erowind wrote: ↑Mon Jul 05, 2021 10:27 am
The Green New Deal just shifts from one set of scarce resources, fossil fuels, to another, rare earths. There isn’t enough, lithium, rhodium, etc out there to fund the measure of consumption our societies demand. The green new deal focuses on building “green” infrastructure to hopefully outlast the decline of fossil fuels for the American Empire at the expense of the financially enslaved nations providing the resources to build it.
The IMF, World Bank and other such international institutions are designed to facilitate and coerce such capital flows out of colony nations for the benefit of centers of capital accumulation like America, Europe, Japan and to an extent China.
The only solution to the climate crisis is reduction of resource usage, vast efficiency improvements, regenerative supply chain practices, and equitable distribution of natural resources for all people. This will not happen until the oligarchical international monetary system is dismantled and replaced with a democratically governed cybernetic economy. An economy based on human and ecological need for all life.
I don't think we need to rely on rare earths too much. Alternative materials will be found.
(Grist) The electric vehicle or EV revolution owes its existence to lithium batteries, and those batteries have a cocktail of specialized minerals to thank for their high performance. In most cases, that cocktail’s ingredient list includes cobalt and nickel, minerals that help deliver the long lifespan and range that consumers increasingly demand of EVs.
But with hundreds of millions of new EVs expected to hit the streets in the coming decades, skyrocketing demand for nickel and cobalt could strain mineral supply chains. Fearing a supply shortage that would slow the EV boom, the U.S. Department of Energy is now proposing that we eliminate cobalt and nickel from batteries altogether.
Earlier this month, the Federal Consortium for Advanced Batteries, a cross-agency group chaired by the Department of Energy, released the first ever National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries to guide the development of a domestic battery industry that helps the U.S. meet its climate targets. Among other goals, the blueprint calls for eliminating nickel and cobalt from lithium batteries by 2030 to develop “a stronger, more secure and resilient supply chain.”
That goal is more challenging — and fraught — than it may sound. While experts say nickel- and cobalt-free batteries that outperform today’s commercial counterparts could be commercialized in the next 10 years, mass adoption by the EV industry is likely to take far longer. And while such batteries might reduce the American auto industry’s vulnerability to future supply shocks, it could also have complex impacts on mining abroad. Mining watchdogs, who worry that eliminating certain metals from batteries will increase the pressure to extract others, say policymakers and auto manufacturers should focus on responsible sourcing and battery recycling instead.
(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) When the climate denial movement started in the 1970s, most people still got their news from a set of gatekeeping referees: national media, informed by academia and other trusted sources. All these gatekeepers had their biases, and they could be wrong, but they mediated a shared reality, and that facilitated the US democracy that those of my age grew up with. Whatever its many and serious flaws, that democracy allowed for some real social progress, and for the hope that national challenges could be addressed by electoral politics.
The shared reality no longer exists, and democracy is under direct and serious threat. Diagnosing all the causes of this will be a task for future historians, but I’m convinced that, looking back over the last few decades, climate denial was the leading edge. And today, it’s no accident that many fossil fuel companies have backed former President Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
Having learned that propaganda can make a decent fraction of the population believe lies on a large scale with no consequence, it’s hard for these bad actors not to keep doing it, and to apply that power more widely. Maybe being a climate scientist colors my view, but “the science is not settled” looks to me like the gateway drug that led to “stop the steal.”
I know that we—those of us affluent enough to be in a position to read or write this—all are complicit, to varying degrees, in the climate crisis. I’ve flown on lots of airplanes and so on. And I know that many good people work at fossil fuel companies; I know some of them personally. But I can’t forgive those at the top who made the decisions that first created the climate crisis, and who now are working to disable whatever capability our political system might have to deal with it.
British Columbia scientist says heat essentially cooked mussels: ‘The shore doesn’t usually crunch when you walk’
Thu 8 Jul 2021
More than 1 billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from last week’s record heatwave, experts warn, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems unaccustomed to extreme temperatures.
The “heat dome” that settled over western Canada and the north-western US for five days pushed temperatures in communities along the coast to 40C (104F) – shattering longstanding records and offering little respite for days.
The intense and unrelenting heat is believed to have killed as many as 500 people in the province of British Columbia and contributed to the hundreds of wildfires currently burning across the province.
Record heatwave may have killed 500 people in western Canada
But experts fear it also had a devastating impact on marine life.
