Those who want to learn more about lead poisoning from lead-acid battery recycling and what to do about it should subscribe to Hugo Smith's fantastic Substack:
Yep I was also going to comment something like "seems like an NGO that runs a similar recycling program as exists in the US could be cheap and effective". Luckily smart people are already doing it!
I think the point of the article was to provide MY with an opportunity to flail artlessly against renewable energy in New England under the cover of a humanitarian argument. As you note, safe lead-acid battery recycling is a solved technical problem that needs to be extended to Africa as soon as possible.
"Many American environmentalists want to shift to a 100 percent renewable grid while also persuading residents of the northeastern United States to switch to heat pumps. Building a stable, winter-peaking electricity system based on solar panels at the latitude of Massachusetts carries specific challenges that simply aren’t relevant in many African countries."
Every movement has its nuts and I'm sure some environmentalists in MA would like to base the grid on solar, but the environmentalists in MA actually making policy are advocating for a 60% clean grid by 2030 and an 80% clean grid by 2050.
So no, not a 100% renewable grid anytime soon. MA law doesn't target a generation mix, but policy-makers believe they'll need about as much offshore wind as they need solar to realistically get to that 80% number (particularly due to winter loads). MA is actively signing contracts to help get gigawatts of offshore wind built. They're also working to secure lots of Canadian hydro for balancing. To round that out, the MA House of Representatives recently passed a comprehensive energy affordability and energy strategy bill (H 5151) that overturns the ban on nuclear power in MA (nuclear is around 20% of ISO-NE generation). Governor Healy's 2025 plan calls for the state to explore “cutting-edge nuclear technologies” and to reduce barriers to deploying advanced nuclear approaches.
So no, MA environmentalists are not planning to base the grid on solar power as Matt's comment above suggests. The MA plan is to get to 80% clean by 2050 using a mix of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear, balanced with up to 20% natural gas.
Growing up in MA in the 2010s, I knew a lot of activists who were pushing for 1.5 C warming, net 0 2025, divest fossil fuels, stop KXL etc. and I’m sure many would still love to do it, even if they realize it’s politically infeasible. At the same time, most people are broadly sympathetic to the need to fight climate change, and could easily fit under the broad label of “environmentalist”. The fact that MA landed on a sensible climate politics is as much because activists aren’t making policy as because of any special sanity on their part.
Yes. This is certainly true and I met my fair share of these same folks growing up in MA a couple decades before you did. Still, I still think what Matt did there is nut picking. He's echoing things powerless pseudo-activists shout while throwing paint on artwork or blocking highway traffic at rush hour. These performance artists just aren't the folks driving policy and aside from the shouting, don't really have anything serious to say about climate solutions. They just haven't done any work to understand what can get us from here to there. No one is listening to them to inform policy because not only is what they're shouting politically toxic, it also isn't technically workable.
Meanwhile, more serious activists in MA did that policy work and activism and have gotten their solutions codified into law. Trying to get in a dig about solar in MA by highlighting what powerless performance artists are saying without mentioning what the folks driving policy have done is unfair to the actual environmentalists there.
Well said. I wish MY took these people working the hard problems more seriously and reduced the time he takes dragging braindead activists through the mud. Maybe that would actually help us make more progress.
Matt's deeply unfamiliar with the long-term energy transition policies being developed in MA and the other Northeast states. He's written multiple pieces demonstrating this, including one that advocated for building loads of new gas transmission lines because gas is temporarily cheap right now. I find it very frustrating, because understanding long-term policy planning used to be a thing that Matt really specialized in, now he seems disinterested.
I find it such a huge problem whenever there is reporting about what “environmentalists” advocate. On almost any issue that is environmentally relevant, there are lots of considerations (eg, desert tortoise habitat and greenhouse gas emissions), and there are often environmentalists on both sides of many policy debates, so saying “environmentalists” support or oppose the thing is often heavily misleading.
That's fair and I'm actually sympathetic to Matt's railing against "the groups" and some of the crazy in that space that does have political power.
If his critique wasn't so specific and didn't mention MA, I really wouldn't have objected. Also, part of the reason I took issue with what he wrote was he also did this tweet a couple of days ago that I think falsely characterized the Northeast's efforts to get offshore wind built.
This is where I think a serious activist like yourself can be frustrated because they don't recognize the broader interplay between politicians and non serious activists.
Matt sees this dynamic in NIMBY where the cost of housing is too high, so activist say we should have set asides for low income households, but this literally makes housing less likely raising the costs of housing. The very thing that activists say they want to correct.
He then sees similar things happening in the energy markets in the NE where the population in generally more liberal, want renewable energy, but then activists often fight the very things that would make that more feasible (offshore wind, electrical grid build out, etc.) for aesthetic reasons and end up making things worse by shutting down nuclear power plants, or stopping hydro power from Canada.
You say that no one is listening to these activists, but then there are things happening in the real world because of them.
"They just haven't done any work to understand what can get us from here to there."
This is the essential point, which gets obscured when MY tosses off ad hoc snipes about renewables because it scratches some weird brain itch. There are (several) ways to get from "here" to net zero in a rapid-but-perhaps-not-optimal time-frame. We can have informed debates about how fast gas can be replaced, how land use laws might need to be reformed to accelerate adoption, etc. Fierce advocates for expanding fossil fuel use and fierce advocates for the immediate cessation of all FF use are equally unrealistic and unhelpful.
I wonder if Matt is broadly correct about the DC environment and over his skis when he extends that trend to regional and local politics. I have no idea about the former.
