The so-called miracle of the developing world was simply the last hurrah before the economic ice age. At least that’s what the press liked to tell its readers from time to time. The doomsters had never gone away, and with the first signs of improvement visible, they were out in force.
It was said industrialised nations had exhausted easy to reach conventional resources, leaving China and India to scrape the bottom of the barrel, something that John Francis admitted was true, but at the same time telling those that cared to listen they should invest in innovative, new technologies and the development of new resources.
However, short-sighted politicians and conservative bankers were not reputed for promoting the unknown, that was the field of visionaries: men like Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, who was not just any automobile builder. Musk believed the future of energy lay in renewable resources, not fossil fuels. With his Tesla lithium-ion batteries, electrical energy could be stored to power cars, homes, business, using sustainable and renewable energy sources such as solar power.
Tom Barton turned his attention to lithium, the largest of deposits of which lay in Chile, where the mineral was extracted from brine at the Atacama Salt Flat. Other South American countries including Argentina and Bolivia had significant exploitable resources, especially the latter at the Uyuni Salt Flat; the world’s largest salt flat. However, hype apart, Barton targeted an American company for his investment: the Western Lithium Corporation in Nevada, which held the world’s fifth largest lithium resource, for his investment portfolio. It was a logical supplier to the Tesla Gigafactory being built in the same state.
In 2010, of a total of more than eleven million cars were sold in the US, a mere two and a half percent were hybrid and just nineteen of which were fully electric. Three years later hybrid sales doubled and electric cars rocketed to nearly one hundred thousand. By 2020, Tesla planned to sell half a million fully electric vehicles each year.
That was however a drop in the ocean for eight billion consumers, many of whom would struggle to find the bare essentials, as fossil fuels, tropical forests, arable land, fisheries and fresh water resources were devoured at a frightening rate.