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Aren’t Appalachians poisoned enough?
Does Trump own a golf course in the Appalachians?
Just like always USA fighting yesterday war. Lithium is already on the way out.
I have a running joke I tell my friends that one day, the rich will flatten mountains, so the only way to see their natural wonder will be in VR. That’s when they will become mainstream. Not because they offer some new technological advancement, but because they’ve managed to capture the spaces we use to get away.
They already take the tops off mountains in Appalachia because it’s more efficient to just straight up delete a mountain to get coal than to dig into it for it
Well here in america we already have flattened mountains. And also maybe bombed our own citizens who felt some sorta way about it.
Wild, but this is already happening - Tuvalu is being “preserved” in vr as it’s going to be one of the first island nations wiped out by climate change.
And China is moving from lithium to sodium
More options for batteries is always good. Doesn’t negate the demand for more storage in general.
Original information source, not the tweet: https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/lithium-eastern-states-could-replace-imports-a-century-or-more
And the Study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11053-026-10652-9
There is a very important sentence all the way at the end:The USGS did not assess what amount would be economically recoverable.Edit: On a second reading, I think this sentence applies only to the southwest Arkansas brine deposits. Sorry.
By the time any of these mines or refineries come online, lithium ion batteries will be being replaced by sodium ion for the larger EV and storage batteries. Besides that, America hardly manufactures phones or laptops.
It’s also why the Department of Energy department EERE (Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy) was just renamed to CMEI (Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation)
At the same time the DoE lab NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) was renamed to NLR (National Lab of the Rockies)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Energy_Efficiency_and_Renewable_Energy
National Lab of the Rockets…? An acronym that sounds like it was made by a grade schooler. Which checks out, if we’re being honest.
Edit: lol I misread it, but the actual name is still very dumb
Rockies. As in the Rocky Mountains.
Still stupid.
Surely it’s more economical to just recycle batteries
Ridiculous, we need to dig up Appalachia to make 500 billion cellphones
Yes, but how will that completely fuck up the countryside? Destruction for quick profit is the key part!!!
Also you need a jobs program for people who insist on living in mountains, refuse to leave or consolidate, and get mad at the idea of government handouts.
I’m sympathetic to Appalachians, most of the women I’ve dated have been Appalachian actually. There’s a lot to love about their culture and history. But as a political block they can be really frustrating as the region is just really inefficient for anything but mining, tourism, and subsistence farming, and the mining is killing them and everyone else.
Require the ability that anything with a battery has the ability to have it removed for recycling. And force ban on single use batteries from vapes and like products that are frequently difficult in design to not be recycled.
We do an amazing job with lead acid batteries. You don’t even have to throw them in the ocean anymore because you get money back.
I think the batteries in everyone’s car are basically ore for the next generation.
I think this is where we’ll start to see some innovation, large pita batteries supplimenting the crumbling infrastructure that people trade out every few years.
With the deregulation of wireless Internet, wired Internet is basically a liability now. I know that where I’m located the electric grid hasn’t been updated in years, the pipes are rotting out around us as well.
Just make a vape deposit system. And resell the batteries back to the vape manufacturers. They are good for hundreds of charges.
Vapes shouldn’t be disposable in the first place.
Would probably also be expensive to validate that the used batteries are still safe.
They’d just crush them up for the precious metals.
I do think about disposable vapes with 20w USB c charging and three inch LCDs.
Like those components are so cheap or old that they’re basically free. People are just throwing these bells and whistles on like we use packaging cause why not
MFW I take a split-second to imagine anyone in this administration can competent their way out of a wet paper bag.
To action this, they’ll kick poor people out of a town, clearcut something’s only habitat, pollute the area, make a tentative agreement for billions that equal zero because of the tax breaks and other oversubsidized giveaways, and then close it all down after all that with a suspicious bankruptcy and government buyout.
What bullshit. The usa already has extensive lithium deposits. It’s not a question of supply, it has always been a question of how much it costs to mine it. Lengthy permitting processes, environmental concerns, high costs, and technological challenges.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/white-gold-mapping-u-s-lithium-mines/
Lengthy permitting processes, environmental concerns
Those two don’t matter to the current administration.
LOL that’s ridiculous campism.
Both sides of your uniparty are paid and work for the same companies.You have to be seriously delusional to not see the difference between the president routinely ignoring laws and all the other ones that at least pretended to want to follow them
That’s besides the point.
The infantile “but they do it much harder” is the same as with the aiding of zio genociders.
It doesn’t matter that there is a difference, but that both sides have the same policy.
It only matters to the dogmatic campists.
But I don’t expect anything better from the idiot country.
It has never been different and they don’t learn.
As long as they fuck up their own shithole for once I’m OK with it.