The fact that MA landed on sensible climate politics is because they sat down and did the engineering work to figure out what a largely-clean grid looks like. The same is true for all of the major states that have long-term transition plans. The only place where activists are actually running these long-term utility planning activities is in the Substack imagination. I find this kind of political sniping unhelpful *when there is real engineering going on.*
But all the "green" sources are either dreamware, face increasing pushback (offshore wind, utility-scale solar in western MA) and are unviable without special favors in permitting and pricing, or are just "let's make it someone else's problem" (overriding the very strong objection of Maine affected to build the NECEC).
That's 5,831 MW nameplate of new offshore wind that'll be finished next year, at a capacity factor of about 50%. Vermont Yankee only produced ~620 MWe. There's another 6,271 MW about-to-construct wind that's frozen by Trump for the next three years, and the correct description of that is not "dreamware", but instead "criminal extortion by Trump that deprives the US grid of easily-constructed new energy at a time we need it, and raises energy prices across the whole country." Adding to the misery, Trump isn't going to construct any new nuclear plants during his term, either.
Realistically how much of that power is going to make it to New England though? Especially from all the way down in Virginia.
And I'd imagine the output from Empire and Sunrise is mostly going to get eaten up by NYC, which has the same decarbonization aspirations, and plenty of its own lost nuclear capacity that needs replacing, thanks to the loss of Indian Point (which BTW it's only fair for you to account for, if you're going to credit NY offshore wind projects to New England).
And then you have to take into account that 50% capacity factor is significantly worse than the lost nuclear plants.
Revolution and Vineyard are 1500 MW nameplate, combined. Offshore wind has about a 50% capacity factor. So those two projects still exceed Vermont Yankee’s yearly generation, and nearly triple it when the wind is blowing. There’s also another 4,270 nameplate sitting in approved-but-frozen projects off MA’s coast, that will get built when Trump leaves. I know there’s a narrative elsewhere in this thread that Trump’s deliberate blocking of wind projects is a knock on wind, and that this is nuclear’s big chance. But actually it just reflects the fact that wind is practical and can displace fossil usage quickly, which is why Trump is blocking it (and doesn’t care about nuclear, which certainly won’t get built in his term.)
Of those, only Vineyard Wind is in MA, and it's already caused 10 of millions of dollars in damages, been shut down multiple times, and is only still operating because a judge enjoined the shut-down orders.
The ISO New England grid doesn't really care very much about whether something is located in RI or MA, and there's plenty of interconnects with the other state grids. The shutdown orders were because of a blade failure, which was fixed, and Trump being an asshole, which hasn't. You're not going to win any converts on this site by portraying "Trump being a terrorist" as the fault of these wind projects.
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.”
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
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'm not at all sure lithium-based batteries are better. Lithium is toxic, although less so than lead, and there's more fire risk. It seems like a big push to make lead-acid battery recycling cheaper than free would be the ideal solution, and in overall terms not that expensive.
(I have a brother-in-law from Kenya, and building solar power systems on his family's houses is one of the things he sends money for/does when he goes home. Having a refrigerator, running water, and a cell phone makes a massive difference not just to convenience but to health, and a few solar panels and a couple car batteries can do that.)
Most of the weight of lead acid batteries is lead. Most of the weight of lithium ion batteries is not lithium, but graphite, which is harmless. Lithium ion batteries are much less toxic.
Also more efficient, with deeper discharge per cycle and 8x-10x the cycle life of lead-acids before they are recycled. This means that a new LFP will cost more upfront, but will be significantly cheaper than a lead acid per kWh stored over the lifetimes of the two batteries. This is a micro-financing problem, which has been addressed in many places with pay-as-you-go financing of solar and battery systems.
Lead-acid battery recycling is already cheaper than free: it’s super profitable. The problem is that when not done safely, it results in a lot of lead pollution and lead poisoning. See this NYT piece for a chilling account of some factories that I've seen firsthand:
Great question! Nobody's answered this definitively. I ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on what I know about the factories that I have visited in Nigeria, and it seems like the comparatively safer recyclers are about 6% less cost-efficient than the unsafe recyclers. This translates to about a $4 increase in the cost of lead-acid batteries for consumers in the U.S. or any other country that imports lead from Nigeria.
I think even backing away a hair from this, the problem is ~*~living in a society~*~.
I am completely talking out of my butt here, but I don't get the impression that there is a serious recurring problem ensuring that actors in developed nations recycle their lead-acid batteries. It's such a no-brainer from every direction. But to some extent this depends on some basic state capacity, and an undergirding belief among the population in the general legitimacy of the state. Otherwise it really is every man for himself, and bad outcomes ensue in all kinds of areas.
Whether the answer is lead-acid battery recycling or pushing for lithium-ion batteries, this seems like a great direction for something like GiveWell to promote. In other words, the answer is money coming from rich nations' people like us.
Lithium-based batteries are more efficient and last much, much longer. The less recycling, the better. The only problem with them is that they are expensive even for first-world households.
Yep. Much, arguably most, of what's in a house is toxic as hell when it combusts. Housewrap, vinyl flooring, PVC pipe, carpets, foam insulation and air sealants, virtually all structural adhesives, surface treatments, OSB's glue components... not to mention the immense amount of plastics in the electronics, clothing, bedding, and furniture that fill them.
