USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

It's because there are people with unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests of corporations would be left.

Actually it looks like their arguments are presented entirely in terms of tradeoffs. They argue that the carbon benefit from electric cars (cited as very far down the list on e.g. https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions) isn’t worth the cost to biodiversity, water use and pollution, cultural values and history, peacefulness and tranquility, etc. https://www.protectthackerpass.org/mining-lithium-at-thacker...

Their argument:

  But many analyses actually find that the emissions reductions from switching to electric vehicles are quite minor. 
  Paul Hawken, for example, doesn’t put electric cars in his top 10 climate solutions. In fact, it’s number 24 on his list, with almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases, and behind solutions like tropical rainforest restoration (about 5 times as effective at reducing emissions as is switching to EVs) and peatland protection (more than twice as effective).
  Producing a single electric car releases a lot of greenhouse gas emissions—about 9 tons on average. This is rising, as the size of electric cars is going up substantially. That means that even if operating electric cars reduces emissions overall, it’s not going to reduce them much. One calculation estimates reductions of 6 percent in the United States. That’s not enough to make much of a dent in warming.

That list is only scale (e.g. 40 Gigatons saved by onshore wind or utility solar by 2050) and even on that measure EVs do pretty well at 10 Gigatons.

But they do even better if you consider cost since the TCO of many electric vehicle classes is lower than the alternative, so you save money and carbon.

These tradeoffs are displayed on a marginal abatement cost curve:

https://www.edf.org/revamped-cost-curve-reaching-net-zero-em...

> $0 per ton or less

> Technologies: Many measures in the power and transportation sectors are cost-effective right now, including several electric vehicle classes, electric efficiency, high-quality solar PV and onshore wind resources, and nuclear relicensing. The use of heat pumps in buildings is also available.

> Emissions: Together, the measures in this range represent more than 1 gigaton of potential annual emission reductions by 2050 or 22% of way toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Frankly, these articles are obviously written from a very left-wing perspective with essentially no relevance on the American political stage.

None of the opinions stated in the protect* article are close to majority.

> > Benson’s argument is that “mining critical metals is a necessity for a greener future.” But I would ask—a necessity for whom? For example, do child slaves laboring in Congolese cobalt mines call this necessary? Cobalt is an essential ingredient in mobile phones and electric vehicle batteries, but those kids aren’t driving Tesla’s and listening to podcasts all day. They need liberation, not consumer toys.

“Liberation” is not the solution to extreme poverty in the Congo/DRC. You either need to convince wealthier societies to do vast wealth transfers or find a way to bootstrap a stronger economy, which very well might involve lithium mining.

I would argue leftism is very relevant on the American political stage, at the very least since WWII.

> almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants

I love this: it implies we should eliminate refrigerants and we should eliminate food waste...

Like a child wanting two incompatible things.

And I was answering "it looks like their arguments are presented entirely in terms of tradeoffs". Which to me contains the same locura - trying to face reality but failing to.

Plus the other reply which is black and white: "unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests"

And I've just noticed the original comment is flagged... Another form of denying and erasing the reality of others.

Casting into the void.

Leftism is very relevant on the political stage, the type of leftism exemplified by this blog post is less so.

The leftism exemplified by this blog post resembles actual leftism. Unfortunately, it only really exists in the confinement zone of social media, and isn't allowed anywhere near the political stage.

What Americans consider "leftist" in their politics is just "socially progressive but center right." Hillary Clinton gets called a Communist, Barack Obama a Marxist. Americans wouldn't know an actual leftist if one threw a Molotov cocktail through their window.

Sure, the people winning elections aren't part of the capital-L Left but that doesn't mean the capital-L Left isn't an important political force even in America.