I see the pseudo Eco warriors....

[Workingman]

.... can't trash the land fast enough for the minerals they need for their virtue signalling electric Tonkas, so they are going to trash the ocean's floors for the polymetallic nodules containing cobalt, copper, manganese and nickel needed for the batteries.

No emissions down on the street is the EV unique selling point - CO2 free. Modern electricity is "green" and cheap - for now, and this is sold and sold and sold. The out of sight damage to the planet is never ever mentioned and is ever so well hidden.

So, to get from A to B they pat themselves on the back because no C02 came out of the exhaust and then they deny the consequences of their builds and batteries. Let's be honest, the EV freaks are well prepared to trash an ecosystem we know next to nothing about nor its importance to life on Earth. they just want the kudos for owning a CO2 free EV, and the bigger the better.

[cromwell]

People tend to believe what's put in front of them and at the moment EVs are mostly presented as being unquestionably wonderful.
In my experience there are very few things that are 100% wonderful.
What people will say when they realise what Boris's zero carbon pledge means in real terms will be interesting.
Like the exploitation of the sea bed I guess they will believe what the man on the TV tells them.

[Suff]

Well, apparently, it is unacceptable to buy these minerals from countries where families send children out to mine them and companies accept the children as miners and the governments don't care.

One slight hiccup. Those minerals exist in countries which exploit child labour.

Of course the impact of burning fossil fuels in cars is known, understood and not a problem.

Or is it?

Oceans suffocating as huge dead zones quadruple since 1950, scientists warn

Have a read. A really good read. Understand that we are already killing the ocean habitat and we need to stop killing it. Stopping killing it is important.

Now let's look at EV's. Current top line EV vehicles have an expected lifetime of 20 years. Minimal maintenance and a MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent), of around 120 to 180. That 180 figure is for the Tesla Model S plaid+ which goes on the market this month. It is virtually a supercar with a 200mph top speed (limited) and a 0-60 speed of 2.1 seconds. The nearest fossil burner in performance does approximately 22mpg.

The people complaining about both the child labour AND the mineral stripping from the pacific ocean are the same people who advocate shutting down nuclear power stations even if it means opening up new coal strip mines and moving power generation back to 60% coal.

Stupid is as stupid does.

As for mining these nodules for EV's? Around 95% of the minerals in the polymetallic nodules is required for the manufacture of EV batteries. The main use for these nodules, in current mining, is for Nickel and Cobalt. The manganese and much of the rest is simply vomited back over the side of the ships, killing the ocean below.

Mining these nodules for EV batteries is actually better for the environment than the current mining.

The fact that you can't even talk to the companies mining, introduce new ideas or get them to think about how to protect the ecosystem (it is possible), is a problem which needs to be solved. For instance they can't even work out that in the sea you can fly for no cost. They just want to drive over the surface, creating mayhem.

Then again, EV batteries are 99% recyclable. How recyclable are the emissions of fossil burners? They are not, they are, instead, killing the oceans.

There is a footer on one of the posters of a site I visit. It says.

"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."

This is in reference to people creating a clean energy and transport infrastructure which will take the next generations on to a cleaner future.

We need to stop fighting with the people who are changing the way we create and consume energy and start helping them.

For instance I can think of a simple way to have a "flying" nodule collector which Picks up the nodules without scraping up the sea bed. I can think of several ways to boost these modules to close to the sea surface using turbines and water vacuum flow. I can t think of a very simple way to re-seed "nodules" back onto the sea bed using plain rocks covered in nodule slurry and baked on, redistributed over the sea bed to replace the habitats we are stealing.

Now if you can find a way for me to talk to the people in those companies and share my ideas with them, that would be constructive.

Bemoaning the likes of GM coming out with their hummer 2023 vapourware does not do justice to the situation today! This pacific mining is needed for the plethora of £25k small family cars with 40kw/h batteries needed to replace the bulk of the 80m fossil burners we sell every year and to replace a large chunk of the 1.3 billion fossil burners still ravaging this planet with uncontrolled CO2 emissions.

