Lithium

 

Jeffrey St. Clair

+ Is it really progress that bicycles, which are now outselling electric cars, have become “electrified”? They are certainly more efficient and less toxic than cars and motorcycles but they’re not green. Bikes run on leg and lung power, which tends to keep the population healthy. Electric bikes run on lithium, uranium, coal, natural gas, oil, endangered salmon or a combination of the above, while displacing traditional bikes and pedestrians.

+ The Greenbush lithium mine in western Australia is 4.8 kilometers long, a kilometer wide and 450 meters deep. The lithium itself is leached out in “chemical processing” plants of astounding toxicity. The overburden is left behind in giant heaps the company quaintly calls “Waste Rock Landforms.”

+ We’ve already had one Lithium coup. Mining corps are scouring the melting glaciers of Greenland for new deposits and Native activists in southern Oregon and northern Nevada are fiercely fighting the 6,000 acre open pit lithium mine planned for Thacker Pass, sacred land to the Shoshone.

+ American liberals are all for indigenous rights until they need their water or land to mine lithium and uranium from or to build sprawling industrial solar “farms”–then rights are trumped by self-righteousness. It’s how the Columbia River dams went up with Woody Friggin’ Guthrie as their troubadour.

COUNTERPUNCH