US Pulls Authorization for Lithium Exploration Project in Southern Nevada, Citin...
source link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/07/23/229245/us-pulls-authorization-for-lithium-exploration-project-in-southern-nevada-citing-wildlife
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US Pulls Authorization for Lithium Exploration Project in Southern Nevada, Citing Wildlife
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Tuesday North America's largest lithium mining operation cleared its last legal hurdle in federal appeals court, giving a green light to the mining of 6,000 acres in an 18,000-acre project site near Nevada's northern border.
But meanwhile, in Southern Nevada...
Federal land managers have formally withdrawn their authorization of a Canadian mining company's lithium exploration project bordering a national wildlife refuge in southern Nevada after conservationists sought a court order to block it.
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Amargosa Conservancy said in a lawsuit filed July 7 that the project on the edge of the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge outside Las Vegas posed an illegal risk to a dozen fish, snail and plant species currently protected under the Endangered Species Act. They filed an additional motion this week in federal court seeking a temporary injunction prohibiting Rover Metals from initiating the drilling of 30 bore sites in search of the highly sought-after metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles.
But before a judge in Las Vegas could rule on the request, the Bureau of Land Management notified Rover Metals on Wednesday that its earlier acceptance of the company's notice of its intent to proceed "was in error... The agency has concluded that proposed operations are likely to result in disturbance to localized groundwaters that supply the connected surface waters associated with Threatened and Endangered species in local springs," said Angelita Bulletts, district manager of the bureau's southern Nevada district...
Conservationists said the reversal provides at least a temporary reprieve for the lush oasis in the Mojave Desert that is home to 25 species of fish, plants, insects and snails that are found nowhere else on Earth — one of the highest concentrations of endemic species in North America at one of the hottest, driest places on the planet.
The article ends with this quote from a director at the Center for Biological Diversity and the Amargosa Conservancy. "We need lithium for our renewable energy transition, but this episode sends a message loud and clear that some places are just too special to drill."
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Nothing can ever be done at anytime, anywhere!-
Luckyos do have quite a bit of trouble reading beyond the headlines...
It was the very first sentence...
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Followed by the Bureau of Land Management removing their approval. So no mine for you!
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The mine in northern Nevada cleared legal hurdles and got the go ahead. The exploration of a mime site in southern Nevada was nixed.
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The exploration of a mime site
No one was heard complaining, but they did seem to be trapped in invisible boxes...
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Lol I usually try and proofread, but that went right past me on the phone screen.
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Do you think one mine is going to supply enough lithium to build all the EVs and grid back up batteries needed for renewable power to be viable?
Do you think foreign countries will buy enough comic book movies so we can buy their lithium?
Or do you want to cut to the chase and roll the tanks and forcibly strip mine a foreign country or two so you can have your renewable power and also high quality vacations for the urban elite?
As an aside, recycling won't work until the metal has been dug up the first time.
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Good thing there are multiple mine sites going up all over the world and the US, just a couple days ago there was a story here about an even larger deposit in Arkansas.
Firstly, that is not how global trade works. "Have some Marvel movies for your lithium sir?" is actually just silliness. People will sell their lithium to whoever wants to buy it.
Also those foreign countries will continue to buy thos emovies because culture is one of the USA's greatest exports. There a reason in Civ games the USA can usual
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If you're not a part of the solution, there's always money to be made prolonging the problem.
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Strategic reserves, my good Slashdotter!.
Strategic banking of useful and uncommon materials is allowing the other guy to use up his own stuff first.
So any Lithium assets with issues like potential disruption to wildlife refuges are just banked, only to be exploited at great need.
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To quantify reserves and determine what would take to mine something vs. what you'd get out of it, you first have to drill boreholes.
Which was just prohibited.
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We don't need strategic reserves of Lithium. Once we have about 300TWh of batteries we'll have enough to decarbonize and production will need to only be slightly higher than steady state maintenance, and the vast majority of the lithium will come from recycling.
