[2trill2spill]

> Your points about mining are a bit beside the point. I don't actually disagree that the mining sector needs to be cleaned up. But our economy generates demand for lots of things we dig up out of the ground. If anything, it seems that the likes of Tesla are vaguely being responsible here and are actually making efforts to clean up that part of their business by working to source what they need in a sustainable way.

Mining is not besides the point, mining is a potential major bottleneck for renewables and has huge environmental costs that should be discussed. Also Tesla is trying to reduce the ecological and human costs of producing battery metals by bringing production/mining to North America, and switching to battery chemistries that don't use cobalt. However those non cobalt battery chemistries use lots of nickel. Also it is becoming extremely difficult to start a mine in the United States. Polymet has been trying to get their copper/nickel mine permitted for over a decade, if you include exploration, which started in the 80's, this project has been going on for decades. Starting a new mine is a very slow process and as the whole world switches to clean energy, demand will surge and new mines will be needed.

> You seem to imply that a scale change is needed on the mining front to bootstrap renewables. I doubt that that's as big of a deal that you seem to imply.

There is plenty of research, articles and information about the incoming surge in demand for metals due to the switch to clean technologies. For example this report from the world bank says that production of some metals would need to increase by nearly 500%[1]

[1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/05/11/m...

[anoncake]

Re batteries: For grid storage, you don't need "battery metals". Lead-based batteries are perfectly sufficient when you don't care about energy density. And that's ignoring other methods of storing energy.