Should We Care About Biodiversity?
A proposed lithium mine may wipe out a rare buckwheat plant in Nevada
One of the very interesting things about the “clean energy transition,” as the people like to call it, is how much it still depends on digging things up from the earth. We won’t be extracting so much oil and gas, but we will be digging up other stuff, like cobalt and lithium. This is, on balance, better for the planet because we’re not burning fossil fuels. But if you live near a beautiful landscape that is about to be turned into a mine, you might not care too much about the greater good. The more I report about clean energy, the more I have been thinking about how we decide what’s best for the greater good. I wrote about one such conflict today: biologists say that a mine in Nevada that the Biden Administration loaned $700 million will almost certainly wipe out a rare species of buckwheat.
Is Your EV Worth the Extinction of a Species?
As someone who thinks about economics a lot, I was fairly skeptical when environmentalists started listing the reasons that Ioneer should not be able to build the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine, as planned, in Nevada. There’s a plant called Tiehm’s buckwheat that grows on 12 acres of land near the planned mine in Nevada, and the U.S. government - yes the same government that just loaned money for the mine — declared Tiehm’s buckwheat an endangered species last year. If Tiehm’s buckwheat goes extinct, there’s no getting it back. And there are bees and insects that feed on it that could be affected too.
But, my economist brain thought, it’s just one flower. That was only discovered in the 1980s. That only grows on 12 acres. That has many buckwheat relatives that are still thriving. And those acres could be the source of some really essential minerals we need for the clean energy transition. Which could make the clean energy transition cheaper and also wean us from our dependence on China. Survival of the fittest, right?
Apparently not. In this piece, I learned a lot about the benefits of biodiversity, which is essentially making sure that we aren’t destroying the abundance of life on the planet, even if it is just one flower. The biologist E.O. Wilson made a good economic case for biodiversity — there’s a flower in Madagascar that cures cancer, but it also could have gone extinct — but I think that going forward, biologists are going to have to figure out a way to explain in clearer terms why biodiversity is important. We’ve been told so many times that the planet is in a death spiral and that we have to do everything we can to save it that I wonder if we (okay me) have become too willing to sacrifice important things in the name of clean energy. Or maybe not, it’s just a flower. Tell me what you think. Also, does anyone really miss the dodo bird?
I also wrote last week about the problems inherent in shopping in Dollar stores. I went to a Dollar Tree for the reporting of this story, and boy, is it tempting to shop at dollar stores. I don’t know why this resonated with me so much, but they have WHOLE SKEINS OF YARD for $1.25 (Yes, they raised their prices because of inflation.) And tissues, which our local pharmacy never ever has, also cost $1.25. Before you get too excited, the prices are so low in part because they have a never-ending list of labor violations, which you can read about in my story. But as we learned with the buckwheat, it’s easy to sacrifice your principles for a good deal!
Is there any reason why this variety of buckwheat cannot be grown anywhere else in the known universe?