Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

There are many good points here. For what it's worth, my mind is more open about H2V's pending that evolutionary leap in fuel production. As for the ore bottlenecks, there are precious few answers to that, and that naturally leads to outlandish follow-ups: How far are we from mining ore for Earth elsewhere in the solar system, at the asteroid belt, e.g.? A century - more?

There's a lot of R&D being done for other energy storage technologies and chemistries. If Lithium becomes more expensive, those technologies will inevitably become commercially viable, and some are already expected to in the next few years. In fact, for large-scale longer-duration energy storage systems, there's a promising company called Energy Vault that has an unusual but fairly simple and practical system of stacking and unstacking cement bricks. It's basically the same concept as a pumped hydro system but with bricks instead of water.

I get that, but I'm also a skeptic. As mentioned, I'm in data storage. NAND flash is *not* a perfect storage media. Pretty much ever since I've been in storage [over a decade], I've been hearing about all the technologies that are "just around the corner" that will displace NAND... Memristors, spin torque memory, phase change memory, etc... All of these have properties that would not only make them better than NAND, but cheaper... Or so their proponents state. Yet none of them are out of the laboratory.

The problem is that commercial viability is a hard thing.

I'd state that at the current state of the tech, lithium batteries are marginally commercially viable for automotive applications. If you want enough in a car to have decent range and performance (Tesla), it's incredibly heavy and expensive. If you skimp on the batteries to reduce cost, you end up with a poor-performing econobox with limited range and still costs $30K (Leaf). Right now the future of electric cars relies on storage chemistry reducing costs to become competitive with ICEV. Because right now, a large part of the value proposition for BEV relative to ICEV includes subsidies, tax credits, etc to artificially reduce the costs. 

So if lithium batteries get MORE expensive, well then those other storage technologies may become commercially viable relative to lithium BEVs, but will still remain a small niche market relative to ICEVs, which is the dominant incumbent for transport.

Which isn't to say that I don't think there's anything better than Lithium out there. But they all need to continue innovation and cost reduction if any of them are going to overtake ICEV. I think it's going to happen, especially as oil becomes harder [and more expensive] to extract, but I've seen too many people wave their hands and say "well the alternatives will become commercially viable because of R&D spending" when it's usually a LOT harder than it looks. 

Got to experience one of the most intense thunderstorms I've ever seen on Monday night, from the safety of a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma City. 

Flight-shaming is a thing in Europe. It will definitely be much more difficult to decarbonize air travel (though short-distance trips like between the Hawaiian islands will likely be electrified) unless/until hydrogen is proven to be safe and economic and/or some other denser energy-storage mechanism is commercialized. Of course, for intracontinental travel, hopefully the Hyperloop or something similar will be feasible at some point.

What percentage of global emissions are from air flight?  And then what percentage are from  terrestrial vehicles?  Just wondering what impact it has to the overall effects.

Estimates vary, but on a per passenger per mile basis, flights are substantially more emissions-intensive, but certainly there are much greater emissions from cars because there are so many of them, they definitely have greater total emissions, which is why it makes much more sense to focus on making EVs cost-effective while deploying a lot of renewables to get off coal and diminish the oil & gas industry (on that note, Newsy, which is a non-partisan TV news site, recently did a very good documentary called "Blowout" on the rise of oil & gas, particularly in Texas and how the US is exporting much of that fuel to Asia).

Thanks.

Yes, I understand per-passenger/per-mile will be much higher for air travel, seems pretty self-explanatory.  But passengers are also paying a substantial premium for that air travel, and the excise taxes charged by the government could be (not sure if they are but they could be) applied toward environmental issues if so desired.

As you surmised, my point is that focusing on terrestrial emissions will be a much bigger bang for the buck, if limiting emissions is the true goal.

shame on all you folks traveling the world

looking at you Cincy