Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels.
Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels.
Mining for coal is much more resource-intensive than renewables or nuclear power.
And yet, there's still the elephant in the room.
The literal 'Elephant's Foot' from the Chernobyl disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
It's bad enough that disaster even happened, but now the aftermath is now in a war torn country? Fuck, why can't we just all work together and figure a way to recycle the nuclear material that we refined in the first place, instead of Russia trying to blow it up?
Oh that's right, nuclear stuff is super dangerous. Like, potentially worldwide life ending dangerous.
HumansPoliticians are not responsible enough for any of these energy demands, whether it's coal, oil, nuclear, etc..Shit, my own phone only uses a few milliwatts of energy a day, but the servers it connects to use megawatts. Has anyone ever considered just turning off the electricity, worldwide, for like a month, just to see what happens?
Just a hypothetical thought there, please don't take me too seriously. But for real, humans existed for over 100,000 years without electricity and they never had any of these extreme devastating problems...
A lot less humans existed for a lesser period of time without electricity.
We used to burn oil and other fuels for lamps, raw wood for heat, raw sewerage was everywhere if not released untreated into waterways. All of this was hugely polluting and detrimental to health. Please don't kid yourself that there were better times in the 1700s.
You make a fine point as well. Overpopulation. There's only so much surface area on our degrading blue-green marble of a planet.
Back in the 1700s there wasn't anywhere near 8 billion people on the planet. Yet people were living just fine. Not perfectly, but is anyone except the richest of the rich living just fine now?
But these days, the politicians want people to believe there's a shortage of people, even trying to restrict women's rights, and also arrange wars to kill people.
https://scottmanning.com/content/year-by-year-world-population-estimates/
Edits - Apologies for numerous edits, I just want to make my thoughts clear.
We had entire cilizations collapse entirly mostly due to ecological disasters. Illnesses were wipeing out huge parts of the population in some cases. Wars also used to be much more common.
The technologies we have do make the world a better place. Not alwasys, but on average.
No nuclear accident has the ability to end life on earth. It is not a possibility.
And humans in the past would regularly suffer from famine and epidemic, and child death was crazy (as was mother death during birth).