“Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now,” the study said.
“Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now,” the study said.
Interestingly, a similar problem as with bike infrastructure. The infrastructure isn’t useful until a lot of it is built and it connects everywhere (and timetables get shorter for trains). The infrastructure won’t pass public opinion until it’s proven to be useful to people. I will always vote yes on funding these projects even if I think they will bomb because it puts us a little closer to the peak of that hill. Its still frustrating though. We could easily do like we did with the freeways if we just decided it was worth building.
The worse part is, what infrastructure does get built isn’t used because it’s mostly useless, and people use this lack of use as justification for not building more.
@njordomir But all of it is network effect in action: the incremental value of each piece is related to how many pieces already exist.
My current push is bike infra for kids to get to school, parks, community centers and libraries. Roads aren’t a safe for them and they can’t drive themselves.
My city has been pushing through improving the biking infrastructure for a decade now.
People have been bitching about it from day one. They bitched even more as the first lanes were going in, as they were “useless” and went “nowhere”
They’ve continued to bitch about it every year, every construction project.
But now, we have a highly interconnected network of bike lanes (most protected) all around town and they’re getting heavily used.
People still find reasons to bitch about it like it’s slowing down traffic by narrowing roads or lost parking spots or whatever, but the “it’s not useful” stuff has stopped.