A request to drill for lithium near Death Valley
latimes.com
latimes.com
It is a nature's marvel, sitting 3600m high, becoming a 70km wide mirror during rains, having less than 1m altitude variations so satellites are calibrated on its surface.
I sure hope for greener future but would shed a tear if this wonder would be destroyed in the process...
For those who speak French, I recommend talks and books by Philippe Bihouix, in which he explains the environmental and societal challenges associated with our new thirst for rare earths and metals.
Sometime after we stop mining fossil fuels, I hope.
I think now we should look for better alternatives to the current way wreck with the environment, eletric cars are better than the ones moved by oil -- by a wide margin, even taking in account that you need to mine lithium. Just check the environmental implications of fracking, yet -- people still do it.
There is always a way. What governments and police makers should care is to understand the environment implications and create a good legal framework and there is law enforcement, so companies do it correctly.
We can either let this fear aside and believe humanity will need this step to perhaps takes other and find more efficient ways of creating energy. Or we can die in fear by keeping this dependency in oil, which btw, we will run out soon.
Earth itself is a timebomb with 7bi people, with the current way we do things. We should be definitely pushing for changes and figure out what we could do in order to get rid of this problem. Also invest more into fusion energy. Develop new shit, basically. We have had much progress in history because people were bold and tried new things. If nowadays humanity is ruined by fear of doing things and press, earth is going to become nothing and humanity will collapse. Don't get triggered by this fear.
Lithium is extracted from water which is pumped to the surface and allowed to evaporate. What's left is a salt that has a high concentration of lithium and is further refined.
I'm not saying it's a process without environmental impact, but it seems like there should be some sound way of domestically extracting this resource that reduces our carbon output.
On the bright side, it's pumping salty water out of the ground and making clouds out of it.
I wonder if there's an opportunity for a combined seawater desalinisation and lithium extraction plant, if they could have complementary processes.
Relevant citation from the page:
> This approach leverages desalination waste streams rather than virgin seawater. This is because seawater desalination plants typically leverage RO, which produces both a purified water stream and a reject stream consisting of a concentrated brine solution. Reject streams are typically discharged to the sea, however, it is possible to recover lithium and other materials from the RO reject brine. This is typically accomplished via a multistep process involving the sequential application of chemical reactants to adsorb, desorb, and crystallize the lithium (or other desired constituents) in the brine. The precipitated salt is then filtered and the brine discharged.
The primary problem is hypocrisy. Environmentalists don't want a metal harvested from their backyard, but require it be harvested elsewhere at equal environmental impact. The options are clear: be content with atmospheric carbon, trade atmospheric carbon for water polluting metal extraction, or stop using electricity.
Trying to blame some private individuals for the system failure we have lived through is pretty weird.
It's a compromise. It's replacing one evil with another. It's more a matter of where you draw the line; I for example am in favor of nuclear energy because the waste product, while extremely dangerous for tens of thousands of years, is in a neat and relatively compact package, instead of blown out into the atmosphere.
But I digress; the only real solution is population and economic decrease. That's unlikely to happen unless something catastrophic happens, but that is the only way without replacing one bad thing with another.
That hasn't been a major issue for a number of years. It only takes a few years on average to 'break even' on energy in vs energy out [1].
Here is a detailed timeline over the case of Exxon and their actions in relation to climate change: https://exxonknew.org/timeline/
It sounded specific, so I thought they were referencing something that actually happened.
I'm less interested in a generalized "the 'carbon lobby' is bad" conversation - nobody is going to disagree with you.
Of course, this all implies that vast swathes of uninhabital desert aren't ecosystems worth saving, which I suppose is the point of the article.
Personally, I think that the root of the issue is overpopulation. None of this would matter so much with fewer people and moving millions of them from the Third to the First World ain't gonna help any.
It's on the order of a billion.
I'm in the Mojave and it's far from uninhabitable. I've never seen a barren wasteland desert of infinite sand dunes like they show in the movies, not in the USA. It might exist here, but I don't know where.
