This is hilarious! It’s seems our favorite Klimate Konsensus Kooks went apoplectic when finding an article on the EPA website from Professor Richard Lindzen, blaming…of course…”fossil fueled climate deniers” marching lock-step with President Trump.
There’s only one problem; it’s 12 years old!
Not really unexpected given Mann’s problematic history with dating proxies and such. His Tweet says it all:
Even funnier: 97% consensus fabricator John Cook did the work of “debunking” the twelve year old article. He writes:
He argues that ocean cycles could be causing observed warming, despite the fact that they only move heat around while the planet is building up heat (at a rate of over 4 atomic bombs per second).
He misrepresents the tropospheric hot spot as a signature of greenhouse warming when it’s the result of *any* type of warming – debunked at http://sks.to/hotspot & http://youtu.be/LM_sKZCv26A (Denial101x)
California set its first renewable portfolio standard in 2002 and currently requires 60 percent of its generation to come from renewable energy by 2030 with the next 40 percent of generation to come from zero-carbon sources by 2045. These non-carbon sources will likely be wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower. California is shuttering its last nuclear plant in the next few years and new nuclear cannot compete economically with these other non-carbon sources.
During a recent heat wave, California was forced to implement rolling blackouts because it had insufficient power to meet demand when its solar generation declined in the evening, Normally, it purchases power from neighboring states when this occurs, but those states did not have extra power to sell due to the heat wave. California got caught because it had retired many natural gas and nuclear plants, and did not have sufficient back-up power to fill in when its intermittent renewables could not find enough sun or wind to continue operating.
Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden, if elected, will be forcing the rest of the country into a similar plight with his “clean energy standard,” which requires 100 percent electricity to be generated from non-carbon sources by 2035. Whether it is even feasible on a national scale is doubtful, but it will undoubtedly be expensive to electricity consumers and to taxpayers.
Electricity Prices
While electricity production from fossil vs. renewable sources varies by state, the energy decisions that each state makes ultimately affect the price of generation and costs to consumers. For instance, Massachusetts had the third highest residential electricity price in the nation in 2019 mainly due to the lack of natural gas pipeline infrastructure, but also due to the premature retirement of fossil fuel generating capacity. California had the seventh highest residential electricity price in the nation in 2019 because of their zeal for carbon free and non-nuclear generating capacity. In 2019, 30 percent of California’s utility-scale electricity came from non-hydroelectric renewable energy, including 5.6 percent that came from industrial geothermal production, in which California leads the nation with 70 percent of U.S. geothermal production. Including hydroelectricity, 49 percent of the state’s utility-scale power was generated by renewable energy in 2019. (See graph below.)
California is not the only state pursuing an all carbon-free and mainly renewable electricity future. In New York, Governor Cuomo has called for the expansion of the state’s “clean energy standard” so that 70 percent of New York’s electricity comes from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind by 2030, followed by 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 and an 85 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. New York is shuttering the Indian Point nuclear plant that supplies power to New York City—one unit was closed in April and the second unit will be shuttered next April. By shutting down just one of Indian Point’s two reactors this year, New York lost more carbon-free electricity than produced annually by every wind turbine and solar panel in the state. New York still needs to figure out how to replace their output.
One project currently under negotiation in New York is the Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission line, which is expected to deliver 24,000 megawatt hours of hydropower daily through a transmission line that runs from Québec, Canada to New York City. However, environmentalists are calling for the city to scrap the project because of concerns about the environmental impacts of the transmission line that include the potential creation of new dams in Québec and the impact of the transmission line cable that will be buried into the Hudson River’s riverbed.
New York has the eighth highest average residential electricity price in the nation and shuttering Indian Point will only raise it. But, thankfully for consumers, not all states are following California’s and New York’s lead. The following map depicts the 43 states that have lower residential electricity prices than California and provides how much lower their residential electricity price is relative to that of California’s price. For example, New York’s average residential electricity price in 2019 was 6.7 percent lower than California’s in 2019. California’s average residential electricity price was 32 percent higher than the nation’s average residential electricity price in 2019.
Residential Electricity Prices Relative To California
Note: The states depicted in black are California and the 6 states that had higher electricity prices in 2019 than California.
