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Environmental ethics Katie McShane compares our respect for species to the word freedom. Everyone believes in it, but no one knows what it means. “Even if you accept that it has value, it doesn’t say what to do when that value meets my needs,” he says.
Comparing the value of things, measuring each other’s costs and benefits, is increasingly a concern of environmentalists. Sometimes, both of these competing things have a claim in the natural world; sometimes there is a proclamation to improve human life. Or the planet as a whole. If the mines at Rhyolite Ridge were looking for gold or copper, it might be easier to dismiss their value. Everyone takes advantage of the commodities, but it can easily be said that you don’t “need” gold or that the value of the dollar is not essential. With lithium the denial is harder. Donnelly and Fraga agree that the country — the world — needs to get rid of fossil fuels. Lithium and the sun are abundant in the desert in the Southwest, so switching to green energy will bring a new level of industrialization to its landscape. Mines and solar power plants will compete with buckwheat and rare desert turtles. But without these mines and power plants, the desert will still suffer. Deserts are weak places due to harsh conditions and similar infertility, where life is easily endangered by higher temperatures and more frequent droughts. The conditions require the formulation of a moral equation: What is the value of the mine and the value of the plant?
All mines have a dirty side, whether their products are “green” or not. They can destroy landscapes or pollute the water supply or expel greenhouse gases. Historically, mining companies cared little about these impacts, taking minimal measures to comply with the rules. But lithium miners are under more pressure to act responsibly, explained Alex Grant, a technical consultant who works with these mines. Buyers of electric vehicles are more likely to be concerned that, for example, 25% of the carbon footprint of a car’s life will come from the battery supply chain. So automakers, in an effort to improve their climate-friendly reputation, have turned to lithium suppliers to burn less and less coal and are seeking certificates to prove that their mines do not damage water and habitats.
It is impossible to eliminate all costs. As Grant sees it, there is no alternative to lithium excavation. The state of fossil burning cars is not an option. What did the opponents of lithium mining expect? Returning to the horse and buggy? “We don’t need all the projects,” he says. “Some of them may have unacceptable effects. But we’ll need a big part of them, that’s for sure.”
It seems that each project has its own costs, that someone will be unacceptable, which makes it difficult to decide whether they should be allowed to move forward. At the northern end of Nevada, the Thacker Pass, another major lithium project near drilling, is being held with indigenous groups and farmers over conflicts over water rights and pollution. The same is true in places like Chile and Bolivia. Alternatively seemingly more environmentally attractive alternatives, such as brines around the Salton Sea in California, have been talked about for decades, but the technology and funding behind these projects is uncertain. We could look at the oceans, perhaps; deep sea mining can offer a scale that looks like any rough mine on earth. But the environmental costs of this approach are even less understandable and have tremendous potential.
In this context, the fate of a humble flower seems like a very small thing when lithium can be so soon and with few additional complications. Mining interests, ranchers and developers have long argued that the process of listing endangered species should have economic costs, such as the loss of value of a mine or the cost of maintaining a species for life support, when natural forces seem to choose. existence.
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