My experience in the Mojave has been one of diverse and abundant life. According to the elderly folks around here there used to be Tortoises everywhere as recently as the 1980s, but all the automotive traffic has practically wiped them out.
We still need to practice restraint and consider consequences in the desert.
> Drilling opponents also acknowledge that the burden of producing lithium should not just fall on nations with less restrictive health and safety regulations and environmental safeguards.
> "It's a tricky question," said Lisa Belenky, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. "We shouldn't export the sacrifices to Bolivia and Argentina, for example, which have massive lithium mines. ... We also think that Panamint Valley is not the right place for it."
It's headlines like these which are the reason you can't or should not really give a fuck about news anymore. There's only exaggerations, hype and bloated stories left in news. I don't even want to read the article when it's using a headline like this.
> A request to drill for lithium near Death Valley National Park has alarmed environmentalists, who say mining the metal is unacceptable, even if it is an essential ingredient in the production of zero-emission electric vehicles.
Not everyone on HN is in their twenties.
And to make it even more OT: the "war" between West and East was won by the West the moment when people in the East started almost revering physical objects coming from the West, such as blue jeans. I remember that growing up in the '80s my mother's only jeans dress had an almost mythical status, it was THE one piece of clothing from our family's wardrobe that had that extra thing. I remembered of that feeling this past weekend while watching a Russian movie describing the '80s as lived on the Eastern side of the Wall (the movie is called "Leto" [1], I highly recommend it), during which movie one of the female characters highly wishes to purchase a pair of jeans for herself, if only she would have had the money.
It is my intuition that the Western sovietologists from back in the day didn't have access to this type of information on the real feelings of the people living in Eastern Europe and in the former USSR, they were looking mostly at translated articles from Pravda and at satellite photos of rocket-launch sites in order to predict the health of the system. Turns out they were looking at the wrong stuff.
Not so fast. The most populous country and the largest world economy by purchasing power parity is communist China. The physical objects people revere are likely made there or in neighboring communist Vietnam.
So this was not really based on the influence of US news but I think it fit quite well nevertheless.
edit: I think in the comics it's "Werner, die Russen kommen!" when Werner and his colleague are joking about their boss and his hysterical character and Werners colleague impersonates the boss. Just to give a little more context. ;-)
But ok, we'll switch to the first part of the subtitle.
And we shouldn't change titles but discuss whether or not sites that use titles like these should be qualified/used as sources or get "banned".
This is a worldwide phenomena and it's terrible. It's ruining trust in media and dulls the power of words.
I don't think that at HN we have much power to affect "trust in media" or "the power of words", but if we did, the way to wield it would be to select the best articles and deselect the worst titles, which is what we try to do anyway.
Banning entire publications wouldn't help because the good and bad articles are scattered across many publications and often exist side by side.
Electricity does have a lot more optimization opportunity, though, whereas those liquid fuel processes are pretty much at their optimum already. A local solar panel DC'ing straight into your car's batteries is going to be pretty good compared to the "generic" pipeline I gave you above. (On the other hand, it can go the other way, too; if your electricity notionally passed through something like a gravity storage step, you lost more there too.) Although from what I've gathered from looking at solar setups, most local solar setups won't actually do that, so it's an optimization yet to be done rather than something all roof-mounted solar panels already do.
2) Electric bicycles and scooters. These are lightweight by design.
3) Public transportation.
We didn't go through the industrial revolution to go back to horses. All the solutions above are not available/appealing at the moment because of "bad" urban planning (cities and infrastructure built around cars).
Things cannot change in a day, and the transition must start now, so electric vehicles cannot be avoided, but the urban transition must also happen quickly.
They are the most common form of transport in China as far as I can tell...
The focus going forward should be on mass transit and not on cars.
It's amusing to contemplate whether it would actually be feasible to have a decent sized modern town in which horses, rather than cars, are the main form of transport.
If that article is right, they would be about as affordable to the owner as a car. And note that they all come with better self-driving software than any car currently for sale to the general public, and probably better than any that will be for sale within the next decade at least.
