LITHIUM MINES ARE NOT “GREEN”. THEY ARE JUST MINES, LEAVING DESTRUCTION AND DEADNESS IN THEIR WAKE.
How a Nevada lithium mine will destroy ten square miles of unique wildlife habitat. Lithium is the key element in electric car batteries.
How a Nevada lithium mine will destroy ten square miles of unique wildlife habitat. Lithium is the key element in electric car batteries.
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From a conversation with Max Wilbert, co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost its Way. For the entire interview, please click on the link to the YouTube video.
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HART HAGAN: You described Thacker Pass, Nevada as being a beautiful and abundant haven for wildlife, including the sage-grouse, the pronghorn antelope, the Pacific tree frog, horned lizards, cougars, bobcats, sage thrashers, ferruginous hawks and prairie falcons. But they're wanting to make a lithium mine out of this. What can you tell us about the proposed project?
MAX WILBERT: Well, unfortunately, it's not proposed any more, it’s planned and they've started construction, actually, as of a couple days ago. We're not lying down. There's a lot of opposition.
The mining company, Lithium Americas--which is a Canadian company through their subsidiary, lithium Nevada Corporation, plans to tear up an area of about 6,000 acres, in Thacker Pass. That’s about 6,000 football fields, since an acre is roughly the size of a football field. They’re going to dig an open pit about 400 feet deep to extract the lithium from the soil. They would extract that lithium using sulfuric acid that would be produced from sulfur that comes from oil refineries.
We believe there might be a Tar Sands connection here as well. The Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada--one of the most destructive industrial projects on the planet--produces a very high sulfur fuel. So they produce a lot of sulfur at those oil refineries. That sulfur is sold into different industries. A lot of it may end up at Thacker Pass because they need an incredible amount of sulfur to extract this lithium from the soil.
If you've been to New York City and seen the Empire State Building, we're talking two (2) Empire State buildings per year. That's how much sulfur they plan to bring into Thacker Pass to make acid to burn the lithium out of the soil.
They want to bulldoze the entire area, blow it up and then use an acid to pull out this lithium. They call this a “green” mine. They call it friendly for the planet, of course, because of the end product being lithium. That has nothing to do with the reality of the situation.
The challenge facing us is that the mainstream environmental organizations--as well as the Democrats and the Republicans--all seem to be behind this project.
Unfortunately this isn't the last lithium mine. There are over 18,000 lithium claims in the state of Nevada alone. There's another major, lithium mine that's doing exploration right now.
Just north of the Oregon border, just 10 miles from Thacker Pass, another company is already destroying more beautiful habitat right now doing their drilling. That's a process for which they don't need any major permits. There's no public input. There's no real way for the public to stop that from happening, unfortunately because of these very archaic, anti-democratic and unjust laws that we have in this country.
There are other mining projects that are threatening other areas as well, and not just in the United States. Lithium mining is booming around the world. We're seeing as this push for green energy starts to accelerate and gain more momentum. We're seeing the same type of destruction that has been visited on areas which have fossil fuels, like fracking areas, tar sands, deep water drilling, etc.
That same type of destruction is now coming, owing to all these other areas but now it's in the name of green energy, unfortunately.