Those considering buying an electric car, please research first where the lithium comes from for the car battery (and other rare earth minerals). They’re mined and extracted in places like the Argentine, Chilean & Bolivan border triangle region and Baotou in Mongolia. The mining uses vast quantities of water, so there’s none left for local villagers, animals and wildlife. Mining releases deadly compounds into the environment, so that groundwater and soils are contaminated for generations. People and animals in the area suffer from rare cancers and wasting diseases. If you look up Baotou on youtube/google images it’s an absolute hellscape of smokestack chimneys, effluent pipes and toxic mining tailings lakes stretching tens of miles across the landscape.
Please consider reading the book called Bright Green Lies about how renewable/sustainable energy isn’t renewable or sustainable... it’s just as dependent on extractivism as fossil fuels, and for only a tiny fraction of their energy density. Lithium batteries and other components of (non)renewable energy generation such as wind turbine blades only have an expected life expectancy of 20 - 30 years, and the materials after that are virtually impossible to recycle or recover, so they end up in turbine blade graveyards or landfill for eternity. We’re tearing up and polluting with mining operations yet more areas of the planet to toxic wastelands, just so we can extend the consumerism party another 30 years. There’s also a documentary film of the same name that’s worth watching on Vimeo (small rental fee). By the way, the authors are not fossil fuel company stooges, they are long term environment writers and activists.
Instead of bright green techno fixes, we need to cut back on our consumption habits by a large degree... electricity/water/gas in the home. Internet is a huge hog of global energy supplies... all those streaming services, cat videos on FB, cloud photo storage sites, bitcoin mining. Having 15 pairs of jeans, buying Christmas themed bedding, doggie prosecco, single bananas wrapped in a clamshell plastic box, several European city break holidays by plane per year. It’s mindboggling how wrapped up in a consumeristic mentality we are.
My actions:
I personally am going to all but cut out social media (there’s a couple of FB groups I like to follow... plus local community pages).
Declutter most of my clothes. My mum growing up in the 1940s only had three outfits... school uniform, out of school play clothes of trousers, jumper and shirt, plus a Sunday best dress for church. I won’t get down to that level, but aim for 4 or 5 of each item. Won’t buy any new clothes at all, even second hand, until they’ve fully worn out. I also use a darning mushroom to mend holes in T shirts/socks etc. When I do buy second hand, I buy practical, long lasting clothes, rather than fashionable/decorative styles.
Put a spending limit of £7.00 per week for the supermarkets (to cover me & DH). The rest of our food I get from the milkman (local organic dairy farmer... raw milk, eggs and yoghurt), butchers for local pastured meat and for which I take my own containers, and organic veg stall at the local market... much of it produced a mile away. Fruit... I pick blackberries in the garden & local lanes, have our own apple, pear & plum trees. Do buy a few frozen berries from Aldi, plus bananas for DH, otherwise I don’t eat much fruit as it’s all imported and/or stored in vast temperature controlled warehouses with a huge physical & ecological footprint. Don’t find it expensive, as I cook from scratch and don’t buy any snack or processed foods, except a few crackers/digestives for DH. Going to get the veg beds dug over in the autumn for planting our own veg. I eat a place based diet rather than a plant based diet, which is dependent on annual starchy/sugary monocrops, haber-bosch fossil fuel intensive fertilisers, herbicides, pestcides, soil decimating machinery, container ships etc.
vimeo.com/ondemand/brightgreenlies