The Thacker Pass Lithium Mine will Worsen the Crises we Face

In his recent opinion piece, “Thacker Pass Lithium Mine is Important for Limiting Global Warming,” Glenn Miller makes the same fundamental error so many others do these days: believing that climate change is the main crisis, rather than a symptom of the real crisis we face, which is industrial civilization and its impacts on the living world.

It’s not surprising he makes this error. The industrialists have done a lot of work in the past few years to make sure we all believe that climate change is the existential crisis we face. Once industrialists, including, yes, even fossil fuel companies, saw the writing on the wall with the increasingly dire IPCC reports coming out year after year, and the public’s escalating panic about the implications of continued fossil fuel mining and burning, they quickly jumped on the technotopia bandwagon. You know, the one that says if we can invent enough new technologies to help us deal with the problems caused by the old technologies, everything will be just fine. And of course, the corporations will be ready to sell us all these new technologies at a large profit (as well as even newer technologies to solve the problems created by the new technologies, and so on ad infinitum).

The previous decade has been one long PR campaign by the World Economic Forum, the UN, economists, governments, and of course, corporations, for technology solutions to this climate change crisis. We can replace the entire grid with wind, solar, and battery storage technologies! (Never mind that this will require 2.4 billion tons of steel, 1.9 million tons of copper, 2.6 billion tons of concrete, 133 million tons of composite fiber, 2.6 billion gallons of lubricating oil, and so much more). We can suck CO2 from the air and bury it underground with carbon capture technologies! (Never mind that this experimental technology has not been proven at scale, and besides which, where are you going to store billions of tons of CO2 underground, and who’s going to pay for it?).

READ THE REST at the Sierra Nevada Ally.