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Comment by MilaM | Hacker News Reader

Rare earths are not a major component in car batteries. They are mostly used in the electric motors for the magnets and it's acutally quite easy to replace them. Mining of lithium, copper, nickel, will have to expand in the future. But it's nothing in comparison to the damage that is done with the extraction of oil and gas.

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Yes, people afraid of rare earth and lithium mining should get some numbers right first: We extract 4 BILLION TONS of oil from the ground every year. In comparison, we extract a few million tons of lithium (and it's reusable / recyclable), and a few tens of thousand tons of rare earths.

The FUD about mining is pure big oil propaganda, frankly.

Oil (let’s forget about Canada oil sands for a minute here) is pumped out of the ground. Lithium and copper is strip mined and lithium salts are dried in toxic pools. I’m all for the electric transition because oil will run out but this needs figuring out environmentally.

Oil is burnt into CO2 that will remain for centuries in the atmosphere, heating it up (and I'm not mentioning countless toxic oil spills, methane leaking, etc). It's less immediately visible and acutely dangerous than toxic pools, but it's really bad.

Is it just pure FUD? There's some very negative and well documented externalities with lithium mining in particular like child slavery and major environmental pollution. It's not something "big oil" is just making up.

"Child slavery" is a known problem with cobalt mining, not lithium mining.

There are negative externalities with any mining, especially as it's often done in developing countries with poor labor protection. However if you are serious about it you should strive to improve the condition of mining workers, as opposed to forgoing it in favor of pumping oil.

Don’t you need to extract hundreds of millions of tons of lithium ore to get a couple of millions of tons of pure lithium? Not to mention the extensive chemical processing the ore must go through.

Yes but it's still absolutely dwarfed by the staggering amounts of fossil fuels we're extracting (and the absolute environmental catastrophe that goes with them):

https://edconway.substack.com/p/the-hump

Few years ago the pure lithium produced was 50 THOUSAND tons. I'm sure it's a multiple by now but I'd be surprised if it has gotten to millions.

Also once lithium is extracted, it carries energy thousands of times before it needs to be recycled to work thousands of times more and so on.

Oil/coal carries the energy ONCE and then it's unmitigated pollution.

And you are right that this is about 4 BILLION tons annually.

Here is data until 2021. http://www.world-mining-data.info/?World_Mining_Data___Data_...

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