Why can't we replace Articulated HGV's with BEV's? Not enough batteries. Why can't we sell the US pickup trucks that do the equivalent of 130mpg in terms of energy use and about 200mpg in terms of emissions? Not enough batteries. Why can't we produce 20m EV's of the 80m vehicles produced each year? Not enough batteries. Why can't we make enough batteries? Not enough Nickel, manganese, lithium and cobalt!

What are these nodules mainly made out of? Manganese, Nickel and Cobalt with Iron and copper and a range of other minerals in there too.

So let's stop going on as if these EV's are rich people's toys. They are not. It just takes hundreds of billions of $ to change from relatively simple (from an engineering point of view), fossil burners, to much more technological EV's. VW has allocated €90bn over the next decade to "try" and catch up with Tesla and get to 10m electric vehicles per year by 2030.

In order to do that, VW have to sell these vehicles at high margins. Even then the sale price of these VW ID.3 vehicles is around the £30k bracket with government subsidies. Those prices will go down when VW stop manufacturing 350k per year and start pumping out 3m per year. Economies of scale.

This stuff is important with a capital I. Yet the tone of these articles is similar to the rather despicable idiots in Brandenburg, bemoaning their beautiful forest of trees grown for cardboard production which it would be harvested for and trying to stop the creation of a factory for making Electric vehicles which will help us stop damaging the liveable biosphere of this planet. These are the same idiots who think that we can burn coal instead of running Nuclear power stations.

Again. Stupid is as Stupid does with NIMBY idiots.

BTW, just as a footer, did you see two of the large sponsors of this complaint? BMW and Volvo.....

[Workingman]

There are no words to justify the vandalizing and despoiling of the deep sea bed, no matter the War and Peace length deflection attempts: no defence - none!

The thing about us clever apes is that we are not so clever. We create partial solutions to problems we made in the first place; and in doing so we create a whole new problem that will need sorting later. Rinse and repeat. The linked article from 'Suff the believer' makes this clear.

The analysis, published in the journal Science, is the first comprehensive analysis of the areas and states: “Major extinction events in Earth’s history have been associated with warm climates and oxygen-deficient oceans.” Denise Breitburg, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in the US and who led the analysis, said: “Under the current trajectory that is where we would be headed. But the consequences to humans of staying on that trajectory are so dire that it is hard to imagine we would go quite that far down that path.”

No, Denise, it's not hard to imagine - we are doing it! Freaking up the ocean beds and any other environment to produce virtue signalling - look at my Tonka Toy - is where we are at, and, yes, we will go down your dire path because ever so many have bought into the EV myth. And don't forget that the economy of continuous growth we now live in depends on it.

[Suff]

There are no words to justify the vandalizing and despoiling of the deep sea bed, no matter the War and Peace length deflection attempts: no defence - none!

No point in any more.

I tried to educate.

We are killing the livable biosphere of this planet. Not just for us but for millions of species. Sadly for those species we will outlast most of them.

We are doing this planetary atmosphere re-engineering by burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels and emitting trillions of tonnes of CO2.

That will not stop until we find a way to change the technology we use to power our lives, heat and cool our homes and provide our transport.

If we do not find a way to ethically and sensibly mine these resources, then we will destroy the habitat for almost all other land and sea creatures.

The only place left untouched will be the deep sea bed.

Repeating brain dead Environmentalist NIMBY, I don't care so long as my hobby horse is ridden, arguments, does not make their case.

These so called "environmentalists" don't even realise that their little bit of the world will die with all the rest and they don't care that everyone else will go with them.

Time to take a step back, pick up the barge pole and review claims before making a cast iron case with them.

Those "tonka toy" EV's will still be going, providing more efficient transport a decade after the fossil burners are in the scrap yard.

It is positions like this that guarantee that we will go over the edge because in order to step back from the brink we need these materials.

On the other hand there are billions of tonnes of methane clathrates, lying on sea beds which will not be so disturbed. If we do not move soon they will start mining these too and burning them.

I know where I stand on this.