cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/49040633
[…]
Villagers in northern China, Myanmar, or Madagascar wake up to dust on their crops and odd smells in their wells. Pastures turn into pits. Streams run a strange shade of green. The same metals that make magnets for wind turbines and motors for EVs arrive wrapped in an invisible trail of tailings, acid, and waste.
[…]
Take Baotou, in China’s Inner Mongolia, often called the rare earth capital of the world. For years, demand exploded as smartphones, wind turbines, and EVs took off. At the edge of the city, a man‑made lake of inky black waste spread wider and wider. From the air it looks like an oil spill frozen in place. On the ground, it smells faintly of chemicals and wet metal, a scent that clings to clothes.
Farmers in nearby villages once grew corn and raised sheep on gently rolling fields. As mining expanded, dust settled on their crops, and the water in shallow wells started to change. Some families reported skin rashes, others saw yields fall. Official data is scarce, and direct links are fiercely debated, but the feeling on the ground is simple: the land is not what it used to be. When your cows refuse to drink from a stream they used all their lives, you notice.
[…]
Can “clean” tech be less destructive?
For companies, the equivalent is building real supply‑chain visibility instead of pretty slide decks. That can mean independent audits at mine sites, long‑term contracts that reward better practices, and actually walking the ground where extraction happens. Soyons honnêtes : nobody does that for every single bolt and magnet. Yet a few start‑ups and automakers are testing shorter chains, recycling loops, and higher environmental standards that move impact closer to those making the promises.
Consumers have a role too, even if it feels small. Holding onto phones for an extra year, choosing a smaller EV, or backing brands that invest in recycling is not glamorous. On a hectic Tuesday, no one wakes up excited about a responsible supply‑chain choice. Still, multiplied across millions of purchases, those shifts slow the hunger for virgin rare earths and make room for alternatives to grow.
[…]
Greed and overconsumption is the main problem. Even if we find the cheapest and environmental friendly fuel source, they’ll increase the use all the way up and make new problems. We need to replace previous fuel use by new ones, not just add new ones and still keep old ones and use far more power than before.
How is this any different than coal mining or uranium mining?
It isn’t. Except that many places where these things are mined are in corrupt poor countries with very lax environmental regulations - so the companies can do whatever they want.
I just want to remind everyone that even the best solutions can do better for the planet and for the workers in that production process.
That does not mean gas or oil or coal or hydrogen is good or better. In fact nearly everything that can be applied to green energy supply chains can be applied to fossil fuels with a multiplier.
I always think it’s better in an online discussion, when a subject doesn’t have overwhelming public support like climate change and green energy, to critique it with a clarifying contextual message like the one above. Just to quell any rational counter arguments or creating irrelevant conversation chains.
Let’s mine more coal and oil sands then, seems smart!
Or we could look at Hydrogen rather than Batteries for vehicles…
Still green, doesn’t require rare earth minerals and existing diesel engines can be modified to burn hydrogen, that’s still 99% water vapor as exhaust (you’ll probably burn some synthetic oil and other lubricants though)
Hydrogen was great until Elon said it wasn’t. But a lot of people forgot it was musk spam that ‘hydrogen bad’
doesn’t require rare earth minerals
I recommend you look at how electrolysis is done.
Hydrogen was never great, it’s always been an oil lobby play because the majority of hydrogen - as I understand it - is a byproduct of the oil process. It makes very little sense to lose efficiency creating a highly flammable substance, lose efficiency transporting and storing that substance, lose efficiency supplying that substance to the end consumer, and then finally lose efficiency extracting the remaining energy from the substance.
Hydrogen may make sense in some circumstances but it should not, and I’d even go so far as to say it will not, replace gasoline. Electricity is by far the best supplier of power long term.
Elon liking something should be a red flag into a subject because he has shown himself to be both uneducated and against humanities best interests. It’s not that Elon likes a thing therefore it’s bad. It’s that Elon likes bad things because Elon is bad, and therefore when you look into it it has a pattern of being bad.
But a lot of people forgot it was musk spam that ‘hydrogen bad’
Once in a while, a blind chicken finds a corn as well, as we say in Germany. It is simply easier and more efficient to use electricity to drive our cars, than to first split the water, transport the hydrogen and then burn it. Oil to fuel works because the energy density of the end product outweighs the costs of production.
existing diesel engines can be modified to burn hydrogen
I never heard about that so far and to be quite frank, I doubt it.
So instead we’ll strip mine rare earth minerals in horrible ways since you don’t like a little inefficiency that doesn’t matter.
Electric car: 85-90% efficiency Hydrogen car: 25-35%
Using 3 times the energy is not “a little inefficiency”
We wouldn’t stop strip mining by switching to hydrogen, but we would increase our reliance on fossil fuels.
Doesn’t matter?
but don’t you need a lot of electricity to split hydrogen out of water?
Yes, electricity can come from Solar and Wind. We need something to store masses of solar. We can use Hydrogen as a storage for energy that doesn’t require rare earth minerals.
I really don’t know the tech but how can hydrogen store solar?
With great difficulty. It has to be kept under high pressure and low temperature.
Hydrogen once you have it is great!
But making hydrogen is not free, it requires a lot of power to create enough hydrogen to replace oil.
And remember conservation of energy, splitting H2O takes exactly the same amount of energy that you later get back when recombining it, and that is an ideal situation.
In reality you have losses on both sides.
The reason why we haven’t got rid of oil yet is that it is just too damn good.
The energy of oil was created over millions and millions of years, and we are now bruning it up in a few centuries (if we are lucky)
Were we ever just going to leave those materials alone?
Rare earth like molybdenum is used for oil pipe lines and cobalt in batteries is also used to refine fossil fuel. So no, they’re not going to leave it alone.
It always struck me as how the oil industry image is somehow “clean”. It’s mining too and it’s polluting and energy-intensive at that.
More people need to learn about Appalachian coal miners and/or listen to Panopticon’s album Kentucky.
No, but blaming green technologies is a great way of desensitizing the public.
Removed by mod
