Also on today’s menu:
Funding For Native Americans
The Problem With Lithium Mining
A public information hearing will take place on Wednesday concerning whether to bring passenger rail back up the Merrimack River Valley as far as Manchester. “The purpose of the meeting is to provide an update and solicit input on the Project Development phase,” the N.H. Department of Transportation said in its announcement of the meeting, which will take place both in person and online.
As currently proposed, the project would extend passenger rail service north from the MBTA line in Lowell, Massachusetts, stopping at two stations in Nashua and one in Bedford that would serve the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport on the other side of the river, before winding up in downtown Manchester. The goal is to provide “rail frequency comparable to existing MBTA Lowell line,” according to the DOT summary, with as many as 20 round-trips each weekday.
Potential funding would come from the new federal infrastructure bill, allowing the upgrading of about 30 miles of existing track (roughly 20 of it in New Hampshire), including crossings and bridges; installing new signaling technology; and building four stations plus a layover facility.
Funding For Native Americans
The federal infrastructure bill also would send money to America’s indigenous people, President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday. In addition to providing money for things like broadband service, Biden said there are five new initiatives, the first two being the bringing together of 17 departments and agencies to protect Tribal treaty rights and the work of the federal government; and increasing Tribal participation in the management and stewardship of federal lands.
The third, he said, is “my administration will be the first to work with the Tribes to comprehensively incorporate Tribal ecological knowledge into the federal government’s scientific approach, helping us fight climate change. And fourth, taking action to protect the Greater Chaco Landscape in Northwest New Mexico from future oil and gas drilling and leasing.
The fifth initiative, he said was to sign an executive order addressing “the crisis of violence against Native Americans.”
The Problem With Lithium Mining
A big part of Biden’s effort at combatting climate change is to promote electric vehicles, but for electric cars to become dominant, the industry will require a lot of lithium for the car batteries.
Environmental and tribal activists are protesting plans to mine the lithium in the Northern Nevada desert for such “green” technologies. Tribes, ranchers, residents, and activists believe the repercussions of the mine will outweigh lithium’s contributions to the nation’s transition to less-polluting energy sources than fossil fuels. The flawed assumption behind the “clean energy transition,” they argue, is that the planet can maintain levels of consumption that are inherently unsustainable.
Extracting lithium can have environmental drawbacks similar to those associated with the extraction of fossil fuels. Currently, most lithium is produced outside the United States, but proponents of lithium mining say there is potential for a rich domestic economy around the resource that justifies its environmental consequences and the potential burden on local communities.
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