UnManufacturing: Tesla Co-Founder Turns to Lithium Recycling
October 19, 2021
When you hear the bogus “but Lithium mining” nonsense, remember that we mine literally a 100,000 times as much coal as we do Lithium, so that even a 20-40x expansion is still going to be minor by comparison (add in fracking, drilling, etc)
And Lithium, unlike coal, is recyclable.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
October 19, 2021 at 8:44 pm
Pin pricks and verdant vistas. Agriculture is thousands of times more ecologically destructive than mining. Think about it. The waste problem from renewables, batteries turbine blades etc, is a favorite bleat among the moronosphere. Problems to be addressed, are being addressed, and are trivial compared to CAGW. Every bluddy thing is trivial compared to CAGW!
October 20, 2021 at 1:33 am
But on the bright side, once we get that permafrost melt really going, the “Anthropogenic” part becomes irrelevant.
😦
October 20, 2021 at 1:49 am
The bright side?
October 20, 2021 at 9:22 am
Gallows humor: At some point we stop worrying about negotiating human GHG emissions and start figuring out how to efficiently catch rats to eat.
October 20, 2021 at 9:59 am
“Agriculture is thousands of times more ecologically destructive than mining.”
I think it is time for you to seek out a clinical professional.
October 20, 2021 at 6:20 pm
The amount of the planet’s surface that is changed from its natural state to unnatural. Mono culture for eg.
October 20, 2021 at 7:09 pm
Which is worse? No idea. They’re both horrific. But agriculture became far worse than it should be when we turned essentially farming INTO mining – fossil fuel dependence for fertilizer, pesticides, and harvesting, soil depletion, aquifer drainage, and biodiversity loss. Plus, a good percentage of agriculture is used for industrial products – oil, cotton, so on.
Here’s a photo to counterpoint GB:
https://images.app.goo.gl/buA7a1FYF9dY8kip6
October 20, 2021 at 11:58 pm
Which is worse? Dunno. Everything we have is either farmed or mined. Intend to keep eating myself. All those endless acres of agriculture depend on mining and miners need to eat and on and on. Guess the point is, the world must change many methods it does things.
October 21, 2021 at 11:34 am
One reasonable metric of how “destructive” something is would be [how much area/natural-functionality is damaged] X [how long it would take for something to recover].
Croplands and pasture would return to nature very quickly, while mountaintop removal, like the Mt. St. Helens area, would probably take decades for interstitial growth to get to the point where it produces enough useful soil (weathering, wind, bird poop) and many more decades of “S-curve”. Cleared forests would start to transition through various biomes (depending upon local weather, water supply, fauna), and some would make it back to being a forest after a century. Roadways without maintenance* would become cracked and overgrown, and would eventually just become a track through the grassland/woods.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: The World Without Us (2008), by Alan Weisman. After touring through and reporting on the natural regrowth and expansion of the wildlife inside of the Chernobyl Exclusion Area, Weisman explored how quickly various aspects of the human footprint would disappear (a single house, Manhattan, Panama Canal, Houston chemical plants and refineries, etc.) if humans suddenly all vanished. Interesting thought experiment, along with an appreciation of what effort it takes to maintain current human lifestyle.
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*Home lawn care wisdom: “One sure way to get lush, green growth is a crack in the sidewalk.”
October 22, 2021 at 2:34 am
It doesn’t take long for nature to heal the scars we inflict ( on her timescale, anyway ) , but extinction wipes out millions of years of trial and error learning.