, I dunno, maybe something like:
"Would you approve of US military actions resulting in the death of top Iranian leadership if it led to:
Oh I agree! In fact, I think you're buttressing my point about question wording; I deliberately worded the question the way I did precisely because its worded in such a way that leaves out context. Like this is precisely how you get various supporters of the President defending this action by absurdly saying if you're against this military action you're somehow pro Ayatollah.
I mean given the fact that this operation has already led to American military deaths means that its likely already been "not worth it" based just on your limited criteria even if the war stopped today.
I'll just follow up and say this all just further reinforces my main point and bafflement with Matt...where the heck is he getting this idea that is readers (or more accurately commentators) are more hawkish than he is? Like genuinely.
I assume from this article that a lot of the lead uptake problem is due to unsafe smelting rather than simply dumping old batteries in a landfill? Smelting without controls on emissions would release lead particulates and aerosols, much as leaded gas did when combusted. In this case, lead vapors escaping and being deposited around the smelters, esp. downwind. That lead would easily end up bioaccumulating in humans. Back when I did environmental geology for a living, I was measuring close to 1,000 ppm lead in Hawaiian soils and very high lead concentration in offshore reef corals downwind from urban Oahu. Indeed, we could figure out whether fish were being hatched inshore or offshore using their lead isotopic compositions.
Of course, running the world on lithium batteries will result in strip mining third world and underdeveloped countries for lithium, with its own environmental problems. MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel has advocated using modern, modularized nuclear reactors to augment renewables in the third world, given that nuclear power has a much smaller waste package per megawatt-hour due to the high energy density of nuclear fuel vs. chemical fuel. Is anyone listening?
The key will be achieving economies of scale with high rates of production. Unfortunately I don’t think the complexity of SMRs will allow for the same cost reductions as solar panels or batteries but at least we’re going to try.
Emanuel's point is it is impractical to power the third world solely on renewables. So to avoid more fossil fuel plants, use modern nuclear power as part of the solution.
I find lithium ion batteries hard to recycle/dispose of in DC and I bet a lot ends up in the trash because people don't want to go far out of their way for good eco-behavior.
My local Ace Hardware in DC is probably my best bet - but I have a recalled baby monitor with lithium-ion and damaged/defective batteries can't go to the normal ACE drop off point.
The DC gov seems to suggest my only option is an infrequently held hazardous waste collection pop-up event at RFK.
Not really a lithium-specific issue: DC bans the disposal of all single use and rechargeable batteries in the trash, as does California. (Many places let you put alkaline batteries directly in the trash, and that's only because they removed the mercury from the original battery chemistry following the Mercury-Containing and Rechargeable Battery Management Act of 1996.)
In Denver there are both recycling centers and places like Home Depot or Batteries Plus, but it kind of chaps me that I both have to go out of my way AND pay a fee. I already pay for trash and recycling; figure out how to make it possible to add batteries and e-waste to the pickup.
Yeah, agree. I think if cities really cared about the adverse effects of people tossing these things in household waste, they'd make it a lot easier for people to recycle/dispose.
What landfill would a DC resident toss e-waste into?
And typically they say not to put lithium-ion batteries in regular household trash because it can cause fires at waste facilities, as seems to happen fairly often:
That says there was, on average, less than one fire per day in waste facilities in the entire US *and* Canada. Some portion of those are thought to have been caused by Li-ion batteries. Doesn’t seems like a big problem.
You asked why not simply toss lithium-ion batteries into the trash, I pointed to a reason why you wouldn't want to do that. Not saying it is a big problem, just responding to your Q.
That's probably something to discuss with your council member then. The cities I've lived in have accepted e-waste at their residential dumps if you physically go there yourself. Dallas even has one for dangerous household chemicals if you bring them in.
I don't plan on chatting with my councilmember about this, just explaining why I wouldn't go to the dump. That might be good advice in some cities, but not in DC.
Matt's always big on cost effectiveness, so while stopping lead poisoning is definitely a good thing, this this seems like pretty small beer to the millions of people who die prematurely, mostly in developing countries, from the effects of air pollution from combustion (mostly from fossil fuels, but also from biomass).
As others have noted, lead-acid batteries are likely to disappear of the scene pretty quickly because LFP batteries are now so cheap, thanks to Chinese manufacturing.
