0bama and the Volt

[tvguy]

OK I looked up rare earth metals in batteries and I see where Hammy is coming from.
But IMO Gasoline and the oil in crankcases refining burning and all that is moe toxic than the insides of batteries.
Plus I just read that they are now recycling most of the rare earth metals.




Rare earth metals -- a set of 17 chemical elements, including scandium, promethium, yttrium and cerium -- come from a small handful of places in the world. So it's about time that these crucial electric vehicle battery materials started getting recycled on a large scale. Honda announced plans to create what it's calling the world's first mass-production process for doing just that with spent nickel-metal hydride batteries.

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Honda dealerships will collect used batteries from customers and then send the parts to Japan Metals and Chemicals for the actual recycling. Japan Metals and Chemicals plans to disassemble the batteries, sort out the active substances, and then extract both rare earth elements as well as the nickel and cobalt. The company already has an established heat treatment process for the extraction, according to Honda.

As much as 80 percent of the rare earth metals in used nickel-metal hydride batteries can be extracted with this new process, the automaker said in a press release. Once they've been extracted, the metals can be reused not only in batteries but in other car parts.
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The term "rare earth," while a bit of a historical misnomer, stuck around mainly because these elements aren't likely to be concentrated in exploitable ore deposits, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Plus, their availability from China, which supplies most of the world's demand, hinges on several volatile factors like environmental regulations, export limits and territorial control of mining operations.

[Yeshuah Hamashiach]

The main reason if I am not mistaken that we have developed so much high tech so fast and keep pounding out the next versions of stuff is because China was willing to sacrifice the environment for huge mineral mining operations. It is my understanding that there are other places to mine it like in Canada , but the manner in which it is done has to be addressed in order to make it environmentally sound to do so. The bottom line to me though is quite simple . I think high tech is out of control as far as cars and stuff go and now people cant work on them anymore. I think although small computers have a purpose , overall I really do prefer a tower and stuff and I prefer to be able to at least take components out and replace them myself. I think that they need to make stuff that people don.t have to be the equivalent of surgeons to fix. I also think that in times of disasters and stuff things people can work on and use to fix other things has alot more value than stuff that is so complicated when it breaks down you are screwed. Last but not least I think that in a real futuristic society with high tech the tech would be as invisible as possible and the whole notion of human interfacing minimalized . That isn't to say no keyboards of screens , but when it comes to ones home and yard and and hood and stuff real good tech wouldn't spoil natural living and luvin and stuff..