It's not the only problem. ~ 200k vehicles are totaled every year due to flood damage. In salt water flooding scenarios the spontaneous fire risk jumps to 10%. EVs are still just 3% of the total carpark but at much high EV penetration rates we don't know how we'll process these flood damaged EVs safely. The insurance industry also doesn't know how they're handle the fire liability within resi policies.
What is the target of this message? Is it like a give well style effective altruism campaign?
Like found myself nodding along and you end with this is tractable but unless this is written for African governments of state I’m not sure what people are supposed to do with this Information given how popular humanitarian aid programs are these days.
He's platforming the idea and bringing it to light. Then he argues for why we should care. That's his role in slow boring of hard boards. He's trying to start convincing people this is an idea they should be aware of and view as something worth addressing.
That's exactly right! I think this is exactly the sort of topic that if covered in a traditional news outlet, would be dry and probably not generate many clicks. But because Matt has a built in rep as a good explainer for these sort of issues, I think automatically generates more interest.
With respect, I do not think this would have been published had it not provided MY with an opportunity (however tenuous) to gratuitously attack renewable energy and renewable energy advocates in the US, and to blame "solar" for lead poisoning in the title of the piece. It is obvious to anybody who has been to equatorial Africa that there is both far too little solar and far too many high-emitting internal combustion vehicles -- which are the source of the lead acid batteries that are being used second-hand and then recycled unsafely. Even the chart shared in the article makes the point that it is vehicles + motorcycles that are responsible for the majority of estimated ULAB (the vast majority if you use the low end estimate for OGS ULAB).
Did I miss the MY article entitled "Internal Combustion Vehicle Batteries in Poor Countries are Creating a Huge Lead Hazard"?
I have my quibbles with the drive-by shot at 100% RE advocates, but I think it is entirely fair to frame this as a solar problem. Yes, vehicles are currently a much larger source, but as the 🚀🚀 graphs show, solar is the primary source of *growth* of the problem and could match or even exceed vehicles if we don't figure this out.
There might be an opportunity for SB to improve by starting with a "why should you care / who is this for" when it's not so obvious.
Relatedly, sometimes it feels like X discourse is an important motivator or framing for the day's post, and when that's the case I also feel like I'm missing something.
Are most articles written for anyone? Obviously it would be good if Trump was a Slow Boring subscriber and he was acting on them but he probably isn't and most of the readers can't do anything policy wise.
And he's very scrupulous in maintaining his image as incorruptible! He couldn't possibly accept such a gift! But a few billion in Crypto? It's not even real money!
I guess the target is me, because I found it interesting to be informed of a problem in the world I was unaware, potential solutions, and its connection to the changing technological and economic landscape. And I pay to read interesting things!
I'm the target audience for this. I care about global health and poverty issues. I can't do very much about it, but I donate to Givewell. I could support a charity doing lead remediation through Charity Entrepreneurship, for example. But more generally, I want to know how the world is doing, and that includes the 1.5 billion Africans in developing economies.
I don't mean to minimize the risks of lead poisoning and I don't see this is a complete non-issue, but as best as I can tell, this paper may be overblowing the risk somewhat, given more recent deployment trends.
Apparently, a lot of the lead acid getting deployed up to now was in very small systems in the $50-200 price range that use second-hand lead acid batteries. I'm not sure how often new lead acid batteries get spec'd in for these deployments, especially with larger sized systems.
Table 1 in the article compares upfront cost per kwh for each chemistry, but that table ignores usable capacity and only compares battery stated capacity. In order to get 10 kwh of usable capacity, you need about 12 kwh of lithium versus about 20 kwh of lead acid because lead acid doesn't support the depth of discharge that lithium ion supports. Once you adjust system cost for this reality, upfront costs for lithium ion are roughly the same as lead acid today, with lithium ion costs are declining rapidly. Also, as the table shows, lifetime LCOS for lithium Ion is already much lower than lead acid.
So imo, this is mostly just a supply chain lag as the market catches up to the new pricing realities. Within a few years, I'd guess there will be no new lead acid batteries deployed because the economics (even upfront costs) are so much worse than lithium ion.
Yes - frankly this is nonsense handwringing over all about what is realy a small-scale marginal case, but there seems to be a strong lefty orientation to finding something to hand-wring over.
My granular expertise is minimal, but I majored in chemistry (not philosophy); as a former neuroscientist with hobbyist's interest in lead toxicity, I want to add my 2 cents worth:
1. Lead is indeed bad.
2. US pollution standards tend to be excessive. In a context of perfect health, many are reasonable for our fabulously wealthy country, but sort of silly/borderline counterproductive for desperately poor countries.
3. Like other toxins, lead doesn't jump out of a garbage dump and attack you. It has to get into you to cause harm. The main routes are airborne (leaded gasoline, smokestacks) and oral (e.g. dust particles in your kitchen from smoke and paint, lead in your pipes, contaminated spices and medicines, etc.)
Accordingly, while lead batteries are a problem, the practical issues relate to safer forms of disposal and recycling, and US-level rules are unreasonable for impoverished countries.
As the OP properly noted, one of the reasons poor countries are poor is because their brains don't work good because of the lead. There is no safe (or "silly") level of lead toxicity:
"Whatever economy you think tolerating lead poisoning is going to obtain for poor countries is almost certainly a false one."
I didn't read this as what he was saying. In the US where gdp per capita is over 90k, then spending $500 per person to create incredibly low lead levels makes sense. In many countries in Africa where gdp per capita is under $2000, spending $500 to reach incredibly low rates doesn't make sense when you could achieve 95% of the same effect by only spending $5 per capita but have a bit higher lead levels.
