Quote:
There is nothing wrong with strip mining. If you are completely opposed to strip mining you'd better get rid of everything you own and live in a cave because chances are almost all the **** in your house in some way came from a strip mine.
Bro, let me start by saying: Tesla's are cool. The actual car, but not necessarily you. I haven't met you so I can't say if you are or are not cool.
Now there are two different arguments here:
Are Tesla's fun to drive and look nice? Yes. I believe they are. The acceleration is awesome. But, are EVs such as Tesla the great panacea for climate change that is being shoved down our throats? No. We've all seen all the studies already so we won't go back into that.
HOWEVER, you made a claim that "chance are all the blank in your house come from strip mining".
I've worked in both petrochemical, refining, and even some mining industries over the last 30 years let me help you out.
Lithium mining: massive amounts of fuel consumed to mine and process the rock to create the lithium that goes into batteries. Have you seen mining equipment? The tire alone is bigger than your Tesla. So, essentially single purpose, massive strip mines for batteries of all sizes (and meds too I think).
O&G: Oil production and refining are used to produce energy for ICE vehicles, yes, but also nat gas, ethylene, and propylene and other by-products that go into Petrochemical plants for the production of plastics and synthetic materials that make up almost every single item in your home, your vehicle, etc. THIS IS WHERE ALL THE BLANK IN YOUR HOUSE CAME FROM. Try to brush your teeth without Oil and Gas producers.
The only mining that is required would possibly be for things that the refinery/petchem plant needs to process intermediate feed streams which is really just some catalyst in a few reactors. These catalysts have zeolites, alumina, silica with very small amounts of moly, nickel, platinum, palladium, rhenium, tungsten, cobalt, etc depending on the select catalyst (not all of those are on every catalyst - it's specific to purpose).
The production of these minerals, metals, binders, etc make up such a small position in the refinery you would be extremely hard pressed to compare that to lithium mining. For example, some moly is a by-product of copper mining so it really isn't "adding" to the mining footprint and moly is used on quite a bit of catalyst. Also, many of these metals are reclaimed to be RE-USED: moly, platinum, palladium, rhenium, nickel and some rare occasions cobalt and tungsten. Can't currently say that about lithium although I would imagine there are some start-ups who would love to figure out how to reclaim lithium from old car batteries (or any batteries for that matter).
So, to say: everything in your home came from strip mining is much less truthful than saying "everything in your home came from OIL" which is actually a much more HONEST statement. The catalyst used in refining is NOT in your home.
Now, construction of a home is a bit different: We don't build homes with copper pipes anymore (Pex tubing - plastics from OIL), but we do use nails and screws so you do have iron ore for that small amount of material. The foundation has concrete and rebar, but sand is pretty abundant and some homes are pier and beam with no concrete foundation so that's a factor too. Just seems more obvious to say OIL put all the junk in your home vs strip mining.