They are generally slower than cars, though. A walking horse goes around 7 km/hr (4 mph). They trot at about 13 km/hr (8 mph), and can easily keep that up for hours.
They canter at 2 to 3 times trot speed, but can only keep that up for about an hour over reasonable terrain, which I'd hope a town would have. They can gallop a bit faster, but not for very long.
[1] https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives...
If you let someone else board the horse it's another $260/month on average. Assuming $10/hour that's 26 hours, or about an hour a day to maintain your horse.
How much time do you spend maintaining your car per day?
The normal bicycle posture might be hard for many animals but maybe something more like a recumbent, adapted for 4 limbs since animals don't have such a big hand/leg strength imbalance...
The big problems becomes dealing with the huge amount of horse waste, both manure and urine, but mostly manure. A horse will create about 15kg of manure and 5kg of urine each day. For a small city of say 200,000 people, you'd need say 100,000 horses. That means 2000 tons of additional waste each day (the humans will be generating about 200 tons of biowaste a day).
This sort of problem was faced in the late 1800's. Some predicted the end of urban civilization caused by horse manure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Horse_Manure_Crisis_of_1...). Automobiles saved us all from the horrible fate of being buried in horse poop.
This wayback link[1] comes from the Wikipedia article on horse cars [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140124204000/http://www.uctc.n... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsecar
Get a horse!
According to Mr Norris M Davidson, a retired radio commentator on music including opera, and very widely read who was born c. 1908 this was a common American phrase in my childhood, when the motor car or automobile, as we called it, was a novelty. The roads not being paved were full of mud holes; tired were apt to burst, engines conked out and publication like Life, Puck and Judge were filled with illustrations about stranded motorists. Many showed the car being towed ignominiously by a horse. Urchins would shout 'Get a horse!' at every daring motorist.
-Dictionary of Catch Phrases by Eric Partridge [0]
[0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3eoQAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg...)
Yes I absolutely would oppose converting the desert to agricultural land. We have more than enough existing agricultural land. No need to wreck the desert.
You want section 3.3 "Biological Resources", which shows that it is not "devoid of life", though one of the sections is "on sandy soils with no discernable aspect."
Note however that this is for exploration. It doesn't assess long-term effects of commercial mining. Also, as the L.A. Times article points out, this ...:
> "does not include mapping of floodplain boundaries, nor any hydrologic modeling or analysis," the response read. "There is no discussion of the risks to cross contamination from the deep brines to the freshwater aquifer, and the drill site reclamation practices do not appear to have taken this risk into account."
"Devils Hole pupfish has much to teach scientists about adaptation to adverse conditions. It has adapted to survive in very warm water with very low oxygen content.
Envision each living thing on Earth, including humans, as being a thread in a piece of cloth. Each time a species goes extinct, a thread is removed and the fabric is weakened. As more threads disappear, one-by-one, the strands separate and fall away. Eventually, the original piece of cloth falls apart and disappears.
All living things are part of a complex, often delicately balanced network called the biosphere. The earth’s biosphere, in turn, is composed of countless ecosystems, which include plants and animals and their physical environments. No one knows how the extinction of organisms will affect the other members of its ecosystem, but the removal of a single species can set off a chain reaction affecting many others. Only time will tell."
Separately there is the simple act of conserving a species for its own sake, but that's a separate topic from its helpfulness for material human needs.
Have you ever been to Death Valley National Park? I was never interested in it until my SO dragged me there. Never did I imagine it would be as incredible as it was. It is otherworldly; surreal; lunar (or martian - if you prefer). It almost feels like you are no longer on Earth.
Ubehebe crater is a geological monument. The alluvial fans are so vast as to be almost incomprehensibly large. Surprise canyon is gorgeous. The racetrack playa is home to wandering stones that seemingly migrate of their own accord. Teakettle junction is a fantastic reminder of the trials of many generations of settlers. Badwater basin, Telescope peak, Artists' Palette, Zabriskie Point, Golden Canyon, the wildflower blooms, unique wildlife, etc. etc. are all amazing sights and features of a desert that's apparently not "much more worthy of protection" that are found nowhere else on Earth.
