Maybe
But regardless of that the science community have yelled about it for a long time now and given that it needs to be solved by politicians all over the world, we can only guess how well that is going to work
And as usually they have had a lot of meeting and signing a lot of papers, but they have hardly committed to anything, which explain why it doesn't seem to really make a difference.
Also as long as you have a world economy based on consumption, its difficult to see how things should improve a lot. The moment things start to go downhill they encourage people to spend money to keep things going. Its a fire out of control, where we are trying to put it out by throwing cups of water on it and a lot of gasoline at the same time in hope that it will somehow work
In Denmark our government want to get everyone to drive electric cars, so they are really boosting that. Which sounds great, if it weren't due to the ****load of cars and batteries that has to be made, there need to be build a whole infrastructure in the whole country, now imagine all countries doing that :O And to make all this we need rare metals.
Rare metals only exist in tiny quantities and inconvenient places—so you have to move a lot of earth to get just a little bit. In the Jiangxi rare earth mine in China, Abraham writes, workers dig eight-foot holes and pour ammonium sulfate into them to dissolve the sandy clay. Then they haul out bags of muck and pass it through several acid baths; what’s left is baked in a kiln, leaving behind the rare earths required by everything from our phones to our Teslas.
At this mine, those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent—now contaminated with toxic chemicals—is dumped back into the environment. That damage is difficult to quantify, just like the impact of oil drilling.
And, as in every stage of the process, mining has hidden emissions. Jiangxi has it relatively easy because it’s digging up clay, but many mines rely on rock-crushing equipment with astronomical energy bills, as well as coal-fired furnaces for the final baking stages. Those spew a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the process of refining a material destined for your zero-emissions car. In fact, manufacturing an electric vehicle generates more carbon emissions than building a conventional car, mostly because of its battery, the Union of Concerned Scientists has found.
Hopefully we can get better at recycling the batteries, but still how much rare metal do we need to dig out, to make electric cars for everyone?
The reserves of some rare earth minerals used in electronics, medical equipment and renewable energy could run out in less than 100 years. Rare earth minerals are naturally occurring resources, which cannot be recreated or replaced. Some minerals are only present in very tiny quantities.
Guess what that number will drop to when we start to really crank up the number of cars that has to be made? Also a lot of the reserves of these rare earth minerals are in China, just freaking perfect
As always the human race is to stupid to act in time, we always have to react when its to late.