Substitute those by corrupt assigning of contracts and public funds and pipedream “AI will extract Lithium for us” snake oil salespeople.
Tell that to the states where the mines are located. Because they will laugh themself silly.
No one has ever cared about the mountain folks :(
Until they shart shooting. I don’t know a single person in Maine that wants Plumbago mined
The Appalachians are older than sharks.
So yeah let’s dig it up and burn it, since that’s apparently the only thing we know to do with nature.
If they really need to ruin nature somewhere, please let the US do this to their own nature so they can live with these consequences instead of outsourcing them
Yep, for once they do it to themselves.
And sharks are older than trees.
Blowing like the breeze
Touching your moms knees
They can pry the lithium from my cold, dead, Mainer hands. But I will be taking at least a few of them with me to Hell.
The rest will perish from the curse of the Paul Bunyan statue, which will awaken like a vengeful Lorax golem.
Ayuh!
We have quite a few Paul Bunyans of notable size in Minnesota. If one awakens I hope they all do and become a weird US folklore version of the army of the ents.
I have a feeling they’ll have a much harder time pushing through mining operations in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire than they did in West VA. This will be received like proposals of mining the great lakes would in MI or WI, and many of the residents (Boston area professors) have the resources and energy to resist it.
Pennsylvania which has a lot of lithium that can be extracted without mining. Brine from fracking can be a major source. Lithium extraction from fracking brine can be relatively sustainable considering fracking is already being done.
Didn’t they just remove the mining protection from the BWCA?
Yep and they’re working on removing protections for other federal land which I have little doubt they’ll* accomplish given it was the fed previously protecting it. I’m just saying I think it will be difficult to actually implement projects in some places due to local opposition combined with the energy and resources to sustain that opposition.
Not a good thing overall btw, by my figuring it just means under-resourced regions will continue to shoulder the bulk of industrial waste and pollution because they’ll be the least equipped to resist. Tale as old as time.
For now.
Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all have different groups that individually disagree with mining once protected wilderness. The only selection of people pushing for this would be the rich who want the money.
I would not fuck with rights of New Hampshire. They will come after you. Never met one who wasn’t a bit off.
When the Civil War was breaking out and the governor of Vermont called for the state to raise $500k to support the war effort, the legislature passed a bill to raise a full million.
When they were called upon to send one regiment of men to fight, they organized seven.
Vermont, also, would not be a good state with which to openly fuck.
I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all, because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.
–Calvin Coolidge
They may be a bunch of hippie hillbillies, but they’re the most chaotic good state. They fought in the revolutionary war and then didn’t join the union for a while
It’s like the push to deforest the western states. You’ll be surprised by the weird alliances that pop up when billionaires show up in the backyard. Wish we could find common ground broadly, but I guess I’ll take what I can get.
Stay the fuck off Plumbago thanks, Maine doesn’t want it’s mountain tops chopped off like fucking West Virginia. I love that since we have a state ban on metal extraction, and even though the lithium is bound as a silicate mineral (spudomeme, sp) it’s technically a metal and that’s prevented it’s extraction so far.
Also they are the largest lithium crystals found, I believe, anywhere. We’re talking 30ft long tree trunk sized crystals embedded in matrix, some of which have been exposed and are insanely cool to look at. The site is on private land but it’s not terribly difficult to get in contact with folks who have permission up there. Maine has a very long history of mineral extraction, and some of the richest gem deposits in North America, but the size of this locality and the type of mining proposed would be a massive problem for a relatively pristine area of Northern Mixed Hardwood and Conifer forest, not to mention the very small towns in the area that would be entirely transformed in the process.
Seriously these things are huge
Imagine destroying that because it’s useful. Like cutting down a redwood
Yesh keep Vermont Vermonty. I don’t live there, I haven’t been there since I was a kid, but it’s beautiful and wonderful the way it is
The hilarious part of this is that they think they can do this to get to something approaching parity/self-sufficiency with China’s level of Rare Earth Metals production, in like… no time at all.
That’s not even close to how any of this works, but okey dokey?
They’re literally the most incompetent economic planners / policy makers… at least since the Smoot Hawley tariffs.
Even if this all like, actually worked, without legal challenges, to … open up mining operations…
You… still have have to do all the rest of the industrial planning/policy to… make… any of this… make any actual sense, and that’s just… national heritage/environmental damage treated as moot.
But the administration’s goal isn’t to efficiently extract the lithium and use it effectively. The goal is to take a buried resource and auction off access to it to Trump’s rich buddies. In the process, Trump will collect enormous bribes to put his greasy thumb on the scale. After the bribes are collected, no on in the administration cares what happens and the auction winners can rape the land any way they want regardless of the final profitability.