Not all states are endowed with renewable resources, such as the southeast where wind resources are poor. As a result, one size does not fit all and using California’s electricity system as a pattern for the nation, as Joe Biden is doing, is not beneficial to Americans for it will only increase electricity prices in the 43 states that have lower prices than California.
Conclusion
Americans need to see where Joe Biden and his party platform are taking the nation with their Green New Deal Clean Energy Standard. Americans complain if legislators torque their gasoline prices, but they should also keep an eye on policies that will increase their electricity prices and threaten the competitiveness of their businesses because these will not only affect their pocketbooks as consumers, but also as taxpayers since Biden indicates he needs $2 trillion—to start! If energy is made too expensive in the United States for businesses to produce things domestically, they will move to places that do not have such policies, taking jobs and opportunities with them. With American companies finally moving jobs back to our own shores, now is not the time to artificially increase the cost of energy in the United States.
IMAGE: THIS FIGURE SHOWS THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION DURING DIFFERENT PHASES OF ITS EVOLUTION. RIT ASSISTANT PROFESSOR NISHANT MALIK DEVELOPED A MATHEMATICAL METHOD THAT SHOWS CLIMATE CHANGE LIKELY… view more CREDIT: RIT
A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher developed a mathematical method that shows climate change likely caused the rise and fall of an ancient civilization. In an article recently featured in the journal Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences, outlined the new technique he developed and showed how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
Malik developed a method to study paleoclimate time series, sets of data that tell us about past climates using indirect observations. For example, by measuring the presence of a particular isotope in stalagmites from a cave in South Asia, scientists were able to develop a record of monsoon rainfall in the region for the past 5,700 years. But as Malik notes, studying paleoclimate time series poses several problems that make it challenging to analyze them with mathematical tools typically used to understand climate.
“Usually the data we get when analyzing paleoclimate is a short time series with noise and uncertainty in it,” said Malik. “As far as mathematics and climate is concerned, the tool we use very often in understanding climate and weather is dynamical systems. But dynamical systems theory is harder to apply to paleoclimate data. This new method can find transitions in the most challenging time series, including paleoclimate, which are short, have some amount of uncertainty and have noise in them.”
There are several theories about why the Indus Valley Civilization declined–including invasion by nomadic Indo-Aryans and earthquakes–but climate change appears to be the most likely scenario. But until Malik applied his hybrid approach– rooted in dynamical systems but also draws on methods from the fields of machine learning and information theory–there was no mathematical proof. His analysis showed there was a major shift in monsoon patterns just before the dawn of this civilization and that the pattern reversed course right before it declined, indicating it was in fact climate change that caused the fall.
Malik said he hopes the method will allow scientists to develop more automated methods of finding transitions in paleoclimate data and leads to additional important historical discoveries. The full text of the study is published in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science.
Hachijojima is a volcanic Japanese island some 287 kilometers south of Tokyo, to which it belongs. 7,522 people live on its 63 km2 of area.
Image cropped from Google Maps.
What makes Hachijojima interesting climatically is its rural, non-urban features – in the middle of the ocean – making station siting there less prone to factors that could corrupt the data, such as airports, asphalt, concrete, steel and other heat-sink-acting infrastructure.
Today we look at data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) going back almost 80 years. Hearing all the claims about a rapidly warming world from the media, many readers would think that there must be warming happening there as well. The data have a surprise in store.
Summer
Now that summer has ended, we plot the latest data to see if summers have indeed been warming at this island.
Interestingly, the annual temperature behavior appears to follow a cyclic behavior that very much resemble some ocean surface temperature cycles we see from around the globe, like the PDO or AMO. Climate indeed changes, but what we see above it cannot be due to anything anthropogenic.
With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea. UAH has updated their tlt (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for August 2020. Previously I have done posts on their reading of ocean air temps as a prelude to updated records from HADSST3. This month also has a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.
Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.
Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?
HadSST3 results were delayed with February and March updates only appearing together end of April. For comparison we can look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6 which are now posted for August. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above.
The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI). In 2015 there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the latest and current dataset, Version 6.0.
