“Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now,” the study said.
Its almost like the answer isn’t some whimsical butler just for you, but fucking public transportation. Build fucking trains.
Agreed. I love trains and it frustrates me to see them bungling the implementation. When they try, they always seem to make the same mistakes trying to bring it to my area.
To see meaningful ridership out here, the train needs to go fast enough to negate the penalty you get at the other end when you have to go from the station to your destination. They wanted to run them at ~55-70mph here, with a few stops between major cities, to parallel a freeway that is 65-75mph. Drive 1 hour (1:10 with parking) or spend 2 hours going to the station, riding a slow train, then going from the station to where you are going? I hate cars, but as someone who only gets a handful of hours to myself after sleep, work, and chores, I’m going to save my time and pick the car. If they ever build the train, as it is planned right now, it’ll just be another commuter train that’s only really used at rush hour when the roads are jammed rather than an all day all week car replacement solution that I can ride to Sunday night dinner at a friends house as easily as a 6am meeting.
/un-requested rant
@njordomir @Sanctus The safe money is it will also run too infrequently to be a good replacement. Adding ‘time waiting for train’ to the picture for trips outside of 6~9am or 3~7pm and officials wonder why services aren’t well used.
Interestingly, a similar problem as with bike infrastructure. The infrastructure isn’t useful until a lot of it is built and it connects everywhere (and timetables get shorter for trains). The infrastructure won’t pass public opinion until it’s proven to be useful to people. I will always vote yes on funding these projects even if I think they will bomb because it puts us a little closer to the peak of that hill. Its still frustrating though. We could easily do like we did with the freeways if we just decided it was worth building.
Maybe build ebikes instead of EVs? Then you’d need about 1/50th to 1/100th the copper.
Metal Theft sector booming. Meth stocks are up.
They’ll start mining landfill for metals and probably plastic soon enough. Air it out, wash it, get the metal and plastic, don’t worry about that other in the air/water, that’s a future poor person’s problem.
metals, sure. The problem with plastics is that plastic is not plastic, it’s a plethora of different chemical structures. Very difficult to recycle some of them, even if sorted.
“Recycling the plastic” in my tip-mine dystopia fantasy would be what they called burning plastic to fire the smelt to get the metals out. They’re gonna burn rubbish for metal and market it as a good thing, someone will get paid a lot of money to think of a word like reclamation.
So it’s time to a coup d’etat on Chile AGAIN!
I always find it ironic that people with the most money are always the hungriest for it. Their entire lives revolve around it, and they are willing to pay any other price for it. They will kill ecosystems, pollute everything and even destroy societies for it.