Good article but I don’t understand why the title isn’t “Vehicles in Poor Countries are creating a huge Lead Pollution problem.” The chart within the article shows that to likely be the majority of the problem. Guess that would be too boring, but sloppy title feeds the perception that somehow solar is bad for the environment
I think as of 2026 Li-Ion batteries cost the same or less up front compared to lead acid. In 2025 ~50% of deployments in Africa were Li-ion and growing.
This seems basically solved on a go-forward basis as Li-ion will keep reducing in price vs a dead technology like lead-acid.
If you want to improve it investments that reduce Li-Ion market costs is the best bet.
Meta comment:
Political red meat post = >600 comments
Wonky technical post = <200 comments
the nerdy part of me = ☹️
In our defense, comments come primarily from argumentation. What's the argument to have here? There's not really a pro lead battery contingent to engage with.
It seems like even the wonks are dubious on the merits of this one
If only there were someone immersed in solar and battery technologies for whom money was of no concern that could help out in this situation.
Sorry, evil woke people made him mad by turning his child trans, so don't count on his help.
SB is feeling really irrelevant these days. I didn’t bother to read this article not because I don’t think it’s a valuable topic but because it’s so far removed from anything anybody is going to do stuff about now, nor is it part of a sustained campaign to change the politics and understanding of an issue like Halina’s housing reporting.
At some point, if your a professional blowhard, you gotta blow at the issues of the day
I ran this by someone I know who runs a solar business in West Africa who had this to comment:
“This piece is out of date. No one uses lead-acid batteries anymore. The cost per kilowatt-hour of lithium batteries fell below that of lead-acid batteries in 2023. I know because I witnessed it. Currently, the cost of Lead-acid batteries runs roughly $150–$250/kWh, while lithium batteries cost $65 ex-factory in China, making them $70/kWh delivered. Considering that lithium batteries last 10 times as long as lead-acid batteries, the cost ratio falls to $ 6.5/kWh to $150 in favor of lithium. That's a cost ratio of more than 20:1 in favor of lithium.”
Yes, and this trend is set to intensify as Africans continue to move towards electric vehicles, as they are doing for example in Ethiopia, which has banned imports of internal combustion vehicles to avoid wasting currency on oil imports and make use of their shiny new hydro dam.
I came to make a similar comment. I don't know any African solar installers but I know the price of lithium batteries is going more or less straight down. Also mostly from china, same as the solar panels, very convenient. With any luck this will dramatically reduce new lead coming in, then they only have to wait 30 years for it to wash out of the environment and then watch crime plummet.
sounds right - certainly it's absolutely spot on for anything at scale. I can imagine some back marginal cases but the idea that one can take macro solar PV imports and back into mega usage of basically car batteries is nonsensical (leaving quite aside at least in my world what I see driving is industrial self-gen for the major megawatts
Glad to see you write about this. Kevin Drum left a big hole to fill.
now from a technical PoV let me comment that I find the hand-wringing over the lead-acid batteries risk based off an extrapolation of
A. Solar panel imports as macro level on nationa
B. Extrapolation of that as household or vilage
C. with lead acid battery / village usage
To be several presumptions too far. And mistaking Africa for the Poverty Porn of Oxfam and the like.
From my professional side and data, I would caution that it appears to me that there are large drivers of business installations, which are not villages, not households, but grid connected business users in Sub-Saharan Africa who are doing Behind The Meter .5-2Mw range self-gen investment as subsitution away from the expensive diesel gensets that are de-rigeur in SSAfr due to utterly shitty grid reliability.
While certainly there are village and household, taking top-line explosion of PV panels for Africa and naively extrapolating village usage doesn't match what I see. [also ETA extrapolating car batter usage, see below]
Of course I have my own data bias as the world I operate on is industiral scale - utility scale. However re Africa, northern and souther, large drivers are business (industrial, commercial, service) doing substitution given battery (whether LI or LFP) and panel pricing now is a very tsolid grid pricing and grid stability mitigation investment. And very bankable for financing.
ETa
cleaned typos
also to 2nd a comment lower down on someone mention having checked in w W African operator, LI batteries have crushed on pricing even at retail never mind scale car batteries.
While I don't work on small stuff, it's absolutely no surprise to read.
