Environment & Energy

...personal experience.

I'm unimpressed.

I've been here for over 20 years listening to their self-congratulatory bullshit, telling me for instance how they like to go into their garage and watch their electric meters work in reverse, as if that matters.

It doesn't.

Meanwhile, on planet Earth, there are well over one billion people who lack basic sanitation and over 3 billion people who lack clean water, according to the UN link just produced.

The planet is burning.

Now there are lots of people around here, still this late in the game, who love to brag about funding the racist white supremacist Elon Musk with their junkie little cars, including those with batteries.

Nevertheless the planet is burning.

Don't worry, be happy. Those iron phosphate batteries are recyclable, always the magic term for antinukes looking to rip the land and seas to pieces for so called "renewable energy."

Cf: Yi Fan, Yongyou Su, Zitong Fei, Yuyun Li, Yun Luo, Le Tian, Qi Meng, Peng Dong, Progress and prospect of spent lithium iron phosphate cathode materials recycling: A review, Journal of Energy Storage, Volume 132, Part B, 2025, 117771.

I like this happy bit of text from the full paper:

How are those 800 °C temperatures going to be produced? Trashing a desert for solar concentration plants that run two hours a day if it's not cloudy?

We can get that lithium back for sure.

Then there's phosphorous, the 11th most abundant element on the planet.

Phosphorous is a critical element on which the world food supply depends, but I don't expect despite being listed as a critical element subject to depletion will be grotesquely enhanced by bourgeois airheads celebrating their worship of Musk and his ersatz "nobility" in setting his cobalt slaves free, even if the iron phosphate battery is less efficient and less robust than NMC batteries thus requiring even more energy losses to use them and hence, a requirement for even more generation. Over in solar electric car heaven I suspect there are few people who give a rat's ass about recycling polyvinylidene fluoride polymers contained in the cathodes of iron phosphate batteries, fluorocarbons representing one of the most intractable environmental problems before humanity, albeit well after the collapse of the planetary atmosphere because, among other things, most of the world's electricity is generated by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels.

Most phosphate mining, now centered in Morocco, is designed for agricultural use, which has generated some remarks in the literature, for instance:

Illakwahhi, D.T., Vegi, M.R. & Srivastava, B.B.L. Phosphorus' future insecurity, the horror of depletion, and sustainability measures. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 21, 9265–9280 (2024).

From that paper's text:



Like most of this "renewable energy will save us" horseshit we hear all day long between ads for Tesla here, we obviously don't give a rat's ass about future generations.

Don't worry though, be happy. We have never hesitated to fuck with the food supply if it meant curtailing our love of cars. In the old days, we decided to kill the Mississippi River delta and kill off all of the seafood in the Gulf beyond it so we could put "renewable" ethanol in gasoline.

But I'm grotesquely overstating the risk to phosphorous supplies in connection with cars, since car worship is only a tiny fraction of the 3% of the world's phosphorous supply that is devoted to industrial use, including batteries. I'm sure we'll easily come across plenty of phosphorous to replace a billion or so cars and trucks with Ford and Tesla products and if the phosphorous is gone "by 2100" that's not our problem. We have never given a rat's ass about future generations other than to worry someone might get exposed to a radioactive element in the year 2525.

Nevertheless, phosphorous depletion has been observed, for instance in the totally strip mined nation of Nauru whose main industry after the phosphate ran out is now warehousing refugees deported from Australia.

What's magic Elon's plan for replacing the neodymium and dysprosium in magnets for the magic electric cars by the way? Going back to pure iron and nickel magnets, I guess.

Sigh...

The nice thing about lanthanide mines is that the tailings are radioactive as they contain thorium. I favor the recovery and use of that thorium with sustainable energy, which is not, in my view, solar and wind junk that will be landfill in 20 years.

We're so damned clueless, it's depressing.

The planet is still burning, but don't let that distract you from your love of your Model Y car provided by trillionaire Musk. I'm sure there are many people here who are happy for this sort of self declared "green nobility" even if I'm personally not impressed so much as disgusted.

Have a nice weekend.