Lithium’s Boom-and-Bust Cycle

Happy Tuesday! The U.S. Postal Service announced last week that it will issue a new Forever stamp next month that looks like a Jeopardy prompt and includes the text, “THIS NATURALIZED U.S. CITIZEN HOSTED THE QUIZ SHOW ‘JEOPARDY!’ FOR 37 SEASONS.” 

Upside-down, along the bottom border of the stamp, lies the answer—or rather, the question: “Who is Alex Trebek?” 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is nearing the end of the high-intensity phase of combat operations in Gaza. “The intensive phase of the war is about to end,” he said. “But that does not mean that the war will be over.” He added that some troops would be redeployed to the border with Lebanon in anticipation of a full-scale war erupting with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group launching attacks against Israel’s northern communities. Netanyahu also appeared to walk back his support for a ceasefire proposal backed by the Biden administration to end the war, expressing interest in a “partial deal” that wouldn’t end the war. The Israeli premier clarified his remarks on Monday, saying he still supports the comprehensive proposal President Joe Biden put forward that lays out phases of hostage releases and ultimately a permanent ceasefire and full IDF withdrawal from Gaza. 
• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently facing federal indictment for conspiring to obtain and share classified information related to leaks from a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in 2010, seems to have reached a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. Assange was reportedly released from a British prison overnight and is en route to the Northern Mariana Islands, where, according to court filings on Monday, he will plead guilty to the charge under the Espionage Act. If the judge approves the deal, Assange will be released from British prison after being sentenced to time served and is expected to return to his native Australia.
• Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters staged a demonstration targeting the Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles on Sunday, blocking access to the place of worship, according to local officials, and violently clashing with counterprotestors and worshippers in the area. “I’m appalled by the scenes outside of Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles,” President Joe Biden tweeted yesterday. “Intimidating Jewish congregants is dangerous, unconscionable, antisemitic, and un-American.” According to the Los Angeles Times, police are investigating two reports of battery and arrested at least one person: a pro-Israel counterprotester carrying a sharp pole. 
• The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear the Biden administration’s legal challenge to a Tennessee ban on gender transition treatment for minors during its next term. The administration argues that Tennessee’s prohibition violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, as drugs that are banned for the purpose of transitioning genders are permitted to treat other medical conditions. “The state has a compelling interest to protect children from experimental and unproven medical procedures,” Republican Tennessee Sen. Jack Johnson told CNN. “We want children suffering from gender dysphoria to get the important mental health treatment they need, but it’s not appropriate to subject children to irreversible procedures with lifelong health complications.” The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Johnson, ruling the Tennessee law, along with a similar Kentucky statute, is constitutional.
• At least five civilians were reportedly killed and more than a hundred injured in the Russian-held city of Sevastopol, Crimea, after debris from intercepted Ukrainian missiles fell on a crowded city beach. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Ukraine used U.S.-supplied ATACMS [Army Tactical Missile System] operational-tactical missiles equipped with cluster warheads to carry out the attack and that both Ukraine and the United States bore “responsibility for a deliberate missile strike on civilians.” The U.S. has been providing ATACMS missiles—which have a range of more than 150 miles—for more than a year. Ukrainian officials have defended the strike on occupied Crimea, calling the territory “a large military camp” home to “hundreds of direct military targets, which the Russians are cynically trying to hide and cover up with their own civilians.”
• A fire at a lithium battery plant in South Korea on Monday killed 22 workers—most of whom were migrants from China. The fire, which occurred less than 30 miles south of Seoul, is the deadliest in South Korea since a 2020 fire at a construction site killed 38 people. The victims were temporary employees who were likely unfamiliar with the structure of the building, a senior fire department official said Monday. South Korea has one of the highest industrial death rates in the world, while also relying heavily on migrant labor to staff factories amid declining birth rates.
• Several major record labels—including Universal, Sony, and Warner Music Groups—filed a lawsuit against two generative artificial intelligence startups, Suno and Udio, that allow users to create music using text prompts. The media giants allege that the AI companies use copyrighted material—including music from musicians like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Jackson—to train their models, and are seeking to prevent the startups from using these works in the future as well as up to $150,000 in damages per work used.
• The Florida Panthers beat the Edmonton Oilers 2-1 to win the Stanley Cup on Monday, concluding a historic series that went seven games. The Panthers clinched their first NHL title after squandering a 3-0 series lead. Had the Oilers won last night, they would have become only the second team in league history—after the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs—to come back from such a deficit.
• The Tennessee Volunteers won the men’s Baseball College World Series on Monday, beating the Texas A&M Aggies 6-5 in the third game of the series to take home their first national baseball title. The Vols lost the first game in the series before securing back-to-back wins in the tournament in Omaha.

A MESSAGE FROM C3 SOLUTIONS

It’s time for conservatives to “own” the climate and energy space.

C3 Solutions—the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions—is building a better and smarter conservative movement by helping conservatives define what they can be for. We can have affordable energy and protect the planet. We’ve shown that free economies are twice as clean as less free economies.

