Too bad the lithium battery industry is no better. Those places are child labor slave mines and the environmental damage is astronomical…
This is true but coal mining is just as bad and requires orders of magnitude (mineral fuels) more excavation than all of the other minerals combined. If we can stop mining coal by using renewables the total amount of mining will be a fraction of what it currently is. Plus many of the other minerals can be reused where coal just ends up as carbon in the atmosphere.
This is exactly it. Of course battery production is harmful too, but not only is it less harmful than other sources to extract, you also don’t have to burn batteries to generate the power. With fossil fuels, the extraction is massively more harmful and then the use itself creates even more pollution.
Trees are technically a green, renewable fuel (if humanity used them that way). The carbon dioxide released is that which was sequestered during the tree’s life.
But oil is gathering material that accrued over vast amounts of time, and using that, dumping huge volumes of co2 directly onto the air. There’s no cycle happening there - just pure extraction for our extinction.
Just take a look where most of these rare raw material resources exist and note what attitude these countries have to the environmental cause. Zero, none. Russia, China, Africa https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinas-mines-rule-the-market-of-critical-raw-materials/a-57148375 I bet they won’t mind destroying whole local ecosystem just to get extra bucks Europe needs
You’re missing the big picture. Firstly because they’re reducing the cobalt requirements in batteries which will massively help. Also long-term lithium and cobalt are metals, they are found all over the place. Oil and coal are products that require life and as far as we know Earth is the only planet in the solar system to have organics like that.
But we can mine asteroids for materials to build batteries. Long before that we’ll have automation to mine the materials on Earth does not requiring human labor. Long-Term this is an improvement it isn’t a zero-sum gain at all like you’re making out
You really sound desperate to reject any possibility that hard work and human ingenuity can solve problems. I assume it’s because you’re scared of feeling you have to actually take life seriously and consider the implications of each choice you make.
