So its alright as long as you aren't directly affected. Lets push it all onto desperate economies to mine the earth and bear the brunt of pollution while I enjoy the clean air and pristine water bodies.
We can either keep pumping oil and burning it, or we can mine some stuff to build panels that last 10+ years and can be recycled at the end of their lifetimes. It's not like fossil fuel extraction is a clean process (both in ecological and humanitarian aspects), in addition to cooking the planet.
This is just a silly argument. We're already polluting those countries anyway with the current fossil fuel regime. We're already putting massive quarries for the minerals currently needed for energy generation and transmission there (coal, copper, gold, etc). We're already prospecting those countries for oil and gas. We're already chopping down rainforests to get to all these resources, not to mention to clear land for cattle grazing for the titanic meat industry.
Mining has to be done somewhere to create a decent standard of living (though Western lifestyles require exponentially more resources than those elsewhere so we can make improvements on the demand side of things). What isn't set in stone in that the extraction of resources has to be exploitative for the people living in those countries, nor that it has to be excessively environmentally damaging. Which it currently, absolutely is, because the capitalist profit motive dictates it to be so.
Compared to burning fossil fuel, it's almost negligible, and entirely localised to where the mining happens.
So its alright as long as you aren't directly affected. Lets push it all onto desperate economies to mine the earth and bear the brunt of pollution while I enjoy the clean air and pristine water bodies.
We can either keep pumping oil and burning it, or we can mine some stuff to build panels that last 10+ years and can be recycled at the end of their lifetimes. It's not like fossil fuel extraction is a clean process (both in ecological and humanitarian aspects), in addition to cooking the planet.
This is just a silly argument. We're already polluting those countries anyway with the current fossil fuel regime. We're already putting massive quarries for the minerals currently needed for energy generation and transmission there (coal, copper, gold, etc). We're already prospecting those countries for oil and gas. We're already chopping down rainforests to get to all these resources, not to mention to clear land for cattle grazing for the titanic meat industry.
Mining has to be done somewhere to create a decent standard of living (though Western lifestyles require exponentially more resources than those elsewhere so we can make improvements on the demand side of things). What isn't set in stone in that the extraction of resources has to be exploitative for the people living in those countries, nor that it has to be excessively environmentally damaging. Which it currently, absolutely is, because the capitalist profit motive dictates it to be so.