The graph above shows monthly anomalies for ocean temps since January 2015. After all regions peaked with the El Nino in early 2016, the ocean air temps dropped back down with all regions showing the same low anomaly August 2018. Then a warming phase ensued with NH and Tropics spikes in February and May 2020. As was the case in 2015-16, the warming was driven by the Tropics and NH, with SH lagging behind. Since the peak in January 2020, all ocean regions have trended downward in a sawtooth pattern, returning to a neutral anomaly in June, close to the 0.4C average for the period. July and August are little changed with NH and SH offsetting slight bumps.
Land Air Temperatures Showing Volatility
We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly. The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground. UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps. The graph updated for August 2020 is below.
Here we see the noisy evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures, first by NH land with SH often offsetting. The overall pattern is similar to the ocean air temps, but obviously driven by NH with its greater amount of land surface. The Tropics synchronized with NH for the 2016 event, but otherwise follow a contrary rhythm. SH seems to vary wildly, especially in recent months. Note the extremely high anomaly last November, cold in March 2020, and then again a spike in April. In June 2020, all land regions converged, erasing the earlier spikes in NH and SH, and showing anomalies comparable to the 0.5C average land anomaly this period.
After an upward bump In July SH, land air temps in August returned to the same flat result from the prior month.
The longer term picture from UAH is a return to the mean for the period starting with 1995. 2019 average rose and caused 2020 to start warmly, but currently lacks any El Nino or NH warm blob to sustain it.
These charts demonstrate that underneath the averages, warming and cooling is diverse and constantly changing, contrary to the notion of a global climate that can be fixed at some favorable temperature.
TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps. Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, NH in July more than 1C lower than the 2016 peak. TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST3, but are now showing the same pattern. It seems obvious that despite the three El Ninos, their warming has not persisted, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995. Of course, the future has not yet been written.
Vanessa Nakate: ‘Many people are not yet aware of the dangers of climate change’
As a prominent Fridays for Future activist, Vanessa Nakate tells DW how climate activism looks different in her native Uganda and why she’s recently been tweeting in German.
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How does climate activism in your country differ from what it looks like in Europe? We’re used to seeing big Fridays For Future strikes here, but what does it look like in Uganda?
Well, of course there is a big difference between the activism in Uganda and in Europe. This is mainly because of two things.
One is awareness. Many people are not yet aware of the dangers. They don’t have the facts. They don’t have the clear science about what is happening when it comes to the climate crisis.
And then the other thing is freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is not the same as we see it is in Europe and it’s also harder for students here to walk out of school and do the climate strikes.
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Recently, you’ve actually been tweeting in German to try and get the message across. What made you do this?
Well, I did that because I was really angry and disturbed by the fact that Germany chose to push coal to 2038. I feel like that helps them and that doesn’t help communities that are already being affected by the climate crisis. I feel like 2038 is too late. It’s unnecessary and very dangerous for communities that are already facing devastating impacts of climate change.
Despite being a climate activist, Vanessa seems quite an impressive person.
Her own country doesn’t care about climate change or hasn’t heard of it. Europe pretends to care, but I mean, they cropped her out of at least one picture of climate activists. Who knows how else she is being mistreated.
Despite lip service to climate activism, Germany and other European countries are pushing ahead with coal projects.
Yet Vanessa is still determined to try.
What a waste of talent. I hope one day soon Vanessa wakes up to how she is being used, and applies that remarkable determination and guts to achieving something genuinely useful, for herself or for her country.
It is increasingly clear that on June 15, the FDA executed a one-two combination against Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). One was the EUA revocation, supported by a junk science memo, and a press release saying “the FDA determined that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19 for the authorized uses in the EUA” (emphasis is added). The Big Tech and MSM distorted this already incorrect determination by omitting the last clause.
But within hours of this press release, the FDA issued another one with a scary titleCoronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Warns of Newly Discovered Potential Drug Interaction That May Reduce Effectiveness of a COVID-19 Treatment Authorized for Emergency Use. It started with
“Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning health care providers about a newly discovered potential drug interaction related to the investigational antiviral drug remdesivir, which has received emergency use authorization for the treatment of hospitalized COVID-19 patients with severe disease.
Based on a recently completed non-clinical laboratory study, the FDA is revising the fact sheet for health care providers that accompanies the drug to state that co-administration of remdesivir and chloroquine phosphate or hydroxychloroquine sulfate is not recommended as it may result in reduced antiviral activity of remdesivir.”
