The answer may depend on the quantity of rare earth elements used.
A few days ago I spotted an article on the web under the headline Your Prius’ Deepest, Darkest Secret points out that many products which appear to to reduce ones environmental footprint actually contain relatively large quantities of rare earth elements, which have to be mined and refined — a dirty process at the best of times.
Neodymium magnets turn wind turbines. Cerium helps reduce tailpipe emissions. Yttrium can form phosphors that make light in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Hybrid and electric cars often contain as many as eight different rare earths … Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you’ll be hard-pressed to find something that doesn’t contain at least one of the rare earths, from smartphones to laptop batteries to flat-screen TVs. They’re also crucial for defence technology—radar and sonar systems, tank engines, and the navigation systems in smart bombs.
No surprise therefore that the demand for rare earths is sky-rocketing and mining is expanding accordingly. Mining and refining produce mountains of waste from rock spoil to harsh acids as well as consuming gargantuan quantities of energy. And mining companies don’t have good track records at reducing and managing any of this.
Another side of the coin is that many of these elements are used in such small quantities that recovering them from old products and recycling them becomes equally as hard as the original refining.
As I pointed out here and as the article concludes: What good is green technology if it’s based on minerals whose extraction is so, well, ungreen?
Gawdelpus.
A hint that the large human penis serves as some sort of signal may be gained by watching what happens when men take the opportunity to design their own penises, rather than remaining content with their evolutionary legacy. Men in the highlands of New Guinea do that by enclosing the penis in a decorative sheath called a phallocarp. The sheath is up to two feet long and four inches in diameter, often bright red or yellow in color, and variously decorated at the tip with fur, leaves, or a forked ornament. When I first encountered New Guinea men with phallocarps, among the Ketengban tribe in the Star Mountains […] I had already heard a lot about them and was curious to see how they were used and how people explained them. It turned out that men wore their phallocarps constantly […] Each man owns several models, varying in size, ornamentation, and angle of erection, and each day he selects a model to wear according to his mood, much as each morning we select a shirt to wear. In response to my question as to why they wore phallocarps, the Ketengbans replied that they felt naked and immodest without them [despite that they] were otherwise completely naked and left even their testes exposed. In effect, the phallocarp is a conspicuous erect pseudo-penis representing what a man would like to be endowed with. The size of the penis that we evolved was unfortunately limited by the length of a woman’s vagina. A phallocarp shows us what the human penis would look like if it were not subject to that practical constraint.
Here’s a quick, easy, cheap and wholesome meal. It’s a variation on my usual theme of chuck it all in a pan until done. So I give you …
It’s a warm and green autumn in the UK this year. It is mid-November; the daytime temperature is stills several degrees above average; I’m not aware that we’ve had any frost yet; and the fish in the pond are still feeding (in a normal year they stop feeding for the winter in mid-October).
Regular readers will know that I’ve long advocated the more liberal Dutch approach rather than the American (and British) proscriptively controlling approach. So I was interested to see yet more expert opinion and research supporting this view under the title “