There’s plenty of lithium. Nothing depends on one certain mine (except maybe the profit of one mine owner).
Comment on Nevada lithium mine leads to 'green colonialism' accusations
capital@lemmy.world 8 months ago
God dammit. Is this a climate emergency or not?
Want to reduce our reliance on oil and gas? Then stop tying one hand behind our backs.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 8 months ago
benwubbleyou@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I agree that it’s a problem but lithium is not an easy mineral to mine or extract and it leads to a lot of nasty biproducts.
Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The problem is we’re not treating it like an emergency.
During COVID world governments provided basically infinite resources to promising vaccine candidates. We are not doing the same for promising battery technologies.
We could also be regulating the market for smarter use of the lithium we have. Lithium batteries for stationary mass storage (“big batteries”) are completely pointless, except maybe as part of virtual power networks. Subsidising and incentivising recycling and recovery of lithium from waste is another low hanging fruit we seem to not be bothering with.
Absolutely it’s true for a global emergency threatening to destroy the global ecosystem, a local ecosystem and cultural site is a sensible sacrifice (not withstanding that we shouldn’t be in this scenario in the first place.)
But we have barely scratched the surface in terms of alternative options and it’s fair to be frustrated when you’re the one expected to sacrifice when other options have not really been tried.