It’s always something with this crowd, isn’t it?
Activists fear a new threat to biodiversity—renewable energy
A small Nevada wildflower named Tiehm’s buckwheat might still be living in obscurity if it had not happened to grow in soil full of lithium. As it is, that could prove its downfall.
Lithium is needed to make the high-powered batteries that are helping the world transition to electric vehicles. Demand is soaring, and mining companies are eager to take it out of the ground at several new sites in Nevada, already home to the only existing lithium mine in the U.S.
But Tiehm’s buckwheat is rarer than lithium. It grows only on approximately 10 acres of land at Rhyolite Ridge in southwestern Nevada—right where one of the new lithium mines is planned.
“One guy on a bulldozer could drive it extinct in one afternoon,” says Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin Director for the Center for Biological Diversity and one of the flower’s biggest advocates.
He and some other conservationists see the flower and the mine as emblematic of a broad and disturbing trend: There is a growing conflict, they say, between efforts to address two environmental crises—a rapidly warming climate on the one hand, and a staggering rise in extinction on the other.
Mining isn’t the only way the renewable energy revolution is affecting landscapes, in the desert and elsewhere. In the past decade, solar- and wind-powered electricity generation has quadrupled in the U.S.— and that’s just the beginning of what experts say we need to do to transition away from fossil fuels and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. By 2030, Nevada plans to get half its electricity from renewable energy, in line with the Biden Administration’s goal to decarbonize the economy completely by 2050.
The result is what some activists describe as a renewable energy land rush putting rare species and untouched desert ecosystems at risk.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. How about we keep the good migrants who just want a better life and to be part of the American dream and deport the eco and climate wackos?
Well if thst wildflower is only on 10 acres it should not much of a problem to keep safe.
Lithium is not a rare metal it is in the top q/3 most common
In the US it is mineable in my areas
There are many other events that can be used in chemical batteries.
Battery technology is improving quite rapidly.
Cobalt is already considered old tech (looks like those child laborers in the Congo will be phased out) Toyota’ solid state lithium ion is due out in 3 years double the power/range of today’s best battery
Even Honda will be cramming EVs down our throats ((they expect 40% of all production to be EVs in 7 years 2030
Make sure there’s no sharp objects around John… https://notrickszone.com/2022/05/23/continued-use-of-combustion-vehicles-leads-to-much-lower-lifetime-co2-emissions-than-driving-evs/
The left thing it’s already Star Trek time, and energy can be free and plentiful without any costs at all.
What will they do when it is discovered that burning unicorn farts emits CO2?
#LGBFJB
#BelieveTheLie
Bwaha! Lolgf
[…] Damned if we do, damn if we don’t Pirates Cove explains […]
William Teach typed: keep the good migrants who just want a better life and to be part of the American dream and deport the eco and climate wackos
Make America Great Again, deport every tRump voter.
Dear Elwood:
Lest you forget…
“The most important thing to remember about climate models which are used to project future global warming is that they were “tuned” with the assumption I started this article with: that the climate system is in a natural state of energy balance, and that there is no long-term climate change unless humans cause it.
This is an arbitrary and illogical assumption. The climate system is an example of a “nonlinear dynamical system”, which means it can change all by itself. For example, slow changes in the rate of vertical overturning of the world’s oceans can cause global warming (or global cooling) with no “external forcing” of the climate system whatsoever.
Instead, the climate models are “tuned” to not produce natural climate change. If a 100-year run of the model produces change, the model is adjusted to removed the “drift”.”
https://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-101/
“The most important thing to remember about climate models which are used to project future global warming is that” they have been 100% wrong all the time. Not one prediction, prognostication or “expert” guess has ever panned out. Not one.
The second most important thing to remember is they are programmed by people, “experts” if you will whose paycheck depends on predicting what they are told to predict.
It’s been suspected for some time that ice in the Arctic, Greenland, Antarctic and glaciers neither read the scientific literature nor watch cable TV, yet they are still melting. Why do you think the ice is melting? The volume of the ice sheets depend on the balance between accretion and melting. An increase in the duration or temperature of the ‘melting season’ causes a decrease in ice, unless precipitation makes up the difference.
The models predict warming, a result of an increase in atmospheric CO2, convincingly demonstrated to be from burning fossil fuels. Outgoing long-wave infrared radiation on its way from the Earth to deep space interacts with greenhouse gases, e.g., water vapor and CO2, resulting in warming. With NO greenhouse gases at all (i.e., no atmosphere) the Earth would be a frozen rock covered in ice with an average temperature of -18 C!!
Certainly no reasonable person denies that the Earth is warming. Right? And the models are not making the Earth warmer or causing ice to melt or oceans to rise are they?
There is absolutely no scientific basis for expecting a doubling of atmospheric CO2 to NOT cause even more warming.
Dr Spencer hypothesized that cosmic rays are causing a change in overall cloudiness and thus causing the Earth to warm.
Did he, dipshit?
#LGBFJB
#LosingTheNarrative
Bwaha! Lolgf
You mean they’re melting sorta like they did early last century, with CO2 much lower…. https://realclimatescience.com/2016/01/disappearing-glaciers/
I guess CO2 doesn’t work as well in the SH… This is sea ice, not land ice, but you get the picture….https://phzoe.com/2021/11/28/global-sea-ice-area/
L’Roy typed, cynically: “experts” … whose paycheck depends on predicting what they are told to predict,
similar to Upton Sinclair’s, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Having worked with scientists for half a century, I can tell you that you are wrong. This is not to say that scientists are never mistaken or are misled or mislead others. But the mass hysteria or cult-like behavior that Professor Teach attributes to climate scientists doesn’t comport with facts.
The skeptical scientist who can put a stake through the heart of the theory of CO2 driven global warming will be famous indeed! Politicians and partisans declare the theory dead, but they don’t count. They can’t even count votes, much less photons!! Perhaps you can answer why anti-global warming scientists haven’t been able to invalidate the theory.
Dearest Elwood:
Evidently you haven’t been working with the right scientists..
“Hundreds of scientists sent a letter to lawmakers Thursday warning National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists may have violated federal laws when they published a 2015 study purporting to eliminate the 15-year “hiatus” in global warming from the temperature record.”
https://dailycaller.com/2016/01/28/300-scientists-want-noaa-to-stop-hiding-its-global-warming-data/