This is massively misplaced hand-wringing overall I think
As a general matter, utility scale grids development not small scale ad-hocing is vastly more economically efficient. Quite leaving aside the usage of these batteries at a crappy village so-called mini-grid
soMY is correct: "If you live, as hundreds of millions of people do, in a village that does not have a functioning electrical grid, the goofy environmentalist dream of a decentralized power system based on rooftop solar is incredibly appealing. I sometimes hear this characterized as “leapfrogging,” as if getting power in that manner is genuinely superior to having centralized utilities. I don’t believe that’s true. But it is absolutely superior to having no electricity at all."
The best solution and quite actionable is utility scale but not via the shambolic state utilities.
GiveWell donors assemble!
These articles are getting shorter and shorter!
Matt,
Your voice being raised about this issue could make a real difference. Thank you.
Not the topic of this post. But for the first time in a while, I actually opened up Twitter and you had a tweet noting that your readers are more hawkish than you are and I have to say as one of your regular commentators...what in god's name are you talking about?!
I'd be lying if I said I read literally every single comment. But vast majority was pretty skeptical if indeed outright against this war we unnecessarily started/joined. The top comment regarding your "The anti-antisemitism movement is failing" post was decrying how much the ADL seems to have undermined their credibility by way too liberally using the antisemitism charge to shut down criticism (a take I agree with btw). I wouldn't say this comment is anti-Iran war per se, but I think it's reasonable to take this comment as a criticism of how some of the war's biggest supporters are acting (or have acted that helped get us to this point).
Your discussion post later in the day featured prominently a post noting that it's kind of silly to criticize Trump's complete lack of coherence regarding justification for war but not as some sort of defense of Trump's actions, but rather a criticism regarding the "cult" that has formed around Trump himself (again, agree with this). And most of the follow up comments were noting it is important to point this out because there are actually a lot of voters beyond the hardcore MAGA base who were "soft" supporters or "swing" voters and even if a small percentage of them can be swayed to "jump ship" so to speak that can be an enormous difference in swing districts and swing states (again a take I agree with).
Point being, given your comment section is quite active and varied (something I appreciate), not surprising just by statistical chance there are some hawkish voices in favor (or at least not outright hostile) to this war. However, it seems very clear to me majority of your commentators are the very least skeptical if not outright flat out against launching this war from what I can tell.
So seriously, where did you get this impression your commentators are so hawkish?
Are you conflating "commentators are hawkish" with "commentators are more hawkish than I am?"
That is to say, Matt could be *very dovish* and therefore the latter statement could be true while the former statement would not be.
matt et al could implement a poll in the next post to get to the bottom of this, or we could do it in the comments. I am definitely more `hawkish' than matt on this one issue.
100%. Put a poll in your post before putting that take out there. Forget Twitter, I'd be just curious myself. As usual with issue polling, he'd have to be careful with question wording (going to guess you're going to get a lot more approval (including from me) if the question is "Do you approve of US/Israel military actions resulting in the death of top Iranian leadership" as opposed to "Do you approve generally of US/Israel military actions"? Not exactly shedding a tear for any leader who lets their security forces murder their own citizens completely unnecessarily).
But assuming he can get good question wording (and Matt I'm sure has contacts with polling firms) it would be interesting to see results. My guess would be 75% disapprove and 25% approve. But that's kind of as speculative as Matt's Twitter take.
If he's going to put takes out there, especially to journalists and pundits who respect his opinions and takes (and therefore may themselves get a wrong impression of how much support or non support for this military action there might be), let's get some more accuracy please.
'going to guess you're going to get a lot more approval (including from me) if the question is "Do you approve of US/Israel military actions resulting in the death of top Iranian leadership"'
If I see a question like that I'm going to say "no" not only because I'm contrarian but more that that kind of question is poison. It assumes we can put people's opinions into neat little boxes, existing independently from any other thought they might have and creating the impression that people are in fact simple minded.
If you're going to ask people's opinions on such weighty matters, you need to go all the way and lay out reasonable scenarios for them to consider. Oh, I dunno, maybe something like:
"Would you approve of US military actions resulting in the death of top Iranian leadership if it led to:
-- 0 American deaths (Y or N)
-- 1 American death (Y or N)
-- up to 10 American deaths (Y or N)
-- 10-100 American deaths (Y or N)
-- more than 100 American deaths (Y or N)"
Oh I agree! In fact, I think you're buttressing my point about question wording; I deliberately worded the question the way I did precisely because its worded in such a way that leaves out context. Like this is precisely how you get various supporters of the President defending this action by absurdly saying if you're against this military action you're somehow pro Ayatollah.
