You're right, I'm dumb, the graph is 0 at 10^6 Si. So rare earths are 1 million times more rare than Si. It's similar to copper and Nickel though

This sort of both-sidesing doesn’t further the conversation at all. Do you really think the person you’re replying to doesn’t know that mining Lithium isn’t without its environmental costs?

The person you’re replying to quite correctly notes that mining Lithium is an improvement over extracting coal, oil, and gas. The term “green” is so nebulous snd ill-defined that it’s not worth talking about.

The best thing humanity can do for the earth is clearly to remove ourselves from it. Anything less than that is compromise. Sure. But sitting here saying “there’s no such thing as ethical consumption” doesn’t really get us anywhere.

Precisely; it’s not big oil propaganda to understand the environmental effects of lithium mining, just as it’s not lithium propaganda to acknowledge the equivalent consequences of the oil industry on the environment.

But if we get to have a way to move at super-human speeds (ie > 5 km/h walking and > 30 km/h running), cheaply and without environmentally detrimental consequences, that’d be great :)

(Fellow cyclists, I know, cycling is an excellent solution for single-person small- and mid-range movement. I’m thinking here of mass transportation and goods transportation, where it’d be hard to use cycle-powered lorries across continents.)

What makes a lithium mine so bad? Oil wells prone to generate lots of saltwater, too.

No doubt that mining lithium has negative impacts, but those negative impacts feel localized in a way that can in principle be mitigated and cleaned up, and though bad for local communities, it doesn’t pose existential risk. This is in stark contrast to the fossil fuel cycle which distributes pollution globally into the atmosphere, and will be tremendously difficult to undo.

Both can be bad, and both are bad.

But it looks like a lot of people assume they are just as bad without any quantitate or qualitative assessment.

Lithium mining is way less bad than oil extraction in both dimensions. If that lithium can offset oil consumption it looks particular good.

>A lithium mine is much more devastating to the environment than an oil well or franking.

This isn't true at all. Lithium is mined in much smaller quantities and in fewer places. In some cases (Cornwall, e.g.), it can be obtained as a byproduct of geothermal energy. It can also be recycled. By contrast, the Wikipedia list of environmental disasters has an entire section devoted to oil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_disaster...

With intelligent charging practices (which often come at the expense of stored energy) and temperature control, modern lithium cells asymptote to ~20% capacity loss and stay there for, well at least since the model S came out, still counting. Or that was the case a couple years ago when I looked into it. The difference in the battery life in a leaf vs a tesla is qualitative not quantitative. The motivation to make phone batteries last longer wasn't there at first until it provided negative press, now intelligent charging is fairly common in phones. Thermal management is harder.

Lithium batteries are a great source of lithium, and bigger of them, like laptop batteries, largely get recycled even now, AFAICT. Lithium + iron chemistries in particular avoid seriously toxic components.

Both lithium and plastics are far less nasty than, say, ash from a coal-burning plant, with its sulfur, mercury, and radioactive stuff. Retiring these is a higher priority thing, IMO, than improving lithium mining cleanliness (though an improvement is always welcome).