In 2007, when I was a student at the University of the West of England, studying for a transportation planning masters degree, I remember sitting around with our instructor and other students looking at the data for human population growth, motorization, and future transport-related carbon emissions, and scratching our heads as the projected numbers were totally inconsistent with a livable future.
Even with a shift to electric vehicles, widely promoted by governments and industry as being a central solution to the climate crisis, the reductions in carbon are at best marginal and the environmental effects of large renewable projects and mining are truly horrific.
As you know, corporations and governments tend to strongly push profitable technologies that they spin as being green but are anything but. Smart meters were promised to usher in a new era of emissions reductions, electrical reliability and efficiency. The truth is just the opposite.
Now we are seeing the same pattern play out with electric vehicles. General Motors has contracted with Lithium Nevada to mine lithium across a huge area in northern Nevada, violating sacred Native American land where Paiutes and Shoshone were massacred by US Cavalry troops in 1865.
For real solutions to the climate crisis, we need the support, participation and wisdom of indigenous people who have thrived on this planet for far longer than this arrogant, self-involved culture has.
Please consider joining and supporting those who are actively protesting the unlawful extraction of lithium on public lands, including indigenous tribes, in Northern Nevada. This is yet another false solution to climate chaos. Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric.
There is simply no way to continue with mass motorization without endangering the very necessities of life on this planet: clean water and air, and a livable climate.
Just as we put our bodies on the line to stop smart meters, now is the time to do the same to stop the illegal and destructive lithium rush now ramping up.
Please click on this link to read about the latest in the resistance to the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine and watch recent videos. Also check out the Protect Thacker Pass group and People of Red Mountain.
I have been inspired by the recent indigenous led group making a stand at Thacker this week. I’m heading to Nevada to show my personal support for this struggle and hope you will consider doing so too. We all have pressing needs for day to day individual survival, but if we can’t come together to stand up for our common survival, then we are in deeper trouble than we can imagine.
At least dozens of people– including Milton Williams, the former smart meter installer turned whistleblower interviewed below– have apparently been involuntarily disconnected from the grid by Dominion Energy in Virginia after refusing smart meters on their homes. This as freezing temperatures spread across the country.
