• Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Too bad the lithium battery industry is no better. Those places are child labor slave mines and the environmental damage is astronomical…

    • bricklove@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      This is true but coal mining is just as bad and requires orders of magnitude (mineral fuels) more excavation than all of the other minerals combined. If we can stop mining coal by using renewables the total amount of mining will be a fraction of what it currently is. Plus many of the other minerals can be reused where coal just ends up as carbon in the atmosphere.

      • Pogbom@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        This is exactly it. Of course battery production is harmful too, but not only is it less harmful than other sources to extract, you also don’t have to burn batteries to generate the power. With fossil fuels, the extraction is massively more harmful and then the use itself creates even more pollution.

        • bastion@feddit.nl
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          3 months ago

          Trees are technically a green, renewable fuel (if humanity used them that way). The carbon dioxide released is that which was sequestered during the tree’s life.

          But oil is gathering material that accrued over vast amounts of time, and using that, dumping huge volumes of co2 directly onto the air. There’s no cycle happening there - just pure extraction for our extinction.