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Comment by bartislartfast | Hacker News Reader

The greenwashing here is burning my eyes

> A huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it.

90% of mined phosphates are used for fertilizer and pollution of waterways with it is a growing problem, but the mining company PR firm is telling us about electric cars and solar panels.

This is similar to discovering a massive new oil field, and telling the world that it'll help with electric cars because they all have plastic components.

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Could be worse.

Pollution is a huge problem, but climate change is literally an existential problem. I'd trade a bit of the former for less of the latter.

> Pollution is a huge problem, but climate change is literally an existential problem

100% agree. If there's a choice between a small amount of pollution vs a large payoff to cut carbon emissions, it's definitely a good idea. For instance, any pollution that comes from the production of solar panels and batteries is probably something we should accept, because the payoff is a large cut in emissions.

But we're not talking about pollution directly in the cause of cutting emissions here. We're talking about separate pollution which is avoidable and has nothing to do with cutting emissions.

The point is, if we use all of this phosphate to make better batteries it would be great and have a good impact on emissions, but most of it will be spread on the ground and let run into rivers because that is the main industrial use of phosphates

Prompts the question, who's working on a publicly transparent level up of this:

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

Visually present all the exploration and mining in the world and add to it visualisations of the resource costs of extraction and the downstream uses of that material in a manner that ties into global climate factors.

Isn't running out of phosphate rock almost a similar scale problem? I thought like a billion people were going to starve to death without it or or something?

What else would you expect from a petromonarchy?

Thank God they didn't being Greta Thunberg to do the press release on their behalf.

I know you’re joking, but all the same I might point out that she’s Swedish, not Norwegian.

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