Look, I'm not a fanatic about this stuff-- I realize that achieving lead-free existence is physically impossible! But just about everything I've read about the economic effects of lead remediation suggests that the costs are normally tiny compared to the benefits at any kind of plausible societal scale, often lopsidedly so. And so when I read "getting rid of lead beyond [insert arbitrary threshold] is silly for poor countries" my reaction is that that's an extraordinary claim and ought to be supported by extraordinary evidence.
If full lead remediation could raise that GDP per capita to $3000 and partial lead remediation would only raise it to $2950 (95% of the same effect) then spending a one-time extra $495 to do the full deal would be worth it.
The US and Germany have a intervention standard at 35 µg/L, while Japan is at 40, France is at 50. Its generally accepted that costs rise dramatically the lower you go. If you are a poor country with limited resources and rates currently at 94, should you dedicate resources to get to 50 and then move on to other pressing needs, or should you dedicate far more money to try and get to 35 and make other pressing needs wait?
Because I think that's the critical point - these countries don't have unlimited resources. That extra $495 you are asking them to spend has a very long list of other needs (vaccinations, better medical facilities, nutrition, solar panels, etc.) that they could spend that money on.
Vaccinations are probably more cost-effective than lead removal (although they also tend to be more financially supported, since developed countries have a direct incentive to slow global disease spread in a way they don't with lead poisoning). I doubt any of the other suggested spends are unless you have gotten lead levels down to developed-world levels. It's that bad.
Obviously this all depends on how the actual proposals math out, but at a first impression I am skeptical.
"I doubt any of the other suggested spends are unless you have gotten lead levels down to developed-world levels. It's that bad."
You're saying that NO other government budget item is as important as lead removal besides vaccines?
By that logic, it would be better to lay off all government workers besides people working on lead removal for as long as it takes to get it down? No police, judges, sanitation workers, etc. - its all going to lead removal?
Clearly this isn't true. Government expenditures are almost always involve trade offs. Going from 60 µg/L to 40 might cost 10x as much as going from 100µg/L to 60 because it generally gets way more expensive as you go. It can be very cost effective to do the first stretch, but lose that as a country get's lower and lower.
The dynamics really are different in countries stuck in an extreme-poverty trap. I don't find it an extraordinary claim at all. The studies you mention may well be valid all the way down to middle-income countries (i.e. most of the world today), but different (and very unfortunate) economic dynamics dominate in the kinds of countries that don't have a nationwide electrical grid.
In particular, there's a series of bottlenecks that prevent "cashing in" the population's health/education status into GDP. Even if everybody in the village gets 20% smarter because lead was removed, that doesn't change the fact that the only job available is subsistence farming.
I recommend checking out Ken Opalo's substack if you're interested in takes about those bottlenecks and how foreign aid funders should think about addressing them.
Probably cheaper and maybe safer to give them money to recycle lead-acid batteries properly (basically, filter the exhaust gas so it doesn't spread lead everywhere.). This is a solved problem - the US recycles lead-acid batteries routinely.
It's a technical problem based on development economics I know nothing about. My guess is that current resources are so limited that lead-acid batteries are the way to go for now, but if so, more thought needs to be put into the final part of the cycle.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Those who want to learn more about lead poisoning from lead-acid battery recycling and what to do about it should subscribe to Hugo Smith's fantastic Substack:
https://leadbatteries.substack.com
There are a few organizations that are working on this, including the Lead-Acid Battery Recycling Initiative and the Partnership for Battery Action:
https://www.labrecyclinginitiative.com
https://globaldevincubator.org/initiative/partnership-for-battery-action-pb-action
Great resource, thank you for sharing.
Thank you. I came to the comments to ask this question, and you have already answered it!
Yep I was also going to comment something like "seems like an NGO that runs a similar recycling program as exists in the US could be cheap and effective". Luckily smart people are already doing it!
I think the point of the article was to provide MY with an opportunity to flail artlessly against renewable energy in New England under the cover of a humanitarian argument. As you note, safe lead-acid battery recycling is a solved technical problem that needs to be extended to Africa as soon as possible.
Wow, you sure got him.
Those who want to learn more about [the effects of] lead... should read the classic writings of Kevin Drum (https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/).
This piece should have been held and pulished in three days in his honor. He died 3/7 last year. I used to read him every day. Rest in peace.
"Many American environmentalists want to shift to a 100 percent renewable grid while also persuading residents of the northeastern United States to switch to heat pumps. Building a stable, winter-peaking electricity system based on solar panels at the latitude of Massachusetts carries specific challenges that simply aren’t relevant in many African countries."
Every movement has its nuts and I'm sure some environmentalists in MA would like to base the grid on solar, but the environmentalists in MA actually making policy are advocating for a 60% clean grid by 2030 and an 80% clean grid by 2050.
So no, not a 100% renewable grid anytime soon. MA law doesn't target a generation mix, but policy-makers believe they'll need about as much offshore wind as they need solar to realistically get to that 80% number (particularly due to winter loads). MA is actively signing contracts to help get gigawatts of offshore wind built. They're also working to secure lots of Canadian hydro for balancing. To round that out, the MA House of Representatives recently passed a comprehensive energy affordability and energy strategy bill (H 5151) that overturns the ban on nuclear power in MA (nuclear is around 20% of ISO-NE generation). Governor Healy's 2025 plan calls for the state to explore “cutting-edge nuclear technologies” and to reduce barriers to deploying advanced nuclear approaches.
