Interview With Bob McKee in 2016 Explores the Connection Between Cannabis and Solar Power

From the article:

“U.N. Warns of Devastating Environmental Side Effects of Electric Car Boom”

“The United Nations (U.N.) announced Sunday the electric car boom will result in a number of devastating ecological side effects for the planet.

While the shift to electric cars reflects ongoing efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, the UN warns that the raw materials used to produce electric car batteries are highly concentrated in a small number of countries and their extraction and refinement pose a serious threat to the environment.

The U.N. trade body, UNCTAD, has issued a new report breaking down some of the unintended negative consequences of the shift, which include ecological degradation as well as human rights abuses.

The report notes that metals such as cobalt, lithium, manganese, copper, and minerals like graphite “play a significant role in energy-related technologies such as rechargeable batteries that are used in a variety of applications ranging from electronics to electric vehicles as well as in renewable energies such as nuclear, wind, and solar power.”

Several of these raw materials are quite rare and have few or no substitutes and they come from specific areas of the globe. More than half the world’s supply of lithium, for example, a key component of lithium-ion batteries, comes from beneath the salt flats in the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.

The production of these raw materials “is often associated with undesirable environmental footprints, poor human rights and worker protection,” the report asserts.

In Chile, for instance, “lithium mining uses nearly 65% of the water in the country’s Salar de Atamaca region, one of the driest desert areas in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells,” the U.N. notes, because nearly 2 million liters of water are needed to produce a ton of lithium.

This has “contributed to environment degradation, landscape damage and soil contamination, groundwater depletion and pollution,” the U.N. states.

In its report, UNCTAD estimates that some 23 million electric cars will be sold over the coming decade and as a result the market for rechargeable car batteries is forecast to rise by over 700 percent in just four years, from its current level of $7 billion to $58 billion by 2024.

Along with lithium, another key component of electric car batteries is cobalt, and two-thirds of all cobalt production happens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), The U.N. observes.

The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that about 20 percent of cobalt supplied from the DRC comes from artisanal mines, “where human rights abuses have been reported, and up to 40,000 children work in extremely dangerous conditions in the mines for meagre income.”

The U.N. also fears that cobalt-copper mines in DRC may contain sulphur minerals that contribute to Acid mine drainage (AMD), a phenomenon that causes pollution or contamination of surface water, thereby increasing the toxicity of rivers and drinking water.

“The environmental impacts of graphite mining are very similar to those associated with cobalt mining,” the report adds.

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said that in 2018, electric cars saved 40 million tons of CO2 worldwide, sufficient to reduce global temperatures by a mere 0.000018°C — or a little more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree Celsius — by the end of the century.

“If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong,” Birol said.”

End of article.

What DOES it mean?

Isn’t that all that really matters?

(Testing here to see if it comes out in stanzas, looks as I posted it.
If it’s all jumbled together then no bueno)

The Weed Odyssey
Remember when we just put some seeds in the ground
and waited for October to come around?
In those early days the plants were very healthy
and after a few years we were all wealthy
From living on food stamps to thousand dollar pounds
there was never any powdery mildew around
We were beginners with the crops we were raising
it was a moment in time, the money amazing
Hiking for hours up and down mountains
looking for springs and places for gardens
There were lessons to learn especially about mold
the enemy within that destroyed the gold
Wood rats, ripoffs, and Camp claimed their share
copters invaded and the hippies got scared
We hid plants under trees and even up in them
with loppers we carved out our camo kingdom
After Camp came the nineties and the greenhouse years
hiding plants behind Reemay calmed the fears
Then the mites joined the mold in a symphony of terror
vacuuming webs off buds in the most stressed-out era
When predator bugs failed with Pyrethrum you bomb it
then the last hippie ethics were spewed like vomit
Growers counted the cash as the prices were soaring
exotic beaches in Costa Rica needed exploring
With houses and land the hippies became entangled
as the sinsemilla boomed across The Triangle
When coke came along we were like Hollywood
we snorted that sweet powder whenever we could
The frisky hippies had sex and then crying babies
and built country schools in the booming eighties
It was an unusual way for those kids to grow up
learning not to call the cops no matter what
Teenagers got the green thumb and planted out Usal
and biked the crop home in backpacks every fall
When medical was legalized the price dropped lower
every stoner from everywhere came to be a grower
If you still wanted to continue making bank
you had to grow a hundred plants of dank
It was harder to sell if your weed lacked aroma
the market wanted clones that put you in a coma
Hordes of wannabe trimmers came for awhile
foreign girls on the street greeted us with smiles
Everyone was in it for the cold hard cash
the colorful workers vanished after the crash
The whole mess was legalized in twenty sixteen
and the enforcer John Ford showed up on the scene
So that’s the story of a very green dream
we rode it for decades starting when young and lean
It was an utter surprise which dropped in our laps
a forty year boom which finally collapsed