[VintageCool]

Construction of the lithium mine at Thacker Pass began in June, and it is expected to start producing lithium by 2026.

There is a (super nutty) environmentalist group and some Native Americans protesting and trying to delay the mine, but it looks like they have so far been unsuccessful at convincing judges, and blockers have been getting cleared out.

I consider myself an environmentalist, so I'm a bit sensitive about descriptions like "nutty environmentalist", but... the group protesting the Thacker Pass mine is weird and I think largely repudiated by other environmentalists. I mean, they're trying to stop the transition to clean energy. These guys advocate for total deindustrialization, return to a pre-agriculture way of life, only as many humans as the hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle can support, and they're... deeply anti-trans?

[bufferoverflow]

> only as many humans as the hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle can support

They should start reducing the population with themselves, obviously

[lucubratory]

Is this Deep Green Resistance? If it is, the anti-trans thing is a combination of things, one of them being that they view hormone replacement therapy as an unnatural "big pharma" thing that can't survive in their idyllic future where the Earth has a population of 100,000, just like insulin for diabetics. The other is just that they had significant factional splits with thin voting margins, and the faction that kept the name was fighting against another faction that had some transgender members, so "Transgender people are industrialised freaks and/or rapists" was a convenient way to try to expel enough voting members of the opposing faction to seize control of the faction. A lot of the time when you see a random extreme political organisation that's nominally left-wing have a strongly anti-transgender stance, it's because at some point in their organisational past transgender people were casualties in some larger factional dispute.