These carefully crafted sentences insinuate several falsehoods. The facts are:
HCQ was co-administered with RDV in clinical trials, and led to lower mortality (9% in the HCQ+RDV patients vs 12% in the RDV patients; [1] Appendix, Table S3. Baseline Predictors of Time to Clinical Improvement)
Laboratory studies have very low value when real clinical data is available
The mentioned non-clinical laboratory study was performed with chloroquine phosphate, not hydroxychloroquine sulfate. Reportedly, chloroquine phosphate caused decreased production of Remdesivir triphosphate in-vitro. This is not relevant to hydroxychloroquine sulfate.
In hindsight, this warning was intended as another signal to doctors, hospitals, public health bureaucrats, instructing them not to treat patients with Hydroxychloroquine. HCQ does not interfere with RDV, but with the revenues of its manufacturer Gilead. The FDA officials and Gilead colluded to prevent the use of HCQ for COVID-19 to sell RDV.
[Arkansas Health Secretary] Dr. Romero said remdesivir is more effective, and can have negative effects in combination with hydroxychloroquine. “We now can use remdesivir in all hospitalized patients,” he said. “That’s how strongly the FDA feels it can work.”
Of course, Remdesivir (RDV) is not more effective than HCQ. Even Gilead claims that RDV shortens hospital stay by a few days, something which is hard to notice or to argue against. Also notice how far the “HCQ is bad, RDV is good” narrative went thanks to the deplatforming of the opposition. For example, the FDA has never claimed that Remdesivir can have negative effects in combination with hydroxychloroquine.
There is also psychological trickery. Shortage of supply of RDV created an impression that it is hotly demanded. Also, RDV is 200x more expensive than HCQ, so it might be perceived as more effective.
The KATV article mentions that State Senator Jason Rapert (R) was hospitalized with COVID-19 in July. He asked to be treated with hydroxychloroquine. The hospital denied his request and treated him with RDV. Such things also happen in other states. In the first half of August, RDV was prescribed at ~75% rate of HCQ, according to my recent survey (See COVID-19 Treatment Aug ii Super.xlsx within the Attachment Zip). If HCQ were used properly (i.e., given to most patients over 40 early on symptoms with Azithromycin and Zinc), there would be no need for RDV. Barr’s DOJ should get involved.
By the way, 27% (109/397) of the patients in this RDV trial, conducted by Gilead, also received HCQ [1]. It is not reported, but the past experience teaches that patients who received HCQ were likely sicker than those who did not. They still had lower mortality. The paper mentions the concomitant use of Azithromycin, although does not give the numbers. Somebody needs to ask for the raw data, and to re-analyze it as HCQ vs HCQ+AZ vs placebo trial.
Coadministration of remdesivir and chloroquine phosphate or hydroxychloroquine sulfate is not recommended based on in vitro data demonstrating an antagonistic effect of chloroquine on the intracellular metabolic activation and antiviral activity of remdesivir …
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The EC50 values of remdesivir against SARS-CoV-2 in Vero cells was 137 nM at 24 hours and 750 nM at 48 hours post-treatment. The antiviral activity of remdesivir was antagonized by chloroquine phosphate in a dose-dependent manner when the two drugs were co-incubated at clinically relevant concentrations in HEp-2 cells infected with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Higher remdesivir EC50 values were observed with increasing concentrations of chloroquine phosphate. Increasing concentrations of chloroquine phosphate reduced formation of remdesivir triphosphate in normal human bronchial epithelial cells.
Thus, Gilead reported two in-vitro tests:
Tested Remdesivir with chloroquine phosphate against a virus unrelated to coronaviruses
Tested production of remdesivir triphosphate in the presence of chloroquine phosphate, and found that less of it is produced
These tests involved neither hydroxychloroquine nor any coronavirus, but the FDA and Gilead used them to discourage the use of HCQ.
On July 10, Gilead issued a press release, which falsely claimed that “the rates and likelihood of recovery were lower in patients who received concomitant hydroxychloroquine compared with patients treated with remdesivir who did not receive hydroxychloroquine.”
In the past, the media used to be critical and suspicious in such situations, when a huge company tests its own ultra-expensive drug against readily available and inexpensive competitors. But Gilead is a Silicon Valley company, so its fellow Big Tech and the fake news media gave Gilead pass.