I mean given the fact that this operation has already led to American military deaths means that its likely already been "not worth it" based just on your limited criteria even if the war stopped today.
I'll just follow up and say this all just further reinforces my main point and bafflement with Matt...where the heck is he getting this idea that is readers (or more accurately commentators) are more hawkish than he is? Like genuinely.
I assume from this article that a lot of the lead uptake problem is due to unsafe smelting rather than simply dumping old batteries in a landfill? Smelting without controls on emissions would release lead particulates and aerosols, much as leaded gas did when combusted. In this case, lead vapors escaping and being deposited around the smelters, esp. downwind. That lead would easily end up bioaccumulating in humans. Back when I did environmental geology for a living, I was measuring close to 1,000 ppm lead in Hawaiian soils and very high lead concentration in offshore reef corals downwind from urban Oahu. Indeed, we could figure out whether fish were being hatched inshore or offshore using their lead isotopic compositions.
Of course, running the world on lithium batteries will result in strip mining third world and underdeveloped countries for lithium, with its own environmental problems. MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel has advocated using modern, modularized nuclear reactors to augment renewables in the third world, given that nuclear power has a much smaller waste package per megawatt-hour due to the high energy density of nuclear fuel vs. chemical fuel. Is anyone listening?
Ontario is https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1006638/ontario-investing-1-billion-to-build-small-modular-reactors-at-darlington
The key will be achieving economies of scale with high rates of production. Unfortunately I don’t think the complexity of SMRs will allow for the same cost reductions as solar panels or batteries but at least we’re going to try.
Emanuel's point is it is impractical to power the third world solely on renewables. So to avoid more fossil fuel plants, use modern nuclear power as part of the solution.
https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Nuclear_Salvation.pdf
Sounds like the perfect being the enemy of the good type solution to me.
No solution is anywhere near perfect. Some are highly imperfect.
I find lithium ion batteries hard to recycle/dispose of in DC and I bet a lot ends up in the trash because people don't want to go far out of their way for good eco-behavior.
My local Ace Hardware in DC is probably my best bet - but I have a recalled baby monitor with lithium-ion and damaged/defective batteries can't go to the normal ACE drop off point.
The DC gov seems to suggest my only option is an infrequently held hazardous waste collection pop-up event at RFK.
Not really a lithium-specific issue: DC bans the disposal of all single use and rechargeable batteries in the trash, as does California. (Many places let you put alkaline batteries directly in the trash, and that's only because they removed the mercury from the original battery chemistry following the Mercury-Containing and Rechargeable Battery Management Act of 1996.)
This shows battery recycling drop-points in DC:
https://batterynetwork.org/state-recycling-laws/washington-dc/
In Denver there are both recycling centers and places like Home Depot or Batteries Plus, but it kind of chaps me that I both have to go out of my way AND pay a fee. I already pay for trash and recycling; figure out how to make it possible to add batteries and e-waste to the pickup.
Yeah, agree. I think if cities really cared about the adverse effects of people tossing these things in household waste, they'd make it a lot easier for people to recycle/dispose.
Why not simply toss the stuff into a landfill?
What landfill would a DC resident toss e-waste into?
And typically they say not to put lithium-ion batteries in regular household trash because it can cause fires at waste facilities, as seems to happen fairly often:
https://www.dwswa.org/recycle-reuse-articles/2018/11/26/is-your-trash-causing-fires-common-batteries-lead-to-facility-fires
That says there was, on average, less than one fire per day in waste facilities in the entire US *and* Canada. Some portion of those are thought to have been caused by Li-ion batteries. Doesn’t seems like a big problem.
You asked why not simply toss lithium-ion batteries into the trash, I pointed to a reason why you wouldn't want to do that. Not saying it is a big problem, just responding to your Q.
Ok, fair. The city probably should cancel all other recycling and devote the funds to batteries, then. At least there’s a small justification for it.
Have to go to your dump with the E-waste.
DC has two waste transfer stations (one temporarily closed) that accepts certain items for disposal, but e-waste is expressly not accepted there.
That's probably something to discuss with your council member then. The cities I've lived in have accepted e-waste at their residential dumps if you physically go there yourself. Dallas even has one for dangerous household chemicals if you bring them in.
I don't plan on chatting with my councilmember about this, just explaining why I wouldn't go to the dump. That might be good advice in some cities, but not in DC.