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MFW I take a split-second to imagine anyone in this administration can competent their way out of a wet paper bag.
To action this, they’ll kick poor people out of a town, clearcut something’s only habitat, pollute the area, make a tentative agreement for billions that equal zero because of the tax breaks and other oversubsidized giveaways, and then close it all down after all that with a suspicious bankruptcy and government buyout.
The Appalachians are older than sharks.
So yeah let’s dig it up and burn it, since that’s apparently the only thing we know to do with nature.
I have a running joke I tell my friends that one day, the rich will flatten mountains, so the only way to see their natural wonder will be in VR. That’s when they will become mainstream. Not because they offer some new technological advancement, but because they’ve managed to capture the spaces we use to get away.
They already take the tops off mountains in Appalachia because it’s more efficient to just straight up delete a mountain to get coal than to dig into it for it
There’s a video clip of a song in French with a similar concept from 2003. A child is frolicking and playing in nature until we discover that it’s all synthetic, her time is up, and other children are lining up for their time in “nature” too. Mickey 3D - Respire on YouTube.
From a description of the song on Wikipedia:
The text of the song addresses a “kid” to alert him about the state of the world that adults will leave to him. The first part of the song deals with the story of humans’ arrival on Earth and their disturbance of the whole balance of nature. The second part imagines the future of people if they continue to do so (referring to the disappearance of natural resources, animals and even genetic modification because of pollution) and how the “kid” will try to explain to his grandchildren why he did nothing to prevent it. The third part speaks about the state of slavery, misery, and shame of the human species as well as the unpredictability of its future.
EDIT: The description is lacking. The lyrics are speaking for themselves and here’s a translation of a few key lines.
"Come and listen kid, I’ll tell you the story of mankind. At first, there was nothing. Nature was following its course. There was no roads. But man came and elements were mastered. There’s no coming back anytime soon. We even began to pollute deserts.
You must breathe. It has to be said.
In a short future we’ll have consumed nature. Your one eyed grand-children will ask why you have two. They’ll ask how you could let this happen. You’ll reply it’s not my fault, it’s the ancient’s fault, but there will no nobody left to defend you. You’ll tell them about when you could eat fruits laying in a field, how animals were roaming the forest, that every spring birds would come back.
You must breathe. It has to be said. You must breathe. Tomorrow it will get worse.
The worst part of this story is that we’re slaves, somehow murderers, incapable of looking at the trees without feeling guilty, half defeated and totally miserable. So there is it kid, the story of mankind. It’s not so nice and I don’t know the end. You weren’t born in a cabbage, but in a hole that we fill like a cesspit."
Well here in america we already have flattened mountains. And also maybe bombed our own citizens who felt some sorta way about it.
Wild, but this is already happening - Tuvalu is being “preserved” in vr as it’s going to be one of the first island nations wiped out by climate change.
Mining has always been allowed on national forest land, but it was heavily regulated and overseen. They recently changed the rules so that no permission is needed for mining operations on less than 5 acres. This will be an ecological disaster
Yep, they are going to strip mine the Appalachians. And the sad thing is that the people in the Appalachians are going to welcome this. Because it means jobs in their minds.
Oh cool so more lithium than they k ow what do do with. What’s next laws stating everyone has to own at least 100 phones and 50 laptops?
And lithium batteries are already obsolete sodium ion battery can last thousands of charge cyclesBut they still suffer from thermal runaways and aren’t as energy dense
Im a Canadian geologist so I obviously dont have any personal stake in this but I do want to share my thoughts.
I think anti-mining sentiment is understandable in most places but not always justifiable. Lithium mining is absolutely required to transition from fossil fuels. Unless the number of cars on the road is greatly reduced, replacing them with BEVs will require significant amounts of lithium or improvements to Na ion batteries. There is not enough lithium available to get by just on recycling.
The question then becomes: where should this lithium come from? If it is not mined in western countries like USA or Canada, it will be mined by China or developing countries. In this comparison, who has better environmental regulations? Which countries have more human rights abuse?