[1] Goldman JD, Lye DCB, Hui DS, Marks KM, Bruno R, Montejano R, et al. Remdesivir for 5 or 10 Days in Patients with Severe Covid-19. N Engl J Med 2020. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2015301
Habitual climate miserablists should take a look around at the real world now and again. This year’s poor UK wheat harvest, reported by the BBC with a ‘climate change’ tag, looks like the exception not the rule. – – – The International Grains Council (IGC) is reporting that global corn, wheat, and rice production is on pace to set new records this year, destroying an incessant parade of media claims that global warming is devastating crop production.
Here at Climate Realism, we have documented and debunked many of the ridiculous media claims that climate change is decimating crop production, some in the last month.
Global crop production, as well as crop production in most of the world’s nations, sets new records virtually every year as our planet modestly warms.
Now, the IGC reports – unsurprisingly – that the same is happening in 2020.
The online agriculture news service, World-Grain.com published a story, “IGC projects record output for corn, wheat and soybeans,” highlighting the findings of the International Grains Council (IGC), that it expects the harvest of key cereal crops, corn, rice, soybeans, and wheat, which are the core staple crops for many peoples around the world, to set records in 2020.
AMUR RIVER, THE CHINA/RUSSIA BORDER This cold, remote region is where around 100 Chinese electric-car manufacturers test prototypes, such as the Chinese/Slovenian joint venture APG Elaphe, pictured. Global annual sales of electric vehicles exceeded one million for the first time in 2017, with more than half of these in China Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
Here’s a thoroughly modern riddle: what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river? The answer is lithium – the reactive alkali metal that powers our phones, tablets, laptops and electric cars.
In May 2016, hundreds of protestors threw dead fish onto the streets of Tagong, a town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. They had plucked them from the waters of the Liqi river, where a toxic chemical leak from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine had wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem.
There are pictures of masses of dead fish on the surface of the stream. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing cow and yak carcasses floating downstream, dead from drinking contaminated water. It was the third such incident in the space of seven years in an area which has seen a sharp rise in mining activity, including operations run by BYD, the world’ biggest supplier of lithium-ion batteries for smartphones and electric cars. After the second incident, in 2013, officials closed the mine, but when it reopened in April 2016, the fish started dying again.
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Workers drill though the crust of the world’s biggest salt flat with large rigs. They are aiming for the brine underneath swathes of magnesium and potassium in the hope of finding lithium-rich spots. Since the 2000s, most of the world’s lithium has been extracted this way, rather than using mineral ore sources such as spodumene, petalite and lepidolite Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
Lithium-ion batteries are a crucial component of efforts to clean up the planet. The battery of a Tesla Model S has about 12 kilograms of lithium in it, while grid storage solutions that will help balance renewable energy would need much more.
Demand for lithium is increasing exponentially, and it doubled in price between 2016 and 2018. According to consultancy Cairn Energy Research Advisors, the lithium ion industry is expected to grow from 100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of annual production in 2017, to almost 800 GWhs in 2027.
William Adams, head of research at Metal Bulletin, says the current spike in demand can be traced back to 2015, when the Chinese government announced a huge push towards electric vehicles in its 13th Five Year Plan. That has led to a massive rise in the number of projects to extract lithium, and there are “hundreds more in the pipeline,” says Adams.
But there’s a problem. As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium required to enable that transformation could become a serious issue in its own right. “One of the biggest environmental problems caused by our endless hunger for the latest and smartest devices is a growing mineral crisis, particularly those needed to make our batteries,” says Christina Valimaki an analyst at Elsevier.
Tahua, Bolivia. Salt miners load a truck with lithium-rich salt. The ground beneath Bolivia’s salt flats are thought to contain the world’s largest reserves of the metal. (The Bolivian Andes may contain 70 per cent of the planet’s lithium.) Many analysts argue that extracting lithium from brine is more environmentally friendly than from rock. However, as demand increases, companies might resort to removing lithium from the brine by heating it up, which is more energy intensive. Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
In South America, the biggest problem is water.
The continent’s Lithium Triangle, which covers parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, holds more than half the world’s supply of the metal beneath its otherworldly salt flats. It’s also one of the driest places on earth. That’s a real issue, because to extract lithium, miners start by drilling a hole in the salt flats and pumping salty, mineral-rich brine to the surface.
