Pascual is a hand on the cathode line I own outside a small town in middle Tennessee, standing at a stainless trough for 11 hours a day, weighing lithium hydroxide and NMP solvent into slurry under a hood he shares with two other men. He is 39. He has done this work for 7 years, unprotected. The line runs 3,200 cells a day. About 800 jump-starters leave the loading dock — the red clamshell in your trunk, jump clamps folded into the lid. You bought yours at the auto-parts store two Aprils ago for $39.99. Pascual’s hands built it. The Lord made the hands. I made the rest of what they do.
You paid $39.99 for the device. You paid $0.00 for the gloves that would have held the NMP off his skin. The difference is mine. I keep it because the line is mine, the shell is mine, and the NEPA exemption comes with the shell. After 7 years of bare-skin contact with NMP — which permeates cheap nitrile in 8 to 14 minutes and was added to California’s Prop 65 list in 2017 as a reproductive toxin — the numbness in Pascual’s fingertips has spread to the distal phalanges, three on the left hand, two on the right. He told me in March. I told him to take ibuprofen. He took ibuprofen. He has not filed a workers’ comp claim because he knows what filing does to the bonus structure I’ve put the line on. The bonus pays the supervisor $1,400 a month to keep injury reports off my desk. The supervisor keeps his $1,400. Pascual keeps his fingertips. The arrangement keeps me out of the morning brief. I’m content with it.
The manufacturer’s SDS, section 8, specifies NMP-resistant laminate gloves — $11.99 a pair, 4 changes a shift. I buy $0.79 nitrile, 1 pair a shift. 90 workers, 2 shifts.
| What I buy | What the SDS tells me to buy |
|---|---|
| $0.79 nitrile, 1 pair/shift | $11.99 NMP-resistant laminate, 4 changes/shift |
| — | 90 workers · 2 shifts |
What I keep: $1,693,000 a year. $2.52 a cell.
An opinion at Fox News this week by Katherine Boyle made the case that the United States has lost the ability to build. The median NEPA review in 2024 ran 26 months. Environmental impact statements averaged 3.8 years. Environmental assessments cost $300,000 mean to prepare. The op-ed asked Congress to enforce the deadlines, limit the litigation, share categorical exclusions across agencies, and not destroy the 50-person drone manufacturer. Now read the next sentence with me. The regime doesn’t destroy me.
I needed the cathode line running in 89 days. I got it running in 84. NEPA didn’t touch it because I built the line inside a 240,000-square-foot speculative shell that had already cleared its environmental review in 2017, then sat empty through two tenant failures. The shell is the permit. The shell is the exemption. The shell sits on a parcel I optioned in 2021 from a county industrial board that voted 11-1 to grant me a 10-year property-tax abatement and a $4,300,000 site-prep grant it pulled out of a one-time federal redevelopment allocation. The county clerk’s office pulled my papers together in 14 calendar days. The state Department of Environment and Conservation issued my air permit in 31 days because the line emitted under the major-source threshold by 19 tons of VOC, and the Title V opt-out was sitting on page 4 of a memo I have on my desk. OSHA did not inspect. The state inspector has been to my plant once in 3 years. He came for a lunch. He left with a tote bag.
You don’t have a permit problem. You have a shell problem. You don’t have $240,000,000 to drop on a speculative shell and wait two tenant failures out. I did. That is the inability to build.
Boyle’s coalition is drafting the categorical exclusion. I’ve already filed our expansion. The third reactor bay breaks ground in March. The next lithium plant will find its own EIS, or it won’t.
Pull the camera back with me. The statute Congress is debating — the median 26-month review, the 3.8-year EIS, the categorical exclusion — is the floor of a triage system that has decided which projects get built and which get to wait. The system does not slow the fast. The fast doesn’t need it. The fast owns a shell. The fast has a county that wants the jobs. The fast has a 14-day clerk and a 31-day air permit and an inspector who comes for lunch. The fast is me. The system slows the slow — the 50-person drone manufacturer, the community-attended cleanup of a brownfield, the local siting of a research lab that requires a community vote — and the slow is the one Congress thinks it’s helping. Congress is not helping them. Congress is helping me.
The drone founder wants to imagine me as one bad plant he can vote out, or one CEO he can shame, or one fund he can divest from. He can’t. I’m the curriculum that grades him out.
I run the Cost Accounting for Resource Extraction seminar at Warden University. Forty-two students a year. They take my final and enter the firms that price your IRA, your 401(k), your union pension. The best of them run the subtraction faster than I do, and they say so with pride when they come back to campus. The drone founder will be priced out by a graduate of mine. He doesn’t know it yet. The permit delay he’s fighting was written by someone who will grade him out, and someone else will occupy the shell he needed.
The arithmetic is older than the shell. The arithmetic is older than the abatement. The proof is in a book a Virginia minister published in 1856.
The relation of master and slave is recognized and sanctioned in the Bible. — Thornton Stringfellow, A Scriptural View of Slavery (Richmond: J.W. Randolph & Atkinson, 1856).
Stringfellow was pricing a different body in a different parish. He was pricing, in his case, the spiritual weight of the cotton gin and the relation of the picking-hand to the man who ran it. He opened the question at the same book Congress opens when it asks why we cannot build. The arithmetic is the arithmetic.
The difference between the 26-month median and my 26-day turnaround is sitting on a memo I have not opened in 3 years. The memo is 4 pages. I have read the headers. I have not read the body. Pascual’s fingertips are still numb. The cells keep leaving the loading dock at 3,200 a day. The vending machine in the lobby is well stocked. The Red Cross runs a blood drive in the parking lot once a quarter. The tote bags it leaves are good. I have not looked up whether the line ever has to wait.
The cathode is going through. The shell is clearing its path. The lithium will keep reaching your battery until something stops the line. Pascual’s hands are on it. The trunk is yours.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.