Click here to download our exclusive guide, The Five Ways Economic Freedom Helps the Planet.

A Critical Catch-22

Fracking has long been a controversial undertaking in Pennsylvania. Panned by environmentalists for the knock-on effects and praised by its proponents for unlocking previously unreachable energy stores, the process of injecting water into wells in the earth to force oil and natural gas to the surface became a point of contention during the 2020 presidential race, when then-vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris had to walk back her own stated opposition to the practice in a vice presidential debate to clarify then-candidate Joe Biden’s vague stance. 

And they had no idea that all that fracking was potentially unlocking their own green energy agenda. This spring, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh analyzed samples of the wastewater from fracking at the Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania and discovered enough lithium in the otherwise toxic water to cover some 30 percent of the current domestic lithium demand, once it can be separated from the wastewater. Eureka, as they say.

Lithium is a must-have mineral for the transition to greener forms of electricity, and the U.S. has no shortage of it—as the recently discovered deposit illustrates. But getting it out of the ground—or the wastewater—takes money, and investing that money might be a tough sell as the price of lithium fluctuates. The delay in getting mines off the ground potentially throws a wrench in a Biden administration priority and highlights the catch-22 of green energy policies built on expected demand for green technologies. 

The device on which you’re reading this newsletter almost certainly contains a lithium-ion battery, of which lithium is—as you might expect—a critical component. Such batteries are lightweight but can hold a substantial charge and, crucially, be …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 1,383-word story on the state of lithium mining in the U.S. is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• What will the future of war look like? Writing for UnHerd, Edward Luttwak explained the growing phenomenon of “post-heroic warfare” and who is likely to benefit from this change in military will. “Why is it that, with larger populations than ever before, our tolerance for casualties is increasingly low?” he asked. “Back in 1994, I offered a simple theory: the wars of history were fought by ‘spare’ male children. … Today, however, with the average fertility of women across Europe less than two and still falling—the EU average was 1.46 in 2022—there are no spare children.” In light of this theory, Luttwak believes we have been getting great power politics all wrong. “All across Europe, entire military institutions are colluding from top to bottom to sustain the illusion that they are capable of combat. … But to some extent, the same can be said of their adversaries in Russia and China. In our current post-heroic age, everyone’s calculations of the true balance of power need to be revised.”
• Writing for the New York Review of Books, Mark Lila explored what he considers to be the pitfalls of the Catholic post-liberal project. “It is possible to attend right-wing conferences whose speakers include national conservatives enamored of the Peace of Westphalia, secular populists enamored of Andrew Jackson, Protestant evangelicals enamored of the Wailing Wall, paleo-Catholics enamored of the fifth-century Church, gun lovers enamored of the nineteenth-century Wild West, hawks enamored of the twentieth-century cold war, isolationists enamored of the 1940s America First Committee, and acned young men waving around thick manifestos by a preposterous figure known as the Bronze Age Pervert,” he wrote. “And they all get along. The reason, I think, is that these usable pasts serve more as symbolic hieroglyphs for the right than as actual models for orienting action. … The post-liberals are stuck in a repetition of mistakes made by many right-wing movements that get so tangled up in their own hyperbolic rhetoric and fanciful historical dramaturgy that they eventually become irrelevant.”

Presented Without Comment

Shelby Busch, the first vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican Committee, said in March she would “lynch” Stephen Richer, a Republican who serves as the county recorder and who rejected lies about the 2020 election being stolen: 

But if Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him. I don’t unify with people who don’t believe in the principles we believe in and the American cause that founded this country. And so I want to make that clear when we talk about what it means to unify.

Also Presented Without Comment

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked by Anderson Cooper whether she has “confidence” in the Supreme Court: 

“No, I think they’ve gone rogue. It’s most unfortunate.”

Also Also Presented Without Comment

New York Post: Trump Camp Claims He Was ‘Tortured’ in Fulton County Jail—as It Peddles Coffee Cups With His Mugshot

In the Zeitgeist 

A Canadian team has not won the Stanley Cup in more than 30 years. And this year, the Edmonton Oilers lost to *checks notes* the Florida Panthers—even after the Panthers blew a 3-0 lead in the series. Florida Man strikes again. 

Toeing the Company Line

• We know our crop of summer interns just started, but it’s already time to think about the fall! If you are an undergraduate or master’s student looking to get some real-world journalism experience before you graduate, we hope you’ll check out our 2024 fall internship listing!
• In the newsletters: Kevin dove into (🔒) Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s push to add warning labels to social media platforms and the Dispatch Politics crew examined Colorado Democrats’ efforts to boost a “Stop-the-Steal” Republican. 
• On the podcasts: In a special edition of Advisory Opinions recorded last month, Sarah interviewed retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer about his judicial philosophy, the future of the court, and more. 
• On the site today: John reports on what Supreme Court nominees could look like in Trump’s second term, Chris pans the primary system, and Cole Murphy, one of The Dispatch’s summer interns, checks in on the presidential race in Georgia.