Vocal Voices

So says a report by a number of scientists and experts, as reported here. It is loosely based on the Gaia Hypothesis. which states that all things on Earth are inter-connected - change one and you change others. This can lead to unexpected consequences.

The Earth has been broken down into nine research boundaries including climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution and others that could not exist without human involvement such as nuclear waste and microplastics. It found that six of the nine research areas are "at risk" and that two of the three remaining areas are heading in the wrong direction.

It is very worrying when all we are doing is tinkering at the edges, and also that some of our tinkering is making things worse - Gaia in action.

Karma

I have said many times that it is not just the climate that will get us, it is the totality of the way we live. This report confirms it.

Unfortunately we focus on one medium, climate, and diminish or ignore, all the rest.

We cannot keep banging on about climate, we have to look at other things, such as population, biodiversity, water and land resources. Why can't, supposedly, intelligent people comprehend this?

Electric vehicles, windmills and solar farms are not the answer, they are part of the ongoing problem. We ned a rethink.

Workingman wrote:Electric vehicles, windmills and solar farms are not the answer, they are part of the ongoing problem. We ned a rethink.

We do need a rethink. But all those things are not the problem. They are the pause to give us time for a rethink. Because without them there is no future we would recognise as anything other than catastrophic.

The biggest problem is that people take what you have said above and use it as a reason for doing nothing and doing nothing will kill billions. I know that you don't mean that but most people who have not educated themselves about the situation do not.

This leaves the same people who worked for the tobacco companies able to cast doubt on action to give us time to reassess.

Suff wrote:

Workingman wrote:Electric vehicles, windmills and solar farms are not the answer, they are part of the ongoing problem. We ned a rethink.

We do need a rethink. But all those things are not the problem.

Au contraire. They are the problem because they are being sold to the unthinking as the answer, the solution. They might offer us a pause in proceedings, but that is all, and they do create further problems whilst doing so.

The electrification of vehicles has created a need for more and more lithium. The extraction of this element is causing significant environmental damage - but let's brush that under the carpet, eh?. The manufacture of the batteries is energy intensive and their recycling is the same and also dangerous. Yes, once they have become useless for transport they can be repurposed for storage, but eventually all of them will need recycling.

Windmills are much the same. They use materials that are difficult or impossible to recycle (concrete and fibreglass) and are CO2 intensive to make, install and maintain. They also disrupt local weather patterns for many kilometres downstream due to their turbulent wakes - warmer surface temperatures and cooler upstream ones due to the cycling effect. That is a definite problem for onshore farms in such as the UK. We do yet not know of their global impacts on weather patterns. There will be some.

Solar? Where to begin? About 8% by weight comes from silver, copper, cadmium and selenium. These elements are not abundant. We make the panels, but in the UK to install enough of them we plant them on arable land which we need to produce food. Not so much of a problem if we put them on new-build or existing roofs, but we don't. In the winter months - Nov to Feb - when we get about eight hours of daylight and need energy the most it provides about 0.5 GW. At max in summer it is about 3GW, but on average we need 45GW. We will need billions of them to make a dent in the need.

Workingman wrote:The electrification of vehicles has created a need for more and more lithium. The extraction of this element is causing significant environmental damage

Lithium, no. Cobalt and copper, yes. Fully 50% of Lithium comes from brine evaporation pools which are used for significantly more than just Lithium. It is just one of the metals/salts collected. They flood the pools, evaporate them for 2 years and then use bulldozers to collect the Lithium. The metal is the #4 most common in the world.

Of course if the manufacturers were willing to use LFP, which is Lithium Iron, then the cobalt and copper, aluminium and Nickel, would not be a big issue as they would not be needed for EV's in the same quantity at they are today.

It is companies like VW and Mercedes and BMW, a full decade behind the leaders, who are causing the problems with mineral extraction. We don't need to slow them down, we need to drag them Forward. Fast.

The main issue with Lithium is not the harvesting of it, it is the refining it to a purity of extreme high quality. That issue is being resolved as we speak.

Wind turbines, solar, these are solutions to very real problems. But they go hand in hand with the electrification of everything. However we are kidding ourselves if we think that this will solve ALL the problems. There are too many people. Of those people fully half of them live a very simple life with minimal energy draw. That other half of the world are going to want what the entitled half already have and, truly, expectations have to change on both sides.

I don't mind admitting that technical solutions are not the be all and end all of our problems. But I won't accept that the technical solutions we have are making more problems. Because they are not. They are solving problems and as we advance down this road the recycling techniques they are funding are making our world a far better place.

It is the humans who are making the biggest problem and fixing them is no easy task.

Suff wrote:Fully 50% of Lithium comes from brine evaporation pools which are used for significantly more than just Lithium. It is just one of the metals/salts collected.

Link? Oh, there isn't one because the claim is bollocks.

Lithium extraction is destroying previously pristine environments just as oil, iron and coal did. FACT. It is the major extracted product from the brines, other molecules / elements are secondary. Another FACT.

Same as soya, palm oil and other crops...

Yes, yes it is bollocks. It is 66%.

https://www.factmr.com/report/lithium-m ... %20sources.

Lithium Tesla uses which is not from salt flats is mined from spodumene, mainly in Australia. Recently they bought a area of the US which has lithium bearing clays and enough lithium for 1bn vehicles.

But you wouldn't know that because all you ever read about Tesla are hit pieces in the press sponsored by legacy auto.