Miscellaneous News Gleanings: Green Elitism, Lithium Mining, EVs, and the War on Lawns

Items of note from various sources the past couple days.

The first is from Michael Shellenberger:

Green Elitism Behind Farmer Crackdowns
What role is the World Economic Forum playing?
 

Farmers in the Netherlands reduced nitrogen pollution by nearly 70% through a voluntary system. But the government says that is not enough and is demanding that they cut pollution by another 50% by 2030.
By the Dutch government’s own estimates, 11,200 farms out of the roughly 35,000 dedicated to dairy and livestock would have to close under its policies; 17,600 farmers would have to reduce livestock; and total livestock would need to be reduced by one-half to one-third. The Dutch government has demanded that animal farming stop entirely in many places.

EdNote: Is there not a global food shortage in the making already? What's the deal here? Is this the beginning of a more widespread trend? How will this impact the price of steak?

Item Two: Lithium shortages coming

Satellite view of salt flats in Bolivia and Argentina
that are rich in Lithium.

Another article I read was about the Lithium shortages that are coming... EVs are dependent on batteries, but Lithium Inflation is up 750%. More than half the world's Lithium comes from So
uth America, but those countries have two things going against Lithium. (1) Leaders who want more of the profits from mining in their countries. (I can't entirely blame them) and (2) indigenous people who are protesting mining altogether, like they do in the U.S. ... "Protect our water" groups. What we have is competing Green objectives colliding.

Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal:

South American setbacks for lithium, a key battery component, worry the electric-vehicle industry.

Lithium is an essential element in EV batteries. Less than 2% of the world's lithium comes from the U.S., though actually 4% is available but we have designated it as off limits. 

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Item Three: The War on Lawns.

Thursday's NYTimes eNews daily had a story on the war on lawns.

Early in the piece the authors write, "But while the lawn may be a powerful symbol of American postwar prosperity, it’s also an ecological dead zone that’s sucking the nation’s aquifers dry."

OK, so my initial reactions to the story ran like this. First, it seems to me that there's an inherent hatred of suburbia that I've never fully understood. People in Manhattan don't have lawns. So why this assault on yet another aspect of the suburban lifestyle?

It brings to mind the assault on SUVs twenty years ago. Well guess what? SUVs are useful for taking eight kids to a soccer game. They save gas because you don't have to take three vehicles. And when you have a hobby farm, pickups and SUVs are quite useful for conveying hay or feed.

Until I read this NYTimes piece (it looks like an opinion presented as news) I never knew lawns were a "powerful symbol" of anything. Then again, when things get cast in a political light, everything tends to be turned into symbols of one kind or another.

And when you look at a map of the U.S. from above, what percentage of the U.S. is covered with lawns? It has to be less than 5%. Most of the country is mountains, forests, plains and lakes. Can this small slice of American landscape really suck the entire North American aquifers into an ecological dead zone? 

I'm skeptical. 

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Are We As Happy As We Used To Be? A Glimpse at the World Happiness Report

Because we live in a scientific age, we enjoy defining and measuring and quantifying things. This goes back to Aristotle who, in addition, began by naming things.

At the end of last week a story about World Happiness caught my attention. The two highlights that jumped out for me were that Norway is now the happiest place in the world and that the U.S. isn't as happy as it used to be.

What were their criteria, I wondered. How does one measure happiness?

The organization, loosely affiliated with the U.N., has been studying happiness for only about five years, publishing their first report in 2013. That the research is global in scope intrigued me. Here in the U.S. "the pursuit of happiness" was loudly trumpeted as a one of our inalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence. But what is this elusive entity that we call happiness?

The World Happiness Report evaluates the following main factors when measuring happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance.

It's an interesting list. Measuring happiness by ranking countries, though, has certain difficulties because as we all know there are vast differences in every country between those at the top of the heap and those at the bottom. (EdNote: I did not read the report in its entirety, but reviewed the executive summary and sections from the various chapters and appendices.)

That Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland led the list of happy countries did not surprise me. We've heard a lot over the years about the high levels of satisfaction people enjoy in Scandinavia. (Finland was 5th and Sweden tied for 9th, in case you wish to know.) The other countries in the top ten were Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. (EdNote: I've never met an Australian who did not seem happy to me.)

So what happened to the U.S? We used to be 3rd.  Now we rank 19th. The executive summary gave these two reasons for this country's fall: declining social support and increased corruption. By way of contrast, the Nordic countries have increased social support and reduced corruption.

As I skimmed the various sections of the report, one of the biggest factors contributing to personal misery is mental illness, which corrodes happiness in whatever country one finds oneself in. Mental illness is a universal problem without borders, which brought to mind this article from The Guardian regarding assisted suicide. Because of lax euthanasia laws Aurelia Browers, a troubled mentally 29-year-old woman in the Netherlands was by law recently able to legally end her life. The Netherlands law was enacted in 2002, permitting assisted suicide when there is "unbearable suffering" without hope of relief.

As I think about this woman's suffering it makes me sad. But suffering takes many forms. We need more caring and compassion for sure, for we never know what hidden burden another is carrying.*

They say that humans have a remarkable capacity for adaptation, but there sure is a lot of brokenness out there. Things aren't what they are supposed to be. That's why we need to be kind, compassionate, merciful and generous.

Are you happy? Somehow writing about all this happiness today made me sad.

Meantime, life goes on. "Sit, Ubu."

* I used to attribute this to Rumi, but have read here that it was someone else.