As I have written many times, #renewables are only as clean as is their manufacturing.
The #lithium mine protests in #Serbia are a vicious cycle - people don't trust it will be mined to proper environmental protection standards (Serbia is not yet in EU), with without actually mining it in EU while preserving these standards, you can't really claim renewables life-cycle is actually clean.
Many pro-renewables environmentalists dismiss these protests as "NIMBY" but it's not really fair and represents a rather ignorant attitude where renewables are clean as long as manufacturing happens "somewhere else", where you don't really see it and don't ask questions about its environmental footprint.
https://www.politico.eu/article/huge-lithium-mining-protest-triggers-crisis-meeting-in-serbia/
Physical context: due to very low energy density, renewables in principle require plenty of mined resources and processing per kWh of energy produced. This is physics and there's no shortcuts here - **if you want more renewables, you need to accept increase in mining and heavy industry by up to 3000%.**
This aspect has been conveniently not discussed in public because in case of PV, for example, 85% of the whole supply chain (mining, processing, manufacturing) is concentrated in just one country - China.
But the fact that a new PV panel or battery arrives from China all shiny and plastic-wrapped doesn't mean it was cleanly produced - quite the opposite, China's energy mix is largely based on coal and its environmental protection record is rather poor.
So it is absolutely desirable for more mining and processing to happen inside EU and US, where high environmental standards are preserved (also labour protection, absence of slave labour etc). And of course, this will also come at a higher price tag - but there's no shortcuts here, any CO2 and pollution emitted "where we don't see it" will come back anyway because we share the same atmosphere with China.
kravietz 🦇 /
npub1pa…jc9c8
2024-08-12 12:35:42
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npub1par9x23t2mmfwnfyqav06qvzjl7lntrypwc2l9sk9zg8w057yxtqzjc9c8Published at
2024-08-12 12:35:42Event JSON
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