Copper. The answers to necessary and to whom should be self-evident.
Other examples would be the rare earths which China has done so much work to acquire control over, and also sand for concrete which is such a high-value commodity that it has developed a global black market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, complete with international organized crime groups, and has caused a lot of environmental damage.
Ah, well that makes it easy then. You leave the people the fuck alone, and let them go on with their lives.
Why? Because the necessity is to some rich cunt who needs to exploit the natural resources of an area they have no larger claim to than anyone else, as well as the labour of whoever they can coerce into working there, to extract further riches for themselves. It is not about life or death. t is not about the betterment of a particular community, or society at large. It’s about profit.
This is only a necessity from a capitalistic lens. We have already extracted these materials, and they are out there ready to be reclaimed and reused. It just so happens that it’s more profitable to trample communities and destroy the earth to get more of it, rather than use what we already have.
That is the problem with capitalism. It is inimical to life and humanity, and cares only for profit. Capitalism is the paperclip maximiser.
Refusing to manufacture solar panels because the people living over the whatever refuse to let us mine the whatever would lead to us burning more fossil fuels and killing the planet sooner, and it would even be worse for the people living above the whatever.
There are also other places you could get those materials from. Let’s not pretend that it’s not about a particular company wanting to extract those materials from that spot for their own profit.
Capitalism isn’t altruistic. It’ll never be about things getting better for people.
It is not about life or death. t is not about the betterment of a particular community, or society at large. It’s about profit.
This is a nonsensical point of view. If we’re going to get out of our current climate problems we need to replace fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy sources as much and as quickly as possible. That’s going to mean more electrical infrastructure, more solar panels, more grid-scale battery systems, more wind turbines, more hydroelectric stations, etc., which in turn means more copper, steel, aluminum, silicon, and concrete.
Sure there’s profit motivation involved. It’s going to be a lot of fucking hard work and people gotta eat. But framing resource extraction for industrial use as only motivated by profit is so narrow-minded that this conversation can’t really continue until you take a few steps down from your high horse and adjust your extreme point of view to something more rational.
We have already extracted these materials, and they are out there ready to be reclaimed and reused. It just so happens that it’s more profitable to trample communities and destroy the earth to get more of it, rather than use what we already have.
There are already massive recycling industries in place for aluminum, steel, copper, and even lithium recovery from old batteries. Aluminum in particular is cheaper (more cost effective in terms of time and labor) to recycle than to mine and refine new ore. That’s great, but it still doesn’t produce enough volume of material, we still need more new material also.
There are also quarries that grind rock and old concrete down to make fine particles, but… it’s not the same as sand, it can’t be used in all of the same production processes. The result is more like very fine gravel than it is sand. There’s also an issue with a lot of concrete being reinforced with steel cables or rebar, which you can’t just throw into a rock grinder.
I don’t know why you’re talking about this as if it were all-or-nothing, that’s not a practical approach in the real world. It seems like you’re more interested in scoring holier-than-thou points than discussing actual solutions.
OK.
Copper. The answers to necessary and to whom should be self-evident.
Other examples would be the rare earths which China has done so much work to acquire control over, and also sand for concrete which is such a high-value commodity that it has developed a global black market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, complete with international organized crime groups, and has caused a lot of environmental damage.
Ah, well that makes it easy then. You leave the people the fuck alone, and let them go on with their lives.
Why? Because the necessity is to some rich cunt who needs to exploit the natural resources of an area they have no larger claim to than anyone else, as well as the labour of whoever they can coerce into working there, to extract further riches for themselves. It is not about life or death. t is not about the betterment of a particular community, or society at large. It’s about profit.
This is only a necessity from a capitalistic lens. We have already extracted these materials, and they are out there ready to be reclaimed and reused. It just so happens that it’s more profitable to trample communities and destroy the earth to get more of it, rather than use what we already have.
That is the problem with capitalism. It is inimical to life and humanity, and cares only for profit. Capitalism is the paperclip maximiser.
Refusing to manufacture solar panels because the people living over the whatever refuse to let us mine the whatever would lead to us burning more fossil fuels and killing the planet sooner, and it would even be worse for the people living above the whatever.
There are also other places you could get those materials from. Let’s not pretend that it’s not about a particular company wanting to extract those materials from that spot for their own profit.
Capitalism isn’t altruistic. It’ll never be about things getting better for people.
This is a nonsensical point of view. If we’re going to get out of our current climate problems we need to replace fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy sources as much and as quickly as possible. That’s going to mean more electrical infrastructure, more solar panels, more grid-scale battery systems, more wind turbines, more hydroelectric stations, etc., which in turn means more copper, steel, aluminum, silicon, and concrete.
Sure there’s profit motivation involved. It’s going to be a lot of fucking hard work and people gotta eat. But framing resource extraction for industrial use as only motivated by profit is so narrow-minded that this conversation can’t really continue until you take a few steps down from your high horse and adjust your extreme point of view to something more rational.
There are already massive recycling industries in place for aluminum, steel, copper, and even lithium recovery from old batteries. Aluminum in particular is cheaper (more cost effective in terms of time and labor) to recycle than to mine and refine new ore. That’s great, but it still doesn’t produce enough volume of material, we still need more new material also.
There are also quarries that grind rock and old concrete down to make fine particles, but… it’s not the same as sand, it can’t be used in all of the same production processes. The result is more like very fine gravel than it is sand. There’s also an issue with a lot of concrete being reinforced with steel cables or rebar, which you can’t just throw into a rock grinder.
I don’t know why you’re talking about this as if it were all-or-nothing, that’s not a practical approach in the real world. It seems like you’re more interested in scoring holier-than-thou points than discussing actual solutions.