this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
397 points (73.1% liked)
Fuck Cars
9827 readers
909 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
BS. You’re assuming current (or is that past) levels of renewable energy and no recycling. Sure mining and processing done rare earths is polluting and energy intensive, but it gets cleaner every year based simply on increased renewable energy. Also, most of these metals are infinitely reusable, and just aren’t yet because it’s not worth it until they’re widely used
See the 40% figure. It assumes realistically achievable goals in the EU for the next decade or two.
That's not the problem. The problem is that it's not economical to recycle them. You technically could recycle them in the present day but mining new resources and throwing the old stuff into a landfill is just cheaper and I don't see that changing any time soon, especially not in undemocratic neo-"liberal" places such as the U.S.
This argument also misses that the current demand for transport is much smaller than the future demand will likely be. We aren't even close to putting every human on earth into their own metal box yet; that insanity is still in front of us if we continue like we have been the past century.
Nothing is infinitely reusable. We have so much e-waste.