If we decide that we can mine these deposits in the west, there is still a question about where they are mined. Do we extract lithium from basinal brines? My understanding is that these are generally more environmentally risky than extraction from pegmatites (the deposit type in New England).
The final question becomes, which communities will have to accept this mining? In Canada, most of the time it is indigenous communities that suffer most of the negative impacts of mining. There are many benefits to the communities too (usually), but the indigenous communities do not have nearly as much political sway as say rich cottage owners might, so their preferences and desires often get steamrolled by government in the name of “progress”.
The unfortunate reality is that if we want to get rid of fossil fuels, we need to do a lot more mining and extraction or come up with some serious technological and societal innovation. In a globalized economy, saying that you dont want mining near your home means that you want some other people to deal with the potentially negative consequences of it. I am not saying that we need to allow all mining everywhere, but these are important ethical considerations that we have to make when talking about how we want society to progress.
Sorry for the rant.
This is a beautiful description of why the obvious move here is “fewer cars, way better public transit.”
Hard agree from me. Cars are such an inefficient use of resources its crazy. If I had it my way we would all get around by train, tram, or bike.
The hilarious part of this is that they think they can do this to get to something approaching parity/self-sufficiency with China’s level of Rare Earth Metals production, in like… no time at all.
That’s not even close to how any of this works, but okey dokey?
They’re literally the most incompetent economic planners / policy makers… at least since the Smoot Hawley tariffs.
Even if this all like, actually worked, without legal challenges, to … open up mining operations…
You… still have have to do all the rest of the industrial planning/policy to… make… any of this… make any actual sense, and that’s just… national heritage/environmental damage treated as moot.
Stay the fuck off Plumbago thanks, Maine doesn’t want it’s mountain tops chopped off like fucking West Virginia. I love that since we have a state ban on metal extraction, and even though the lithium is bound as a silicate mineral (spudomeme, sp) it’s technically a metal and that’s prevented it’s extraction so far.
Also they are the largest lithium crystals found, I believe, anywhere. We’re talking 30ft long tree trunk sized crystals embedded in matrix, some of which have been exposed and are insanely cool to look at. The site is on private land but it’s not terribly difficult to get in contact with folks who have permission up there. Maine has a very long history of mineral extraction, and some of the richest gem deposits in North America, but the size of this locality and the type of mining proposed would be a massive problem for a relatively pristine area of Northern Mixed Hardwood and Conifer forest, not to mention the very small towns in the area that would be entirely transformed in the process.
Seriously these things are huge
Imagine destroying that because it’s useful. Like cutting down a redwood
Yesh keep Vermont Vermonty. I don’t live there, I haven’t been there since I was a kid, but it’s beautiful and wonderful the way it is
Just like always USA fighting yesterday war. Lithium is already on the way out.
What exactly is 328 years of anything? Are they saying we consume X tons, and we have found 328×X tons? Or is there some sort of future consumption estimations or trend lines accounted for? Is this all functionally available, or can we only access 20 years worth of it economically and banking on future extraction improvements? With thay large of a supply I would expect economic viability of further extraction would diminish over time.
My interpretation of the image is, “we consume x per year, we estimate there is 328x in the Appalachian area.”
Where will it get refined?
Well uh, China.
Untill they figure out that you can’t just cram raw ore into a battery or computer.
ETA on them figuring that out … 2-3 years?
Oh right, and then you actually have to build the refineries.
I’m goin with ‘within the next 2 years’, being said for approximately 8 years.
In America rich people must profit and everyone else must suffer. Everything is for sale.
Aren’t Appalachians poisoned enough?
Original information source, not the tweet: https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/lithium-eastern-states-could-replace-imports-a-century-or-more
And the Study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11053-026-10652-9
There is a very important sentence all the way at the end:The USGS did not assess what amount would be economically recoverable.Edit: On a second reading, I think this sentence applies only to the southwest Arkansas brine deposits. Sorry.
And China is moving from lithium to sodium
