{"id":57250,"date":"2021-03-25T12:58:09","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T17:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57250"},"modified":"2021-03-25T12:58:09","modified_gmt":"2021-03-25T17:58:09","slug":"between-the-devil-and-the-green-new-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57250","title":{"rendered":"Between the Devil and the Green New Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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We cannot legislate and spend our way out of catastrophic global warming.<\/p>\n

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From space, the Bayan Obo mine in China, where 70 percent of the world\u2019s rare earth minerals are extracted and refined, almost looks like a painting. The paisleys of the radioactive tailings ponds, miles long, concentrate the hidden colors of the earth: mineral aquamarines and ochres of the sort a painter might employ to flatter the rulers of a dying empire.<\/p>\n

To meet the demands of the Green New Deal, which proposes to convert the US economy to zero emissions, renewable power by 2030, there will be a lot more of these mines gouged into the crust of the earth. That\u2019s because nearly every renewable energy source depends upon non-renewable and frequently hard-to-access minerals: solar panels use indium, turbines use neodymium, batteries use lithium, and all require kilotons of steel, tin, silver, and copper. The renewable-energy supply chain is a complicated hopscotch around the periodic table and around the world. To make a high-capacity solar panel, one might need copper (atomic number 29) from Chile, indium (49) from Australia, gallium (31) from China, and selenium (34) from Germany. Many of the most efficient, direct-drive wind turbines require a couple pounds of the rare-earth metal neodymium, and there\u2019s 140 pounds of lithium in each Tesla.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not for nothing that coal miners were, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the very image of capitalist immiseration\u2014it\u2019s exhausting, dangerous, ugly work. Le Voreux, \u201cthe voracious one\u201d\u2014that\u2019s what \u00c9mile Zola names the coal mine in\u00a0Germinal,<\/em>\u00a0his novel of class struggle in a French company town.<\/p>\n

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\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

green new deal, commune, mining, renewable energy, JASPER BERNES, fossil fuels, finite resources<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL We cannot legislate and spend our way out of catastrophic global warming. From space, the Bayan Obo mine in China, where 70 percent of the world\u2019s rare earth minerals are extracted and refined, almost looks like a painting. The paisleys of the radioactive tailings ponds, miles long, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[31070,1647,328,23450,31071,1482,674],"class_list":["post-57250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-commune","tag-finite-resources","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-green-new-deal","tag-jasper-bernes","tag-mining","tag-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57251,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57250\/revisions\/57251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}