this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
103 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
60095 readers
2861 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The problem is we're not treating it like an emergency.
During COVID world governments provided basically infinite resources to promising vaccine candidates. We developed brand new types of vaccines for a novel virus in a third of the time it takes us to make existing vaccines for well known viruses. We are not doing the same for promising battery technologies.
We could also be regulating the market for smarter use of the lithium we have. Lithium batteries for stationary mass storage ("big batteries") are completely pointless, except maybe as part of virtual power networks. Subsidising and incentivising recycling and recovery of lithium from waste is another low hanging fruit we seem to not be bothering with.
Absolutely it's true for a global emergency threatening to destroy the global ecosystem, a local ecosystem and cultural site is a sensible sacrifice (not withstanding that we shouldn't be in this scenario in the first place.)
But we have barely scratched the surface in terms of alternative options and it's fair to be frustrated when you're the one expected to sacrifice when other options have not really been tried.