Lithium vs. Lettuce | Hacker News Reader

Lithium vs. Lettuce

ambrook.com

46 pointsmfburnett10 comments

>“You can’t eat an iPhone,” talking to me on his own.

You can't eat money either, and yet with money you can buy all the food you want since someone somewhere will want to exchange the money for food.

And as much as people complain about technology companies being spoiled, farmers as a whole generally have to be forced to not do things that are extremely dangerous to the environment. Pumping out all the water they have in an aquifer. Continually irrigating until their soil becomes salt. Spraying poisons on monocultures until everything around them looks the same and 3 horrific hard to kill insect types are left plaguing everything. Avoiding crop rotations and plowing early so all their soil blows/washes away. Growing crops that drink 100x the water of native plants, etc, etc, etc.

Yes, we absolutely need food to survive. Does it have to be almonds and cows? Probably not. Don't let farmers as a whole act like they are some pro-ecological force here to save the world either, as everything to keep them from damaging the planet has been forced on them too.

> And as much as people complain about technology companies being spoiled, farmers as a whole generally have to be forced to not do things that are extremely dangerous to the environment.

"Farmers" is doing some work here. You mean corporations.

No, I mean farmers. I come from a family of farmers that have been doing it long before corporations owned the world (yea, even the east India company). When poisons came out and massively increased crop yield they used that because it increased profits. When grain prices were high they'd till marginal land that was at risk of erosion because more money is better than less. Spraying huge amounts of fertilizer was fine because it more than paid for itself at the time, who cares if the rivers turn green.

We get regulations because both individuals and corporations tend to maximize the short term while intentionally neglecting or being ignorant of the long term consequences. Farmers reaped the rewards of the green revolution, but it came at a pretty great cost.

I have a buddy who runs a very large and super crunchy co-op.

He's been doing it decades now, after the first 4-5 years he dropped all his small holding farmers are good and honest talk.

Verify, always verify. It's easy to tell simple and wrong stories if you neglect verification. You want someone to be honest, have a track record of verification and contracts to back it up.

Farmers in Sumeria over-irrigated the land until it was rendered unusable due to oversalination. This was a gradual process occurring over hundreds of years. That occurred before the limited liability corporation was invented.

There's zero contradiction between these two things.

Lithium mining is somewhat less vulnerable to the groundwater table collapse; while some water is still needed to maintain the miners, it’s not agriculture-levels of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44162654

They’ve been saying this for years. Every few months you’ll see an article about IV having the biggest store of lithium in the US, but nothing ever comes of it.

That's because lithium is not that rare and hard to get. It's now around $10 per kg ( https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=... ). There was a brief spike due to supply chain snags a couple of years ago, coinciding with tons of these announcements.

And a 100kWh Li-Ion battery (~$14000) needs just about 10 kg of lithium (~$100).

I gather that several southern american nations have some serious issues with Lithium mines nicking water. Search: "lithium mines water southern america"

You could look at this: ...

https://www.bmwgroup.com/content/dam/grpw/websites/bmwgroup_...

... and read the Conclusion, and note that the study was not too fussed about delivering bad news. That Conclusion is a masterclass in hiding stuff. You will actually have to read the entire paper and its all a load of fluff. Shame really.

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