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Drill, Baby, Drill
For oil, of course, not for Lithium !
F--k Yeah.
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Ah, environmentalists. Ya gotta love 'em. They are blocking even exploration for possible lithium extraction, for a site that is not even part of the wildlife refuge.
"We want EVs, stop burning fossil fuels!" Ok, we need lithium, here's a mine. "No! Not like that!"
It's the same every time. "We want green power!". Ok, here's a spot for a wind farm, or here's a spot for hydroelectric, or whatever... "No! Not like that!"
The greenies apparently think that EVs magically grow on trees and electricity magically appears at the plug. Then their leadership flies in private jets to climate conferences [bbc.com]. Even the low-level leadership is full of hypocrites: Here, in Switzerland, the leader of the group that glues themselves to streets recently flew to Mexico for vacation [9gag.com], and also turns out to be a fan of Formula 1 racing.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” --George Carlin
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Well yeah. Remember The Life of Julia? Owned nothing and depended on the government for everything.
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The most fanatic of the environmentalists cannot be appeased unless humanity was somehow transformed back to the stone age, at which point they *might* consider us "one with nature" as a species. So anything short of that is pretty much unacceptable.
Like wokeism and other recent trends, it is really more of an emotional / quasi-religious movement than anything practical or reasonable.
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I agree, anti-"wokism" is more of an emotional / quasi-religious movement than anything practical or reasonable. All that "woke" crap in Christianity about loving your fellow man? Ha, wokism run amok. Clearly Jesus was preaching gun-rights and the benefits of slavery.
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The Hebrews were really grateful for all the job training they received in Egypt!
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Ordinarily I would be inclined to agree with you, but in this particular instance, the area is actually very unique, is a green oasis in the desert that literally has many species that exist nowhere else on the planet, and since there is already a suitable place in the northern area of the same state, it seems reasonable to block this.
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Wow, "one place" was approved, I guess that means that everyone's needs are now forever met. *eyeroll*
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"Tuesday North America's largest lithium mining operation cleared its last legal hurdle in federal appeals court, giving a green light to the mining of 6,000 acres in an 18,000-acre project site near Nevada's northern border."
"Federal land managers have formally withdrawn their authorization of a Canadian mining company's lithium exploration project bordering a national wildlife refuge in southern Nevada"
If you'd bothered to actually read the summary, you would have seen that your environmentalist bogymen okayed a huge lithium mining operation in the same state. The difference is that it it's not right next to an environmental reserve and won't kill off a bunch of unique species.
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The same people who jump to the standard positions of them damn environmentalists! and heaping derision on the "woke" - which now means anyone they disagree with - are simply using memes that allow them to have the simple standard enemy they need, so they don't need to think, just regurgitate pap.
There is a whole lot more than just tree huggers or whoever their hate target du jour their simple minds can grasp.
There is the strategic reserve issue. You don't go using all of your goodies up just because
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The environmentalist solution isn't EVs, it's public transport. EVs is the "status quo" solution.
Wind farms are mainly opposed by people that are mad that they ruin their views, e.g. Trump, not environmentalists. There's hardly any unexploited hydroelectric locations and the dams do wreck the local environment so you can't just dismiss that.
COP attendees aren't really "greenies" unless you think Sunak or bin Salman count:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/1... [nytimes.com]
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Right EVs are trap. Its a scheme to make personal transportation ultimately so expensive only the very wealthiest can afford it. Step one use subsidies, punitive changes to current regulations and standards around th established technology and mass propaganda that EVs are significantly "greener" never mind even under ideal conditions the break even point just on carbon is nearly half way into the vehicles useful life..
Once you can't get a good reliable ICE powered vehicle they will drop the real cost of E
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Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
"We need to reduce CO2 emissions."
"I won't accept any reduction in quality of life, I must be able to keep flying and racing fossil fuel cars."