So no, MA environmentalists are not planning to base the grid on solar power as Matt's comment above suggests. The MA plan is to get to 80% clean by 2050 using a mix of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear, balanced with up to 20% natural gas.
Growing up in MA in the 2010s, I knew a lot of activists who were pushing for 1.5 C warming, net 0 2025, divest fossil fuels, stop KXL etc. and I’m sure many would still love to do it, even if they realize it’s politically infeasible. At the same time, most people are broadly sympathetic to the need to fight climate change, and could easily fit under the broad label of “environmentalist”. The fact that MA landed on a sensible climate politics is as much because activists aren’t making policy as because of any special sanity on their part.
Yes. This is certainly true and I met my fair share of these same folks growing up in MA a couple decades before you did. Still, I still think what Matt did there is nut picking. He's echoing things powerless pseudo-activists shout while throwing paint on artwork or blocking highway traffic at rush hour. These performance artists just aren't the folks driving policy and aside from the shouting, don't really have anything serious to say about climate solutions. They just haven't done any work to understand what can get us from here to there. No one is listening to them to inform policy because not only is what they're shouting politically toxic, it also isn't technically workable.
Meanwhile, more serious activists in MA did that policy work and activism and have gotten their solutions codified into law. Trying to get in a dig about solar in MA by highlighting what powerless performance artists are saying without mentioning what the folks driving policy have done is unfair to the actual environmentalists there.
Well said. I wish MY took these people working the hard problems more seriously and reduced the time he takes dragging braindead activists through the mud. Maybe that would actually help us make more progress.
Matt's deeply unfamiliar with the long-term energy transition policies being developed in MA and the other Northeast states. He's written multiple pieces demonstrating this, including one that advocated for building loads of new gas transmission lines because gas is temporarily cheap right now. I find it very frustrating, because understanding long-term policy planning used to be a thing that Matt really specialized in, now he seems disinterested.
"Uninterested" but otherwise, great comment.
I find it such a huge problem whenever there is reporting about what “environmentalists” advocate. On almost any issue that is environmentally relevant, there are lots of considerations (eg, desert tortoise habitat and greenhouse gas emissions), and there are often environmentalists on both sides of many policy debates, so saying “environmentalists” support or oppose the thing is often heavily misleading.
"No one is listening to them to inform policy because not only is what they're shouting politically toxic, it also isn't technically workable."
POLICY wise maybe no one is listening to them, POLITICALLY there are many people listening to them.
That's fair and I'm actually sympathetic to Matt's railing against "the groups" and some of the crazy in that space that does have political power.
If his critique wasn't so specific and didn't mention MA, I really wouldn't have objected. Also, part of the reason I took issue with what he wrote was he also did this tweet a couple of days ago that I think falsely characterized the Northeast's efforts to get offshore wind built.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2026662172886016147
This is where I think a serious activist like yourself can be frustrated because they don't recognize the broader interplay between politicians and non serious activists.
Matt sees this dynamic in NIMBY where the cost of housing is too high, so activist say we should have set asides for low income households, but this literally makes housing less likely raising the costs of housing. The very thing that activists say they want to correct.
He then sees similar things happening in the energy markets in the NE where the population in generally more liberal, want renewable energy, but then activists often fight the very things that would make that more feasible (offshore wind, electrical grid build out, etc.) for aesthetic reasons and end up making things worse by shutting down nuclear power plants, or stopping hydro power from Canada.
You say that no one is listening to these activists, but then there are things happening in the real world because of them.
"They just haven't done any work to understand what can get us from here to there."
This is the essential point, which gets obscured when MY tosses off ad hoc snipes about renewables because it scratches some weird brain itch. There are (several) ways to get from "here" to net zero in a rapid-but-perhaps-not-optimal time-frame. We can have informed debates about how fast gas can be replaced, how land use laws might need to be reformed to accelerate adoption, etc. Fierce advocates for expanding fossil fuel use and fierce advocates for the immediate cessation of all FF use are equally unrealistic and unhelpful.
I wonder if Matt is broadly correct about the DC environment and over his skis when he extends that trend to regional and local politics. I have no idea about the former.
Yes. That sound right. See my reply to John E above.
The fact that MA landed on sensible climate politics is because they sat down and did the engineering work to figure out what a largely-clean grid looks like. The same is true for all of the major states that have long-term transition plans. The only place where activists are actually running these long-term utility planning activities is in the Substack imagination. I find this kind of political sniping unhelpful *when there is real engineering going on.*
But all the "green" sources are either dreamware, face increasing pushback (offshore wind, utility-scale solar in western MA) and are unviable without special favors in permitting and pricing, or are just "let's make it someone else's problem" (overriding the very strong objection of Maine affected to build the NECEC).
Meanwhile, Vermont Yankee is still shut down.
I don't know if you're writing from 2014 or what, but here are the wind projects currently under construction:
Vineyard Wind 1 — 806 MW, ~90–95% built, completion mid-2026
Revolution Wind — 704 MW, ~80–85%, built, completion mid-2026
Empire Wind 1 — 810 MW, ~50–55%, built, completion late 2027
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW-C) — 2,587 MW, ~40–50% built, mid-2027
Sunrise Wind — 924 MW, ~45% built, late 2027
That's 5,831 MW nameplate of new offshore wind that'll be finished next year, at a capacity factor of about 50%. Vermont Yankee only produced ~620 MWe. There's another 6,271 MW about-to-construct wind that's frozen by Trump for the next three years, and the correct description of that is not "dreamware", but instead "criminal extortion by Trump that deprives the US grid of easily-constructed new energy at a time we need it, and raises energy prices across the whole country." Adding to the misery, Trump isn't going to construct any new nuclear plants during his term, either.