Death Valley is a severely underrated and under-visited national park that is, in my opinion, far more impressive than Joshua Tree NP, for example. Or Pinnacles NP. Or Cuyahoga NP or Acadia NP or others.
If I were you, I would go visit DVNP.
Do you think these places were less impressive/worse 10K years ago when they had forests and lakes? And why must we preserve them in current desolate state instead of restoring to the older state when they could sustain more life?
My viewpoint seems to be highly unpopular here, but i didn't see any good argument why significantly reducing the number of deserts on earth is not a good thing.
Death valley doesn't even have any features that would be lost because of trees unlike for instance rainbow mountains in china.
I don't even know how to address this. Are you suggesting that DV was "covered in trees" or heavily forested 10k years ago? That is irrefutably incorrect.
> Death valley doesn't even have any features that would be lost because of trees unlike for instance rainbow mountains in china.
What? Again, you've never even been there. You have zero idea of "what features would be lost". You expose your ignorance more and more with each sentence. Educate yourself on the history, geology, and ecology of the area before you talk out of your ass about places you've never been to.
I have never been to death valey, and i live far enough from it to make traveling there not worth the time. But with the invention of books, images, and videos one doesn't have to be at a place to know about it.
You seem to have a very strong emotional attachment to the place, but i would argue that it only adds bias to your judgement.
"The Southern part of Nevada" is not feasible. Lithium is concentrated among the salt of dry lake beds. Southern Nevada drains to the ocean rather than concentrating salt on land.
I agree that deserts are fascinating ecosystems, but at the same time they are very sparse and very miserable places. And it's hard to find a better place for a mine other than ocean floor (for which we do not have a good technologies yet, unfortunately).
Arctic region is not even in its natural state, but is a result of human intervention from 10K years ago, when by eliminating mammoths we converted highly productive savanna-like arctic steppe into mosquito infested empty place it is now.
Of course any mine anywhere must be controlled to produce as little pollution as possible, and rare species must be protected, or their genomes must be digitized.
But if it was technologically feasible, i would even support terraforming both of this regions to make them habitable.
The problem is, as soon as you bring a bigger picture or talk about the economic offset to Green anything, you're labeled anti science.
Politically I'm libertarian and conservative leaning centrist, I refer to myself as a pragmatic libertarian.
I absolutely am in favor of some policy to protect the environment. Not to the point that some would extend things though. All the same, it's very concerning to me the amount of ewaste produced, badly disposed of and restrictions on end user maintenance and right and ability to repair.
I'm also surprised how far the left has gone away from classic liberal values.
How about against natural gas, even considering fracking vs lithium mining?
Also, I never suggested using taxes for either.
Shipping is almost inconsequential - I bought my $16000 Yaris and it was shipped from Japan to eastern Canada. If the carbon cost of the fuel to ship is included, manufacturers will self-select where to manufacture (or will charge appropriately to deliver)
I fundamentally feel that disposal of lithium ion battery packs from cars should be viewed as a cheap source material, not a cost.
Side note, if you drive 16000km/year... Maybe you don't need a Tesla? That's only 40-50km a day. Get something much cheaper with 100km range, and rent a car the half dozen times you need more.
Edit: responding to your edits: carbon is carbon, does it matter if it comes from natural gas or a different source?
Mostly it seems to be based on perceptions rather than facts.
It can be noted however that the components in an electric vehicle can be more readily recycled than parts in a traditional ICE vehicle.
This is just a reason to continue research, not a reason to avoid what the vast majority agree is likely to be the better approach.
A lot of things that feel good aren't.
Actually, comparing to the lifetime emmisions of a regular vehicle it is.
For example a container ship full of hybrids from Japan arriving in Europe or the US is responsible for emissions in the order of what a full tank of gas per each of those transported vehicles would create.
Meanwhile your typical hybrid over its lifetime saves more than its weight in gasoline - thrice that in case of taxis.
I blame Top Gear for over-dramatizing how much shipping and production matter. Most of the environmental impact always did and will come from the usage of a vehicle.