"Okay, we aren't saying you have to stop doing those things, although they could reduce their emissions. In fact I enjoy both without compromising on the goal of net zero."
"Hypocrite!"FWIW F1 is supposed to be going net zero. For flying the main focus is on business users who make a lot of flights, not individuals who maybe go
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Well, in this specific situation, we already have an agreement that a designated area is worth preservation as a refuge.
So outside that refuge, you want to do a project that is surface construction? Ok then. They probably would shrug at a solar farm, they might ask about avian life impact of windmills in an area, but less resistance. Hydroelectric would probably get a bigger objection, given just how much that changes the local environment (though that area is heavily hydro powered already). Or even som
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Except that they don't shrug at solar farms either [electrek.co].
It's just extreme NIMBYism.
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And for the record, there are solutions for dealing with groundwater.
The mine in question is clay, so they actually don't want to encounter groundwater. But even in cases where it's the groundwater that's desired (such as salar lithium brine), the standard solution is that of Los Flamencos Nature Reserve in Chile. Brine is not particularly useful to humans, but at Los Flamencos it feeds halophilic plants and microbes and creates a sort of oasis ecosystem. Albermale taps into the same brine for salar lithiu
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I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but the endless expanses of deserts of southern Nevada are jam-packed with a patchwork of refuges and parks. It's only 8km from Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge to the Funeral Mountains Wilderness Area, which is itself part of Death Valley National Park, which can also be found stretching from 20km south to 11km W of Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, and beyond to the WNW. 24km SSE of Ash Meadows is the Nopah Range Wilderness Area. 19km ESE you're inside P
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In such a situation, the next step is for the extraction company to counter with information about why the groundwater is not threatened, in an updated notice to BLM.
We have to navigate nuance here, and even if they ultimately can proceed after clarifying the situation with respect to groundwater safety, then at least it's more likely they have explicit thought toward the groundwater situation in their final strategy.
Folks should at least be able to raise their concerns and have them be evaluated in the pro
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The question is whether it's the same "them". Judging from the article, it's likely not the same them. In that instance, yeah, they are absolutely unreasonable NIMBY folks, even blatantly admitting it in their commentary. Seemingly recognizing that there is a such thing as whiny empty NIMBY-ism but on the other hand it is 'their' backyard, so it's totally different... somehow?
Also that 'art' that they say is important to keep tourists interested in seeing is... a trench? Just... wow....
However, it seems
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It's being left alone because it is not needed yet
Don't worry, if we find ourselves in a war situation, and the lithium is needed, they will eliminate the wildlife refuge, and you or I or anyone who gets in the way.
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Green movement is an anti-capitalist movement masquerading as environment movement. You can clearly see this in them opposing any solution that would actually reduce global pollution in favor of measures that would disproportionately impact quality of life. This is how you end up with schizophrenic set of believes that is against fossil fuels AND nuclear energy at the same time.
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Of cource they can not have their own mine if they need reason to invade or exploit Mexico. How would that look...
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BANANA
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
The governing principle of the Western world.
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You're joking, I know, but land clearing is a big contributor to atmospheric CO2. Cleared land doesn't absorb much carbon. It's also a major cause of habitat loss which drives mass extinction.
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While thatâ(TM)s true, clearing the land area involved in a mine doesnâ(TM)t produce anywhere near the amount of fossil fuels that the ICEs would. And you know what else causes extinctions? Rapidly heating the planet. Far more extinctions than this would.
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An EV prevents the emission of about 50 tonnes of CO2 over its lifespan vs. an equivalent gasoline car, and uses maybe 12kg of lithium (which is recycled at end of life, not consumed). For a 100m deep lithium resource at 1000ppm-recoverable and density of 1600kg/m, that's 100kg/m, that's 416 tonnes of CO2 per square meter (again, ignoring recycling). Do you think that there's 416 tonnes of carbon in a square meter of desert plants? Let's entirely ignore that land use is entirely temporary**, and that ICE vehicles also are made of "stuff" that doesn't just appear from thin air (including actually rare minerals like platinum).