Then they leave it to evaporate for months at a time, first creating a mixture of manganese, potassium, borax and lithium salts which is then filtered and placed into another evaporation pool, and so on. After between 12 and 18 months, the mixture has been filtered enough that lithium carbonate – white gold – can be extracted.
It’s a relatively cheap and effective process, but it uses a lot of water – approximately 500,000 gallons per tonne of lithium.
In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, mining activities consumed 65 per cent of the region’s water. That is having a big impact on local farmers – who grow quinoa and herd llamas – in an area where some communities already have to get water driven in from elsewhere.
There’s also the potential – as occurred in Tibet – for toxic chemicals to leak from the evaporation pools into the water supply. These include chemicals, including hydrochloric acid, which are used in the processing of lithium into a form that can be sold, as well as those waste products that are filtered out of the brine at each stage. In Australia and North America, lithium is mined from rock using more traditional methods, but still requires the use of chemicals in order to extract it in a useful form. Research in Nevada found impacts on fish as far as 150 miles downstream from a lithium processing operation.
Rio Grande, Bolivia. An aerial view of the mineral formations along the Rio Grande delta, at the edges of the salt flats. The delta is mostly dry due to the effects of lithium mining, which is heavily reliant on water for its shallow artificial salt-pans, or solar evaporation ponds, in which saline solutions are left to dry out over a period of months, leaving the minerals behind. This drying out of the delta has led to a lack of stability in water levels, both on top of and below the surface. The river is home to a wide variety of freshwater fish, many originating in the Amazon basin Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
According to a report by Friends of the Earth, lithium extraction inevitably harms the soil and causes air contamination.
In Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto, locals claim that lithium operations have contaminated streams used by humans and livestock, and for crop irrigation. In Chile, there have been clashes between mining companies and local communities, who say that lithium mining is leaving the landscape marred by mountains of discarded salt and canals filled with contaminated water with an unnatural blue hue.
“Like any mining process, it is invasive, it scars the landscape, it destroys the water table and it pollutes the earth and the local wells,” said Guillermo Gonzalez, a lithium battery expert from the University of Chile, in a 2009 interview. “This isn’t a green solution – it’s not a solution at all.”
But lithium may not be the most problematic ingredient of modern rechargeable batteries. It is relatively abundant, and could in theory be generated from seawater in future, albeit through a very energy-intensive process.
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Lino Fita, head of potassium extraction for mining company Comibol, looks out over his factory. The brine in this region is rich with potassium and magnesium, which makes it harder and more expensive to extract lithium. The brine is put in large ponds for many months to evaporate excess water and separate its salts. The remaining compound is then purified and processed. Very few lithium-processing experts work in the factory, as there is a nationwide shortage of staff. In the past, as few as three people have run the factory’s entire production line Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
Two other key ingredients, cobalt and nickel, are more in danger of creating a bottleneck in the move towards electric vehicles, and at a potentially huge environmental cost.
Cobalt is found in huge quantities right across the Democratic Republic of Congo and central Africa, and hardly anywhere else.
The price has quadrupled in the last two years.
Unlike most metals, which are not toxic when they’re pulled from the ground as metal ores, cobalt is “uniquely terrible,” according to Gleb Yushin, chief technical officer and founder of battery materials company Sila Nanotechnologies.
“One of the biggest challenges with cobalt is that it’s located in one country,” he adds. You can literally just dig up the land and find cobalt, so there’s a very strong motivation to dig it up and sell it, and a a result there’s a lot of motivation for unsafe and unethical behaviour.”
The Congo is home to ‘artisanal mines’, where cobalt is extracted from the ground by hand, often using child labour, without protective equipment.
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Brine is pumped out of a nearby lake into a series of evaporation ponds and left for 12 to 18 months. Various salts crystallise at different times as the solution becomes more concentrated. It is also treated with lime to remove traces of magnesium. When the minerals are ready for processing, they are taken to the nearby Planta Li lithium factory to produce the ions that will go into batteries. In 2017, the factory produced 20 tonnes of lithium carbonate Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
There’s also a political angle to be considered. When Bolivia started to exploit its lithium supplies from about 2010, it was argued that its huge mineral wealth could give the impoverished country the economic and political heft that the oil-rich nations of the Middle East. “They don’t want to pay a new OPEC,” says Lisbeth Dahllöf, of the IVL Swedish Environmental Institute, who co-authored a report last year on the environmental footprint of electric car battery production.
