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The greatest trick the petrochemical industry managed to pull was convincing people who think of themselves as "environmentalists" that a few lithium mines are somehow worse than the entire global oil industry (which, remember, is also where the plastic being dumped in the sea comes from).
in reply to Sarah Brown

FeralRobots
FeralRobots
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then there's the part where the conflate 'battery' with 'lithium'. Battery tech is developing REALLY FAST & the most interesting stuff is specifically designed to make the tech cheaper & less environmentally disruptive. (E.g. I love those massive iron-salt batteries - they're packed in large-size shipping containers & installed in massive arrays as buffer storage for wind- & solar-farms.)

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Sion [main]
Sion [main]
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Or that (as relates to cars) you can recover the metal from an ICE, but not a battery, so in terms of future landfill EVs are worse.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Miguel Arroz
Miguel Arroz
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I understand why people donā€™t want lithium mines at their doorstep. But on the other hand, I think thereā€™s always an element on colonialism in many of those protests. People want to enjoy the goods that come from extraction, but are happy if extraction is done half the world away, on poor countries so they donā€™t have to see of suffer through the consequences. Anyways I think the solution to mobility is less cars, not just making all cars EVs, that should be the main goal.
in reply to Miguel Arroz

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
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@Miguel Arroz Ok,

But letā€™s make the cars EVs first, because thatā€™s a much easier problem to solve.

@Miguel Arroz
in reply to Sarah Brown

Miguel Arroz
Miguel Arroz
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Existing cars definitely need to be EV. But solving the ā€œtoo many carsā€ problem isnā€™t hard. Netherlands does it. Even Spain has the largest high speed train network on the planet only second to a much bigger country, China. The real hard problem to solve is finding people who are good at, and want to solve hard problems and are also willing to go into politics and win elections. EVs wonā€™t fix this, among many other problems: twitter.com/visionzeroyvr/statā€¦
in reply to Miguel Arroz

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
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@Miguel Arroz And yet Spain runs zero long distance trains to Portugal, and cancelled the only sleeper services it had with no plans for replacement.

Meanwhile the Algarve Line has exciting infrastructure plans to increase the average speed from about 60kph to about 75kph.

Iā€™d love, love, love ubiquitous fast convenient rail, but the promise of it at some unspecified future date is frequently trotted out as an excuse to not need to decarbonise road transport, a thing that is already happening, and is quite easy to accelerate.

@Miguel Arroz
in reply to Sarah Brown

Miguel Arroz
Miguel Arroz
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Yeah, Iā€™m not saying decarbonizing and depolluting out cities isnā€™t important. Iā€™m just saying that isnā€™t the panacea people are led to believe it is by the car industry. Long distance and cities are different problems, but living on a city core, I honestly think politicians should face trial every time someone gets hit by a car, because they do exactly jack shit to stop this mayhem. Iā€™m preparing myself mentally to move out of Vancouver because I canā€™t take this shit any more.
in reply to Miguel Arroz

Miguel Arroz
Miguel Arroz
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Itā€™s ironic that when I visit my parents in Portugal on a shitty Lisbon suburb, I can have the window open any time and not feel any real difference in the noise levels. Here, if I open the window, even during nighttime, my living room turns into a highway. The noise is unbearable. And I live in the city that calls itself ā€œthe greenest cityā€. This experience made me deeply hate cars and politicians.
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