Realistically how much of that power is going to make it to New England though? Especially from all the way down in Virginia.
And I'd imagine the output from Empire and Sunrise is mostly going to get eaten up by NYC, which has the same decarbonization aspirations, and plenty of its own lost nuclear capacity that needs replacing, thanks to the loss of Indian Point (which BTW it's only fair for you to account for, if you're going to credit NY offshore wind projects to New England).
And then you have to take into account that 50% capacity factor is significantly worse than the lost nuclear plants.
Revolution and Vineyard are 1500 MW nameplate, combined. Offshore wind has about a 50% capacity factor. So those two projects still exceed Vermont Yankee’s yearly generation, and nearly triple it when the wind is blowing. There’s also another 4,270 nameplate sitting in approved-but-frozen projects off MA’s coast, that will get built when Trump leaves. I know there’s a narrative elsewhere in this thread that Trump’s deliberate blocking of wind projects is a knock on wind, and that this is nuclear’s big chance. But actually it just reflects the fact that wind is practical and can displace fossil usage quickly, which is why Trump is blocking it (and doesn’t care about nuclear, which certainly won’t get built in his term.)
Of those, only Vineyard Wind is in MA, and it's already caused 10 of millions of dollars in damages, been shut down multiple times, and is only still operating because a judge enjoined the shut-down orders.
The ISO New England grid doesn't really care very much about whether something is located in RI or MA, and there's plenty of interconnects with the other state grids. The shutdown orders were because of a blade failure, which was fixed, and Trump being an asshole, which hasn't. You're not going to win any converts on this site by portraying "Trump being a terrorist" as the fault of these wind projects.
Admirably restrained response to typically crude MY trolling that is little better than "The sun doesn't always shine!!!" variety.
But it's more fun to point at the fringe idiots and ignore the serious people actually trying to solve problems.
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.”
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
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'm not at all sure lithium-based batteries are better. Lithium is toxic, although less so than lead, and there's more fire risk. It seems like a big push to make lead-acid battery recycling cheaper than free would be the ideal solution, and in overall terms not that expensive.
(I have a brother-in-law from Kenya, and building solar power systems on his family's houses is one of the things he sends money for/does when he goes home. Having a refrigerator, running water, and a cell phone makes a massive difference not just to convenience but to health, and a few solar panels and a couple car batteries can do that.)
Most of the weight of lead acid batteries is lead. Most of the weight of lithium ion batteries is not lithium, but graphite, which is harmless. Lithium ion batteries are much less toxic.
Also more efficient, with deeper discharge per cycle and 8x-10x the cycle life of lead-acids before they are recycled. This means that a new LFP will cost more upfront, but will be significantly cheaper than a lead acid per kWh stored over the lifetimes of the two batteries. This is a micro-financing problem, which has been addressed in many places with pay-as-you-go financing of solar and battery systems.
"Pay as you go"... Including battery-swap systems like this one in Kenya:
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/03/06/battery-shortages-wait-times-at-swap-stations-in-kenyas-booming-electric-motorcycle-sectors-show-that-its-time-for-big-investors-to-support-these-companies/
Lead-acid battery recycling is already cheaper than free: it’s super profitable. The problem is that when not done safely, it results in a lot of lead pollution and lead poisoning. See this NYT piece for a chilling account of some factories that I've seen firsthand:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/world/africa/lead-battery-recycling-pollution-cars.html
I agree that lithium isn’t perfect, but it's certainly better than lead.
How much would you need to subsidize safe battery recycling for it to be cheaper/more profitable than unsafe recycling?
Great question! Nobody's answered this definitively. I ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on what I know about the factories that I have visited in Nigeria, and it seems like the comparatively safer recyclers are about 6% less cost-efficient than the unsafe recyclers. This translates to about a $4 increase in the cost of lead-acid batteries for consumers in the U.S. or any other country that imports lead from Nigeria.
I think the hard part is compliance.
I think even backing away a hair from this, the problem is ~*~living in a society~*~.
I am completely talking out of my butt here, but I don't get the impression that there is a serious recurring problem ensuring that actors in developed nations recycle their lead-acid batteries. It's such a no-brainer from every direction. But to some extent this depends on some basic state capacity, and an undergirding belief among the population in the general legitimacy of the state. Otherwise it really is every man for himself, and bad outcomes ensue in all kinds of areas.
Whether the answer is lead-acid battery recycling or pushing for lithium-ion batteries, this seems like a great direction for something like GiveWell to promote. In other words, the answer is money coming from rich nations' people like us.
Lithium-based batteries are more efficient and last much, much longer. The less recycling, the better. The only problem with them is that they are expensive even for first-world households.
I thought they were also very toxic if they caught fire?
Not an scientist or engineer, but I suspect most things are very toxic when they catch fire.
It's a rare material where you say "uh oh, this is toxic when ablaze". Usually the primary problem is "ablaze".
Yep. Much, arguably most, of what's in a house is toxic as hell when it combusts. Housewrap, vinyl flooring, PVC pipe, carpets, foam insulation and air sealants, virtually all structural adhesives, surface treatments, OSB's glue components... not to mention the immense amount of plastics in the electronics, clothing, bedding, and furniture that fill them.
