cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/49040633
[…]
Villagers in northern China, Myanmar, or Madagascar wake up to dust on their crops and odd smells in their wells. Pastures turn into pits. Streams run a strange shade of green. The same metals that make magnets for wind turbines and motors for EVs arrive wrapped in an invisible trail of tailings, acid, and waste.
[…]
Take Baotou, in China’s Inner Mongolia, often called the rare earth capital of the world. For years, demand exploded as smartphones, wind turbines, and EVs took off. At the edge of the city, a man‑made lake of inky black waste spread wider and wider. From the air it looks like an oil spill frozen in place. On the ground, it smells faintly of chemicals and wet metal, a scent that clings to clothes.
Farmers in nearby villages once grew corn and raised sheep on gently rolling fields. As mining expanded, dust settled on their crops, and the water in shallow wells started to change. Some families reported skin rashes, others saw yields fall. Official data is scarce, and direct links are fiercely debated, but the feeling on the ground is simple: the land is not what it used to be. When your cows refuse to drink from a stream they used all their lives, you notice.
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Can “clean” tech be less destructive?
For companies, the equivalent is building real supply‑chain visibility instead of pretty slide decks. That can mean independent audits at mine sites, long‑term contracts that reward better practices, and actually walking the ground where extraction happens. Soyons honnêtes : nobody does that for every single bolt and magnet. Yet a few start‑ups and automakers are testing shorter chains, recycling loops, and higher environmental standards that move impact closer to those making the promises.
Consumers have a role too, even if it feels small. Holding onto phones for an extra year, choosing a smaller EV, or backing brands that invest in recycling is not glamorous. On a hectic Tuesday, no one wakes up excited about a responsible supply‑chain choice. Still, multiplied across millions of purchases, those shifts slow the hunger for virgin rare earths and make room for alternatives to grow.
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Or we could look at Hydrogen rather than Batteries for vehicles…
Still green, doesn’t require rare earth minerals and existing diesel engines can be modified to burn hydrogen, that’s still 99% water vapor as exhaust (you’ll probably burn some synthetic oil and other lubricants though)
Hydrogen was great until Elon said it wasn’t. But a lot of people forgot it was musk spam that ‘hydrogen bad’
It has nothing to do with Elon. He just said what intelligent people who have looked into the physics of the problem have known for a long time.
Hydrogen ONLY makes sense for things like trains. Do you really think it is better to use electricity plus extract then process oil to create hydrogen, burn oil to tanker truck that hydrogen to a gas station, use electricity to store the hydrogen, then waste electricity converting it to its components through a rare earth catalyst plate to charge a battery… versus transmitting electrons over a wire to charge a battery? Hell, even the fact that EVs can charge at home instead of constantly driving extra miles to get to a gas station to refill their hydrogen makes them better for the environment.
Yeah, mining rare earths for batteries is bad. But you are an idiot if you think the same thing isn’t happening in the creation of hydrogen and the rare earths used in hydrogen motors, along with the inefficiencies of transport and storage of hydrogen.
I recommend you look at how electrolysis is done.
Hydrogen was never great, it’s always been an oil lobby play because the majority of hydrogen - as I understand it - is a byproduct of the oil process. It makes very little sense to lose efficiency creating a highly flammable substance, lose efficiency transporting and storing that substance, lose efficiency supplying that substance to the end consumer, and then finally lose efficiency extracting the remaining energy from the substance.
Hydrogen may make sense in some circumstances but it should not, and I’d even go so far as to say it will not, replace gasoline. Electricity is by far the best supplier of power long term.
Elon liking something should be a red flag into a subject because he has shown himself to be both uneducated and against humanities best interests. It’s not that Elon likes a thing therefore it’s bad. It’s that Elon likes bad things because Elon is bad, and therefore when you look into it it has a pattern of being bad.
Once in a while, a blind chicken finds a corn as well, as we say in Germany. It is simply easier and more efficient to use electricity to drive our cars, than to first split the water, transport the hydrogen and then burn it. Oil to fuel works because the energy density of the end product outweighs the costs of production.
I never heard about that so far and to be quite frank, I doubt it.
So instead we’ll strip mine rare earth minerals in horrible ways since you don’t like a little inefficiency that doesn’t matter.
We wouldn’t stop strip mining by switching to hydrogen, but we would increase our reliance on fossil fuels.
Doesn’t matter?
but don’t you need a lot of electricity to split hydrogen out of water?
Yes, electricity can come from Solar and Wind. We need something to store masses of solar. We can use Hydrogen as a storage for energy that doesn’t require rare earth minerals.
I really don’t know the tech but how can hydrogen store solar?
Hydrogen once you have it is great!
But making hydrogen is not free, it requires a lot of power to create enough hydrogen to replace oil.
And remember conservation of energy, splitting H2O takes exactly the same amount of energy that you later get back when recombining it, and that is an ideal situation.
In reality you have losses on both sides.
The reason why we haven’t got rid of oil yet is that it is just too damn good.
The energy of oil was created over millions and millions of years, and we are now bruning it up in a few centuries (if we are lucky)