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   goatsarah (goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 19:29:18 JST goatsarah
   The greatest trick the petrochemical industry managed to pull was convincing people who think of themselves as "environmentalists" that a few lithium mines are somehow worse than the entire global oil industry (which, remember, is also where the plastic being dumped in the sea comes from).
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     FeralRobots (feralrobots@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 19:39:43 JST FeralRobots

     in reply to

     @goatsarah then there's the part where the conflate 'battery' with 'lithium'. Battery tech is developing REALLY FAST & the most interesting stuff is specifically designed to make the tech cheaper & less environmentally disruptive. (E.g. I love those massive iron-salt batteries - they're packed in large-size shipping containers & installed in massive arrays as buffer storage for wind- & solar-farms.)

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     Alexandra Lanes (ajlanes@mastodon.online)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 20:12:42 JST Alexandra Lanes

     in reply to

     @goatsarah Do I take it there’s some opposition to your country’s proposed lithium mine?

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     goatsarah (goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 20:12:42 JST goatsarah

     in reply to

     • Alexandra Lanes
     @ajlanes Not that I've seen.
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     goatsarah (goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 23:12:02 JST goatsarah

     in reply to

     • Miguel Arroz

     @arroz Ok,

     But let’s make the cars EVs first, because that’s a much easier problem to solve.

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     Miguel Arroz (arroz@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 23:12:03 JST Miguel Arroz

     in reply to

     @goatsarah I understand why people don’t want lithium mines at their doorstep. But on the other hand, I think there’s always an element on colonialism in many of those protests. People want to enjoy the goods that come from extraction, but are happy if extraction is done half the world away, on poor countries so they don’t have to see of suffer through the consequences. Anyways I think the solution to mobility is less cars, not just making all cars EVs, that should be the main goal.

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     goatsarah (goatsarah@thegoatery.dyndns.org)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 23:29:04 JST goatsarah

     in reply to

     • Miguel Arroz

     @arroz And yet Spain runs zero long distance trains to Portugal, and cancelled the only sleeper services it had with no plans for replacement.

     Meanwhile the Algarve Line has exciting infrastructure plans to increase the average speed from about 60kph to about 75kph.

     I’d love, love, love ubiquitous fast convenient rail, but the promise of it at some unspecified future date is frequently trotted out as an excuse to not need to decarbonise road transport, a thing that is already happening, and is quite easy to accelerate.

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     Miguel Arroz (arroz@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 23:29:05 JST Miguel Arroz

     in reply to

     @goatsarah Existing cars definitely need to be EV. But solving the “too many cars” problem isn’t hard. Netherlands does it. Even Spain has the largest high speed train network on the planet only second to a much bigger country, China. The real hard problem to solve is finding people who are good at, and want to solve hard problems and are also willing to go into politics and win elections. EVs won’t fix this, among many other problems: https://twitter.com/visionzeroyvr/status/1665440425635618818

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     Miguel Arroz (arroz@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 23:54:35 JST Miguel Arroz

     in reply to

     @goatsarah Yeah, I’m not saying decarbonizing and depolluting out cities isn’t important. I’m just saying that isn’t the panacea people are led to believe it is by the car industry. Long distance and cities are different problems, but living on a city core, I honestly think politicians should face trial every time someone gets hit by a car, because they do exactly jack shit to stop this mayhem. I’m preparing myself mentally to move out of Vancouver because I can’t take this shit any more.

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     Miguel Arroz (arroz@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Jun-2023 23:54:35 JST Miguel Arroz

     in reply to

     @goatsarah It’s ironic that when I visit my parents in Portugal on a shitty Lisbon suburb, I can have the window open any time and not feel any real difference in the noise levels. Here, if I open the window, even during nighttime, my living room turns into a highway. The noise is unbearable. And I live in the city that calls itself “the greenest city”. This experience made me deeply hate cars and politicians.

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