In their efforts to discredit renewable energy and support continued fossil fuel burning, many anti-environmentalists have circulated a dual image purporting to compare a lithium mine with an oilsands operation. It illustrates the level of dishonesty to which some will stoop to keep us on our current polluting, climate-disrupting path (although in some cases it could be ignorance).
The image is a poor attempt to prove that lithium batteries and renewable energy are worse for the environment than energy from oilsands bitumen. The first problem is that the “lithium mine” is actually BHP Billiton’s Escondida copper mine in Chile (the world’s largest). The bottom image is of an Alberta oilsands operation, but it’s an in situ underground facility and doesn’t represent the enormous open-pit mining operations used to extract most bitumen.
Lithium is used in batteries for electric cars, cellphones, computers and other electric devices, as well as power-grid storage systems, because it’s light and highly conductive. Most lithium isn’t mined. More than 95 per cent comes from pumping underground brine into pans, allowing the liquid to evaporate and separating out the lithium using electrolysis.
Read the Desmog story by David Suzuki - “Renewable Energy Isn’t Perfect, But It’s Far Better Than Fossil Fuels.”
(As with other such stories commenting about electric vehicles and their environmental implications, and then compare them to fossil fuel powered vehicles, rarely is any attempt made to discuss the energy-rich infrastructure that supports privately owned vehicles; electric, fossil fuel powered or otherwise.
Yes, we need to rid the world of fossil fuel powered vehicles now and turn, just as quickly as we can, to electric vehicles, powered by sun, but they must be integrated and used through a publicly owned and operated infrastructure - Robert McLean)
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