Nevada lithium mine leads to 'green colonialism' accusations
(www.bbc.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Oct 2023 20:00
https://lemmy.world/post/6565596
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Oct 2023 20:00
https://lemmy.world/post/6565596
Nevada lithium mine leads to ‘green colonialism’ accusations::The rush to mine lithium for car batteries is dividing environmental and native American communities.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
In the high Nevadan desert near the Oregon border lies an enormous deposit of lithium, a metal that is essential in the production of electric car batteries.
In March, the diggers moved into a stunningly beautiful area called Thacker Pass, 4,000ft (1,219m) above sea level.
Mr Biden has said explicitly that he wants the US to be the world leader in electric cars - and wants the lithium that is key to making them to be mined in the US.
Every year a group called The People of the Red Mountain come here to remember their ancestors - who they say were murdered at Thacker Pass.
Mr Crowley also points out that some local native Americans are already working on the mine and support the project - something Ka’ila accepts too.
She believes the Thacker Pass mine is a textbook example of “green colonialism” - the notion that once again native people are being ignored, this time in the name of preventing climate change.
The original article contains 880 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I am all for the protection of the environment and sacred ground, but if doing so helps prevent our and other creatures extinction, I am willing to look the other way.
Whether this actually does that is yet to be seen and verified as worth it.
UpperEchelon warned about this very thing.
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.
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.
The problem is we’re not treating it like an emergency.
During COVID world governments provided basically infinite resources to promising vaccine candidates. We developed brand new types of vaccines for a novel virus in a third of the time it takes us to make existing vaccines for well known viruses. 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.
There’s plenty of lithium. Nothing depends on one certain mine (except maybe the profit of one mine owner).
Who will be left to remember the ancestors at Thacker Pass once all life on earth is extinguished? Who will make the trek there when all the plants have died and desert sandstorms wreck everything that dares venture to the surface of a dried out, dead world?