Tom Burns isn’t panning with a pickaxe and a whiskey flask, but give the man a wide-brimmed hat and a time machine, and he’d fit right in with the rest of the silver-mad bastards who lit up Virginia City like a Roman candle in 1864.
Only this time, it’s not silver. It’s lithium — the light, white messiah of the clean energy revolution. And Burns is howling from the stage to keep history from repeating itself.
“We were a territory,” Burns said, thumping the table at a ZETA Education Fund event as if it owed him money.
“We get a pass for losing the Comstock riches to San Francisco the first time. But not this time.”
In other words: Nevada was young, dumb, and broke once before, and it damn well better not be again. It is the Lithium Rush, baby, same madness, different century.
Except now it’s clean, renewable, and comes with federal tax credits instead of whiskey rations and syphilis. Welcome to the 21st-century gold mine — except this one powers Teslas instead of saloon lanterns.
FOLLOW THE MONEY — IF YOU CAN FIND IT
Nevada is currently the belle of the clean energy ball — with one lonely operating lithium mine in the whole godforsaken country and enough federal love to make Iowa jealous. Ioneer and Lithium Americas got government loans fat enough to make Wall Street blush. Redwood Materials in Carson City is doing some alchemy with dead batteries, and even Panasonic is begging for local lithium so they can stop buying it from Korea and Japan.
But before you get giddy picturing American-made batteries flying off assembly lines like hotcakes, there’s a catch: The whole damn thing could come undone faster than a casino marriage if Republicans torch the tax credits that keep this Frankenstein dream alive.
Enter the Inflation Reduction Act — a dull name made up by a bean counter on Ambien. But under that sleepy label lies a bazooka of federal investment for building a domestic supply chain.
The two big lifelines? The 45X production credit and the 30D electric vehicle credit. One helps make the batteries. The other helps buy the damn car.
45X gives producers a sweet little 10 percent rebate on their costs. For Panasonic, that means $1.4 billion a year — a number that smells like lobbyist bait from six states away. The 30D gives buyers up to $7,500 in tax relief for purchasing EVs, as long as those EVs don’t come with components cooked up in a Chinese backroom.
Sounds simple. It’s not. It is government sausage-making at its finest — tangled in national security, climate goals, and the industrial equivalent of high-stakes poker.
REPUBLICANS: KILL THE BILL OR BANK THE BENEFITS?
Now, Republicans are in the majority, holding a giant red marker and looking for $1.5 trillion to slash. The tax credits are expensive. They’re popular. And they make the GOP base foam at the mouth with rage about “coastal elites” and battery-powered Marxism. The math doesn’t add up, but rage doesn’t have to.
Still, there are cracks in the wall. Take Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada — a Republican who voted against the IRA but is now scrambling to keep the benefits flowing into his district like beer at a rodeo. His turf has seen $6.6 billion in clean investments, with another $11 billion allegedly inbound. That’s reason enough to break ranks with your party — and he might — again or still.
Asked if losing the credits was a dealbreaker, Amodei said, “It’s the floor.” In other words: he’s not looking to die on this hill, but he’ll at least light a campfire and bitch about it.
Meanwhile, auto lobbyists, battery execs, and energy wonks are flooding Washington with white papers, spreadsheets, and half-sincere pleas for American competitiveness. The irony? Their biggest enemy isn’t Chinese imports or federal bureaucracy — it’s the cultural death match around electric cars. The EV has become a political Rorschach test: is it progress, or is it a liberal conspiracy on wheels?
EVERYONE WANTS A PIECE — BUT NO ONE WANTS TO BLEED FOR IT
Everyone wants the credits. No one agrees on the rules.
Miners want to make sure foreign lithium doesn’t undercut their domestic rocks. Manufacturers desire flexibility so they can keep importing.
Automakers want loopholes to keep prices low. The whole thing is like a Thanksgiving dinner where everyone brought a fork, and nobody brought food.
Redwood Materials, for example, says the 30D credit is “the hot topic” and that they’d like to close the so-called leasing loophole that lets EV makers source batteries overseas and still claim the money. It would force companies to buy American — and give Redwood a bigger slice.
But guess what? None of these companies want to fight in public. They’re terrified of drawing fire from the Trump machine, which may or may not decide that lithium is patriotic one day and communist the next. So they whisper in corridors, send quiet letters, and pray to the gods of favorable committee assignments.
THE CHINA CARD
The ultimate Trump card — pardon the pun — is China. Nearly two-thirds of all EV battery components are from there. Even the most frothing America-first types on Capitol Hill can’t ignore that math. If we want to compete, the argument goes, we’ve got to build a domestic supply chain. And that means paying for it, one credit at a time.
ZETA’s Albert Gore III — yes, that Gore — says the combo of production and deployment credits is the only way to wean ourselves off the Chinese lithium drip. And he might be right. But good luck getting that through a Congress that can’t agree on what day it is.
FINAL THOUGHTS FROM THE DESERT FRONTIER
Here in Nevada, the mood is cautiously caffeinated as the lithium loop is humming–or now. The money is flowing. The factories are rising. But everyone knows it could all fall apart with one bad vote, one presidential tantrum, or one more TV hit where EVs are called socialist golf carts.
For now, Nevada’s holding its breath and building like hell. Because this time, they want to keep the gold.
Or the lithium. Whatever.
And if they blow it again?
Well, they’ll tell ghost stories to the next generation of miners.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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