Hacker News Reader

Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

Similarly aluminum is the most abundant mineral on Earth's surface, but aluminum is only harvested from bauxite rock formations. The highest concentration of gold on the planet is thought to reside just off the continental shelf next to California, but this is never harvested because scraping the ocean floor for trace metals is too expensive. Density and costs of extraction matter.

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.

View on HN

I thought the clearest option is to harvest it from nations with weak environmental lobbies, like we do today. Anyone up for some Amazon rain-forest?

Which brings us back to the L.A. Times article:

> 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."

The primary problem is quite obviously the carbon lobby/climate change deniers, without which serious effort to rein in unchecked carbon emission would have started 30 years ago.

Trying to blame some private individuals for the system failure we have lived through is pretty weird.

Well no, that isn't the primary problem. The carbon lobby wants to keep coal plants, but the alternative currently involves what the linked article is about - battery production, which produces a lot of waste as well. Other alternatives are windmills (visuals, kill a lot of birds), solar panels (hard to compensate their energy production with the energy required to make them), nuclear power (the US has a huge nuclear waste problem), etc.

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.

> solar panels (hard to compensate their energy production with the energy required to make them)

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].

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3038824

Which is actually substantially better than a producing oil rig.

Agreed, which comes back to the question as to why we don't cover vast swathes of uninhabitable desert in said solar panels - and we come back to the root of the issue; carbon lobbying.

Can you actually give an example of the carbon lobby blocking something like this? I think the environmental impact + logistics + cost are more likely the reason this is not common.

If you genuinely don't know the basic story of anti-science work by the big oil/carbon companies, the basic story is this: the science was pretty clear by 1980 that we need to draw down carbon emissions, and by wilfully lying and deceiving the carbon lobby has managed to muddle the water enough that emissions have grown yearly instead.

Here is a detailed timeline over the case of Exxon and their actions in relation to climate change: https://exxonknew.org/timeline/

I was more looking to an answer to the question: "why we don't cover vast swathes of uninhabitable desert in said solar panels" from OP.

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.

Sorry, then I misunderstood your meaning. But it does seem strange to say that there is no opposition to the notion that the carbon lobby is bad, for example Trump can still summon much support.

I have a feeling that if power companies could make money by building solar arrays, they'd be all-in in a New York minute. It's kind of like blaming GM for not building electric cars because of the evil oil companies. If they could build a car that ran on water, they'd happily sell them.

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.

> moving millions of them from the Third to the First World ain't gonna help any

It's on the order of a billion.

You mean, environmentalist lobbying. That’s what actually happens in practice. See the recent Ivanpah solar plant, for example. It didn’t face difficulties from carbon lobby, but it did from environmentalists who want to protect the uninhabitable desert.

How much actual uninhabitable desert is there in the continental USA?

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.

As a country it is just good resource strategy to use up all the resources that are cheap to get in other countries first so when they start to run out, not only do you have a source that is close to home and easy to get, but you can now sell your resources at the higher price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com