** Rover Metals is, like most companies in the new Nevada boom, looking at a clay project. The mining process is very simple:
1) Dig up clay.
2) Run the clay through a process to leach out the lithium.
3) Put the clay back in the hole.If anything, they're probably improving soil fertility by decompacting it, bringing deep minerals to the surface, etc. This isn't hard rock mining. There's no acid mine ponds. No heavy metals (like the lead in your ICE car's lead-acid battery). It's just bloody clay.
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"proposed operations are likely to result in disturbance to localized groundwaters that supply the connected surface waters associated with Threatened and Endangered species in local springs"
So regardless of what they did with the clay, the mining would probably screw up the adjacent springs.
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I'm sorry, but the notion that drilling 30 shallow boreholes (which are capped) is going to eliminate high-flow-rate springs that are fed by water that's flowed for at least many dozens of kilometers already through strata so deep that they're hard to reach even deliberately, before permeating to the surface at Ash Meadows because of its highly fractured carbonate strata [nanfa.org], is beyond absurd.
We're not talking about a permit for mining. We're talking a permit for drilling 30 capped holes in the ground.
Meanwhil
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Well in this neck of the woods, you don't really have to worry about clearing land, it's all pre cleared. It's desert. Groundwater concerns are valid, but outside the refuge, there's negligible vegetation.
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You just don't appreciate that they understand that, in the face of impending global catastrophe and mass human-caused extinction where dozens or hundreds of species are going extinct each year because of our CO2 emissions, the really critical thing is to protect the Southern Nevada Striped Desert Slug from being startled during its mating season.
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But end risk for a few species? You betcha! Iâ(TM)m a conservationist, and want to preserve biodiversity much more than the next guy. But this is a nasty double standard.
the real solution is to enforce more meticulous extraction. It can be done, but it does add cost. And this result should be reversed. American wealth stands on the gross exploitation of first people and certain Africans. The least we can do is protect some of their special places.
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This isn't saying "do it more carefully". This is saying "don't do it at all". They're not even trying to extract anything right now, they just want to drill boreholes to take samples. They're not even being allowed to do that.
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IMO we need to recognize that our planet won't sustainably support a civilization of more than about a billion people - maybe much less - and take steps to reverse population growth. And if we do manage to shrink it to a billion or less, we should consider abandoning some continents to nature.
Of course, no one will agree to either of those. Or maybe a lot of people would support them both, provided someone else had to make the sacrifices.
See also: tragedy of the commons.
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Pop. growth is tanking in Russia, China, and Europe. I expect the rest of the world to slow down as well as they get better economies. The U.S. also has negative growth. The only thing keeping the U.S. pop. from dropping is immigration, which is something the right wing-nuts might consider as they reach their dotage.
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Just saying it's "unsustainable" doesn't make it so, you have to demonstrate it.
Silly analogies like a houseguest are just emotional distractions. This is like when people compare the finances of a nation-state to a single family home. It's nonsense fodder for simpletons who refuse to contemplate the complexity of how these massive systems operate.
The fact we can actually consider these things *at all* is what makes us the superior animal.
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Nope, this is way outdated thinking from like the 70's with the "population bomb" book that has been pretty much entirely discredited and considered absolute junk science. The world population is set to level off soon and frankly we could (and probably should) support close to billion people just in the USA.
Degrowth in general is for losers on the extreme ends of both political spectrums. The far far left wants it because they think it will bring some socialist utopia where we all farm and work off mutual
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You do know quite a lot of people in this world didn't grow up across the street from farmland right? They grow up in cities or suburbs? Don't drag your personal and/or imaginary scenarios into this like it proves anything, at all.
Save your emotional sleight-of-hand for the next guy. Just becuase you have zero imagination and hate everything, especially yourself doesn't make the convincing argument you think it does. It's just boring.
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