It's not the only problem. ~ 200k vehicles are totaled every year due to flood damage. In salt water flooding scenarios the spontaneous fire risk jumps to 10%. EVs are still just 3% of the total carpark but at much high EV penetration rates we don't know how we'll process these flood damaged EVs safely. The insurance industry also doesn't know how they're handle the fire liability within resi policies.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/climate-change/article293730084.html
Describing how Redwood Materials reuses and recycles EV batteries damaged by floods and fires.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2024/10/10/redwood-materials-new-specialty-recycling-ev-batteries-damaged-by-fire-and-hurricanes-tesla/
What is the target of this message? Is it like a give well style effective altruism campaign?
Like found myself nodding along and you end with this is tractable but unless this is written for African governments of state I’m not sure what people are supposed to do with this Information given how popular humanitarian aid programs are these days.
He's platforming the idea and bringing it to light. Then he argues for why we should care. That's his role in slow boring of hard boards. He's trying to start convincing people this is an idea they should be aware of and view as something worth addressing.
That's exactly right! I think this is exactly the sort of topic that if covered in a traditional news outlet, would be dry and probably not generate many clicks. But because Matt has a built in rep as a good explainer for these sort of issues, I think automatically generates more interest.
With respect, I do not think this would have been published had it not provided MY with an opportunity (however tenuous) to gratuitously attack renewable energy and renewable energy advocates in the US, and to blame "solar" for lead poisoning in the title of the piece. It is obvious to anybody who has been to equatorial Africa that there is both far too little solar and far too many high-emitting internal combustion vehicles -- which are the source of the lead acid batteries that are being used second-hand and then recycled unsafely. Even the chart shared in the article makes the point that it is vehicles + motorcycles that are responsible for the majority of estimated ULAB (the vast majority if you use the low end estimate for OGS ULAB).
Did I miss the MY article entitled "Internal Combustion Vehicle Batteries in Poor Countries are Creating a Huge Lead Hazard"?
Agreed. Matt both points to a real problem and obnoxiously frames it as a solar problem.
I have my quibbles with the drive-by shot at 100% RE advocates, but I think it is entirely fair to frame this as a solar problem. Yes, vehicles are currently a much larger source, but as the 🚀🚀 graphs show, solar is the primary source of *growth* of the problem and could match or even exceed vehicles if we don't figure this out.
Also it seems possible that some African people will read this and tell others about it.
There might be an opportunity for SB to improve by starting with a "why should you care / who is this for" when it's not so obvious.
Relatedly, sometimes it feels like X discourse is an important motivator or framing for the day's post, and when that's the case I also feel like I'm missing something.
Are most articles written for anyone? Obviously it would be good if Trump was a Slow Boring subscriber and he was acting on them but he probably isn't and most of the readers can't do anything policy wise.
Somebody should buy Trump a gift subscription. Potential for a high bang for your buck in solving problems in the world.
I’m not confident he can read medium or long form prose.
I suppose there's also the problem that Trump, as a government official, is not allowed to accept gifts above a certain dollar amount.
And he's very scrupulous in maintaining his image as incorruptible! He couldn't possibly accept such a gift! But a few billion in Crypto? It's not even real money!
Maybe bundle it with a plane to sneak it in.
Unfortunately I don't have his personal email. I suspect if he DMed Matt he could get a free subscription.
What about posting them in the comments setion of Truth Social?
I guess the target is me, because I found it interesting to be informed of a problem in the world I was unaware, potential solutions, and its connection to the changing technological and economic landscape. And I pay to read interesting things!
I'm the target audience for this. I care about global health and poverty issues. I can't do very much about it, but I donate to Givewell. I could support a charity doing lead remediation through Charity Entrepreneurship, for example. But more generally, I want to know how the world is doing, and that includes the 1.5 billion Africans in developing economies.
I don't mean to minimize the risks of lead poisoning and I don't see this is a complete non-issue, but as best as I can tell, this paper may be overblowing the risk somewhat, given more recent deployment trends.
Apparently, a lot of the lead acid getting deployed up to now was in very small systems in the $50-200 price range that use second-hand lead acid batteries. I'm not sure how often new lead acid batteries get spec'd in for these deployments, especially with larger sized systems.
Table 1 in the article compares upfront cost per kwh for each chemistry, but that table ignores usable capacity and only compares battery stated capacity. In order to get 10 kwh of usable capacity, you need about 12 kwh of lithium versus about 20 kwh of lead acid because lead acid doesn't support the depth of discharge that lithium ion supports. Once you adjust system cost for this reality, upfront costs for lithium ion are roughly the same as lead acid today, with lithium ion costs are declining rapidly. Also, as the table shows, lifetime LCOS for lithium Ion is already much lower than lead acid.
So imo, this is mostly just a supply chain lag as the market catches up to the new pricing realities. Within a few years, I'd guess there will be no new lead acid batteries deployed because the economics (even upfront costs) are so much worse than lithium ion.
Yes - frankly this is nonsense handwringing over all about what is realy a small-scale marginal case, but there seems to be a strong lefty orientation to finding something to hand-wring over.
My granular expertise is minimal, but I majored in chemistry (not philosophy); as a former neuroscientist with hobbyist's interest in lead toxicity, I want to add my 2 cents worth:
1. Lead is indeed bad.
2. US pollution standards tend to be excessive. In a context of perfect health, many are reasonable for our fabulously wealthy country, but sort of silly/borderline counterproductive for desperately poor countries.