In a recent paper in the journal Nature, Yushin and his co-authors argued that new battery technology needs to be developed that uses more common, and environmentally friendly materials to make batteries. Researchers are working on new battery chemistries that replace cobalt and lithium with more common and less toxic materials.
But, if new batteries are less energy dense or more expensive than lithium, they could end up having a negative effect on the environment overall. “Assessing and reducing the environmental cost is a more complex issue than it initially appears,” says Valimaki. “For example, a less durable, yet more sustainable device could entail a larger carbon footprint once your factor in transportation and the extra packaging required.”
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Graves such as this one are a common sight on the salt flats. The area has experienced very little rainfall over the last two years, which has affected the lives of local quinoa farmers. The lithium plants, which use vast amounts of water, have exacerbated shortages: in locations such as Pastos Chicas, near the Argentina/Chile border, additional water had to be shipped in from elsewhere to meet demand Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
At the University of Birmingham, research funded by the government’s £246m Faraday Challenge for battery research is trying to find new ways of recycling lithium-ion. Research in Australia found that only two per cent of the country’s 3,300 tonnes of lithium-ion waste was recycled. Unwanted MP3 players and laptops can end up in landfill, where metals from the electrodes and ionic fluids from the electrolyte can leak into the environment.
A consortium of researchers, led by the Birmingham Energy Institute are using robotics technology developed for nuclear power plants to find ways to safely remove and dismantle potentially explosive lithium-ion cells from electric vehicles. There have been a number of fires at recycling plants where lithium-ion batteries have been stored improperly, or disguised as lead-acid batteries and put through a crusher.
Xiangtan, China. Workers on the production line at Soundon New Energy, a huge lithium-ion battery company in eastern China. Most electric vehicles in use today are yet to reach the end of their cycle. The first all-electric car to be powered by lithium-ion batteries, the Tesla Roadster, made its market debut in 2008. This means the first generation of electric vehicle batteries have yet to reach the recycling stage Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
Because lithium cathodes degrade over time, they can’t simply be placed into new batteries (although some efforts are underway to use old vehicle batteries for energy storage applications where energy density is less critical). “That’s the problem with recycling any form of battery that has electrochemistry – you don’t know what point it is at in its life,” says Stephen Voller, CEO and founder of ZapGo. “That’s why recycling most mobile phones is not cost effective. You get this sort of soup.”
Another barrier, says Dr Gavin Harper of the Faraday Institution’s lithium recycling project, is that manufacturers are understandably secretive about what actually goes into their batteries, which makes it harder to recycle them properly. At the moment recovered cells are usually shredded, creating a mixture of metal that can then be separated using pyrometallurgical techniques – burning. But, this method wastes a lot of the lithium.
Linyi County, China. A production line at Chinese electric-car company ZD, in Linyi County. The company’s small, urban electric two-seaters are made exclusively for the Italian market, where ZD has a joint-venture company Share’ngo, a car-sharing startup in Milan. China is the world’s largest electric car manufacturer, and over the past few years, the country has been looking to increase the number of countries it exports to Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
UK researchers are investigating alternative techniques, including biological recycling where bacteria are used to process the materials, and hydrometallurgical techniques which use solutions of chemicals in a similar way to how lithium is extracted from brine to begin with.
For Harper, it’s about creating a process to shepherd lithium-ion batteries safely through their whole lifecycle, and making sure that we’re not extracting more from the ground unnecessarily, or allowing chemicals from old batteries to do damage. “Considering that all of the materials in these batteries have already had an environmental and social impact in their extraction, we should be mindful of ensuring good custody,” he says.
A Chinese mining-industry executive for Dutch asset manager APG in a luxury hotel. State-backed companies in China are aggressively searching for fresh deposits of lithium carbonate. They are not alone: companies from Japan, Germany, Sweden, France, Switzerland, South Korea and Canada are also acquiring lithium mines in the hope of meeting rising demand Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
Additional reporting and image captions by Abigail Beall
Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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