• sodium_nitride [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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    8 days ago

    Gold mining? No. It will be used mostly as a store of value and/or as a luxury product.

    Copper mining? Eh, it seems that the world is going to need to mine huge amounts of copper to electrify. I recently attended a lecture by an environmental scientist, and he was pretty clear that there is pretty much no way around mining a huge amount of metals for transitioning the economy to clean energy*, other than de-growth, which basically no one is interested in.

    Copper is one of these minerals and is needed as a conductor. The other mentioned by the article is anorthosite (never heard of this shit before) which is apparently used for fiberglass. As it turns out, using fiberglass insulation can cut down on heating energy use.

    *That includes recycling