3. Like other toxins, lead doesn't jump out of a garbage dump and attack you. It has to get into you to cause harm. The main routes are airborne (leaded gasoline, smokestacks) and oral (e.g. dust particles in your kitchen from smoke and paint, lead in your pipes, contaminated spices and medicines, etc.)
Accordingly, while lead batteries are a problem, the practical issues relate to safer forms of disposal and recycling, and US-level rules are unreasonable for impoverished countries.
As the OP properly noted, one of the reasons poor countries are poor is because their brains don't work good because of the lead. There is no safe (or "silly") level of lead toxicity:
https://www.who.int/news/item/17-10-2025-no-safe-level--act-now-to-end-lead-exposure
Whatever economy you think tolerating lead poisoning is going to obtain for poor countries is almost certainly a false one.
"Whatever economy you think tolerating lead poisoning is going to obtain for poor countries is almost certainly a false one."
I didn't read this as what he was saying. In the US where gdp per capita is over 90k, then spending $500 per person to create incredibly low lead levels makes sense. In many countries in Africa where gdp per capita is under $2000, spending $500 to reach incredibly low rates doesn't make sense when you could achieve 95% of the same effect by only spending $5 per capita but have a bit higher lead levels.
Look, I'm not a fanatic about this stuff-- I realize that achieving lead-free existence is physically impossible! But just about everything I've read about the economic effects of lead remediation suggests that the costs are normally tiny compared to the benefits at any kind of plausible societal scale, often lopsidedly so. And so when I read "getting rid of lead beyond [insert arbitrary threshold] is silly for poor countries" my reaction is that that's an extraordinary claim and ought to be supported by extraordinary evidence.
If full lead remediation could raise that GDP per capita to $3000 and partial lead remediation would only raise it to $2950 (95% of the same effect) then spending a one-time extra $495 to do the full deal would be worth it.
The US and Germany have a intervention standard at 35 µg/L, while Japan is at 40, France is at 50. Its generally accepted that costs rise dramatically the lower you go. If you are a poor country with limited resources and rates currently at 94, should you dedicate resources to get to 50 and then move on to other pressing needs, or should you dedicate far more money to try and get to 35 and make other pressing needs wait?
Because I think that's the critical point - these countries don't have unlimited resources. That extra $495 you are asking them to spend has a very long list of other needs (vaccinations, better medical facilities, nutrition, solar panels, etc.) that they could spend that money on.
Vaccinations are probably more cost-effective than lead removal (although they also tend to be more financially supported, since developed countries have a direct incentive to slow global disease spread in a way they don't with lead poisoning). I doubt any of the other suggested spends are unless you have gotten lead levels down to developed-world levels. It's that bad.
Obviously this all depends on how the actual proposals math out, but at a first impression I am skeptical.
"I doubt any of the other suggested spends are unless you have gotten lead levels down to developed-world levels. It's that bad."
You're saying that NO other government budget item is as important as lead removal besides vaccines?
By that logic, it would be better to lay off all government workers besides people working on lead removal for as long as it takes to get it down? No police, judges, sanitation workers, etc. - its all going to lead removal?
Clearly this isn't true. Government expenditures are almost always involve trade offs. Going from 60 µg/L to 40 might cost 10x as much as going from 100µg/L to 60 because it generally gets way more expensive as you go. It can be very cost effective to do the first stretch, but lose that as a country get's lower and lower.
The dynamics really are different in countries stuck in an extreme-poverty trap. I don't find it an extraordinary claim at all. The studies you mention may well be valid all the way down to middle-income countries (i.e. most of the world today), but different (and very unfortunate) economic dynamics dominate in the kinds of countries that don't have a nationwide electrical grid.
In particular, there's a series of bottlenecks that prevent "cashing in" the population's health/education status into GDP. Even if everybody in the village gets 20% smarter because lead was removed, that doesn't change the fact that the only job available is subsistence farming.
I recommend checking out Ken Opalo's substack if you're interested in takes about those bottlenecks and how foreign aid funders should think about addressing them.
Rules are unreasonable, giving them money so they can afford the lithium-ion ones seems like the right answer?
Probably cheaper and maybe safer to give them money to recycle lead-acid batteries properly (basically, filter the exhaust gas so it doesn't spread lead everywhere.). This is a solved problem - the US recycles lead-acid batteries routinely.
It's a technical problem based on development economics I know nothing about. My guess is that current resources are so limited that lead-acid batteries are the way to go for now, but if so, more thought needs to be put into the final part of the cycle.
It completely sucks that lead turned out to be poisonous.
And that it cannot just be turned into gold :(
Au contraire: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/08/250810094318.htm
Just as I was reading excitedly .. "turning lead into gold" yesyesyes "for just a fraction of a second" damnyou
Asbestos too ☹️ A material too great for our immune systems to handle
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.
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.
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/
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.
It seems like there is satisfaction in the putting down of solar power. Not better than grid power, leads to lead poisoning.
I would simply build nuclear. 😉
NYT had a great investigative piece last year about the recycling of lead car batteries in Nigeria. Some horrific stuff. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/world/africa/lead-poisoning-auto-industry-car-batteries.html
I'm a person experiencing the westernness, but getting ready for a flight. So I get to comment early hooray!
I saw it would just say thank you for bringing to our attention. An important and interesting issue.
Also I feel like i'm getting to experience.How the other side lives. It's so exciting and exhilarating!
Why are young liberals so depressed
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
GiveWell donors assemble!