Greenies Build A Tower of Babel

 Olivia Murray notes It's a greenie conundrum: Massive amounts of lithium discovered in "fracking water." I'll go make some popcorn.

Writing for Fox News, Charles Creitz recently reported on a very inconvenient truth, from a new study: fracking wastewater is full of lithium, making it a “promising domestic source” if tapped, and the process to extract it “reduces the cost” of traditional water decontamination efforts. Here are the details, from Creitz:

Major lithium discovery in fracking wastewater leaves the left facing EV ‘irony’

A University of Pittsburgh study suggested processing byproducts from natural gas production in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale basin could potentially meet nearly half of U.S. lithium needs.

…

In the study, published in Nature’s ‘Scientific Reports,’ estimates of annual lithium yields from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale totaled 1,278 tons. The Marcellus Shale range covers large swaths of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia.

One of the researchers, Justin Mackey, told KDKA that in addition to supplying substantial amounts of lithium, processing the wastewater in that way ‘reduce[s] the cost of remediating and handling’ it….

Not only is lithium a crucial component for everything the left likes to inaccurately file under “net zero” technologies (electric vehicles, solar panel energy storage systems, wind turbines), but it’s necessary for basically all electronics—the computer I’m using to write this blog, and the phone from which you may be reading it. In the U.S., we’re largely reliant on foreign lithium, as Australia, Chile, and China produce 90% of the lithium on the global market—which leaves us in a precarious position if there are any supply chain disruptions or price fluctuations—so sourcing it from dirty fracking water, in a process that reduces the cost companies already pay to clean the contaminated water, is quite a good deal for the American consumer, economy, and environment.

And, not only that, but considering how utterly filthy and destructive to the environment the traditional lithium mining process is—just think how much worse it is in unbound-by-climate-deals China—it’s an even better deal to use the market, or the law of supply-and-demand, to diminish our dependence on products that come with ecologically devastating consequences.

You can see the conundrum here. We could get half of our lithium supply needs for EVs from fracking, but then that implies as use for petroleum as well. Now, I would solve the problem by using the lithium for genuine electrical needs such as cell phones and other rechargeable battery devices. I would continue running transportation needs on petroleum products as the most practical and safest methods of fueling those needs, and I would continue using coal and nuclear for fixed location power plants. We have at least 200 years' worth of these items right here at home. Why not use them? Oh, that's right, "global warming."

But the idea that man contributes anything to "global warming" or for that matter to "global cooling" or indeed any other weather change has been thoroughly debunked. Man's contribution is like pissing in the ocean and hoping to make it rise. I am not saying that mankind has no effect. But to believe that man's effect on climate change measurable is the height of hubris. It is akin to building a tower to reach heaven (a reference to the tower of Babel in the Bible) and we all know how that turned out.

Man should be good stewards of the earth as God commanded in Genesis. But at the same time, while not wasting the earth's resources wantonly, we are also to use them for the benefit of all, which implies making the best use of ALL of the earth's resources.