Billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel doubts president's reelection chances, won't donate money

[brooklynite]

Source: New York Daily News

He’d rather be in New Zealand.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder who donated $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, does not believe in the portly president this time around, the Wall Street Journal reported.

People close to Thiel said he doesn’t plan to donate to Trump’s reelection campaign, according to the Journal. Thiel reportedly said a tanking economy will doom Trump at the polls in November.

While he won’t be putting his money where his mouth is, Thiel will still vote for Trump, the Journal reported. Thiel, who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, has no plans to make a reappearance at this year’s edition in August.

Read more: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-peter-thiel-donald-trump-reelection-20200703-766didbnj5azpbdpzhkok7mmvi-story.html

[not fooled]

1. Hahahahahaha

"portly president"

That'll drive orange anus (further) nuts.




Oh, and Thiel is a standout asshole among all of the "libertarian" assholes who propelled red don into the oval office. Great job wrecking the country for your radical warped ideology.

[NNadir]

2. Pals with Elon Musk, who for reasons that escape me, is viewed as a hero on DU. n/t.

[yaesu]

3. musk is a fascist pig, I said that months ago before the man baby threw a fit over shutdowns

thinks his shit don't stink because he makes fancy golf carts.

[NNadir]

4. I rather like that locution for his cobalt laced cars, "fancy golf cart."

There are actually people who think these things are "green."

Cobalt is a conflict metal, mined by enslaved children in Africa. But it's, um, "green."

There is nothing "green" about batteries, although some people might not believe it, as the 2nd law of thermodynamics is suddenly out of fashion.

[Budi]

5. Thank you! I've been baffled for years as to how 'Not Green' lithium batteries actually are.

From phones to fuel free cars. Lithium mining is toxic & relys on slave labor to be mined.
-----------------------



AMUR RIVER, THE CHINA/RUSSIA BORDER
This cold, remote region is where around 100 Chinese electric-car manufacturers test prototypes, such as the Chinese/Slovenian joint venture APG Elaphe, pictured. Global annual sales of electric vehicles exceeded one million for the first time in 2017, with more than half of these in China


Here’s a thoroughly modern riddle: what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river? The answer is lithium – the reactive alkali metal that powers our phones, tablets, laptops and electric cars.

In May 2016, hundreds of protestors threw dead fish onto the streets of Tagong, a town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. They had plucked them from the waters of the Liqi river, where a toxic chemical leak from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine had wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem.

There are pictures of masses of dead fish on the surface of the stream. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing cow and yak carcasses floating downstream, dead from drinking contaminated water. ...MORE at LINK

SNIP
But there’s a problem. As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium required to enable that transformation could become a serious issue in its own right. “One of the biggest environmental problems caused by our endless hunger for the latest and smartest devices is a growing mineral crisis, particularly those needed to make our batteries,” says Christina Valimaki an analyst at Elsevier.


Tahua, Bolivia. Salt miners load a truck with lithium-rich salt. The ground beneath Bolivia’s salt flats are thought to contain the world’s largest reserves of the metal. (The Bolivian Andes may contain 70 per cent of the planet’s lithium.) Many analysts argue that extracting lithium from brine is more environmentally friendly than from rock. However, as demand increases, companies might resort to removing lithium from the brine by heating it up, which is more energy intensive.




Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Brine is pumped out of a nearby lake into a series of evaporation ponds and left for 12 to 18 months. Various salts crystallise at different times as the solution becomes more concentrated. It is also treated with lime to remove traces of magnesium. When the minerals are ready for processing, they are taken to the nearby Planta Li lithium factory to produce the ions that will go into batteries. In 2017, the factory produced 20 tonnes of lithium carbonate


In South America, the biggest problem is water. The continent’s Lithium Triangle, which covers parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, holds more than half the world’s supply of the metal beneath its otherworldly salt flats. It’s also one of the driest places on earth. That’s a real issue, because to extract lithium, miners start by drilling a hole in the salt flats and pumping salty, mineral-rich brine to the surface.

Two other key ingredients, cobalt and nickel, are more in danger of creating a bottleneck in the move towards electric vehicles, and at a potentially huge environmental cost. Cobalt is found in huge quantities right across the Democratic Republic of Congo and central Africa, and hardly anywhere else. The price has quadrupled in the last two years.

READ MORE ....

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact


HEALTH IMPACT

Exposed: Child labour behind smart phone and electric car batteries
19 January 2016

Major electronics brands, including Apple, Samsung and Sony, are failing to do basic checks to ensure that cobalt mined by child labourers has not been used in their products, said Amnesty International and Afrewatch in a report published today.

The report, This is what we die for:
Human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo power the global trade in cobalt, traces the sale of cobalt, used in lithium-ion batteries, from mines where children as young as seven and adults work in perilous conditions.

The glamourous shop displays and marketing of state of the art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks, and miners in narrow manmade tunnels risking permanent lung damage
MORE... from Anmesty International

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/Child-labour-behind-smart-phone-and-electric-car-batteries/

-----------------

Oh ya, Don't get me started.! 😬

Hello, GREEN NEW DEAL...Please address Lithium/Cobalt mining & the Human Rights Abuses & the cost to our environment.

I haven't heard a word on this subject from that advocacy.

"As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium required to enable that transformation could become a serious issue in its own right"


Thank you. 🍃

[NNadir]

12. It's relatively rare here that someone is quite so intrinsically aware of these implications.

Thank you for your elaborations.

I note though that even as the amnesty link you've provided focuses on these stark realities, the language is uncomfortably oxymoronic.

To wit:

"As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium required to enable that transformation could become a serious issue in its own right"

In this context, the word "clean" is oxymoronic. It's some kind of habit in language that does not stand up to scrutiny.

I have been writing here about our assumptions on the left that so called "renewable energy" is "green," for a long time, this from the perspective of a scientist. A number of my posts in my journal - most originating with a discussion of a paper in the scientific literature - refer to the chemistry of lithium batteries, many referring to the hand-waving nonsense that they can be cleanly and sustainably recycled.

In terms of human development goals, it is absolutely essential that human beings have industrial energy. This point is made quite eloquently in a recent documentary that has gone into circulation that my family bought me for Father's Day: Juice: How Electricity Explains the World.

There are parts of it with which I disagree, but the basic reality is one that needs to be discussed.

The key to energy being clean, safe, and sustainable however, particularly on a planet with more than 7 billion human beings, an unacceptably large percentage of whom live in dire poverty, is the energy to mass ratio.

I have argued - as have many others with a high enough levels of sophistication - that the only acceptable form of primary energy is nuclear energy, despite the rote and very dangerous opposition to it on our end of the political spectrum.

The core of my argument goes like this, when confronted with the selective attention associated with say, Chernobyl and Fukushima, this on a planet where 70 million people die each decade from dangerous fossil fuel and biomass combustion waste - aka "air pollution:"

Nuclear energy need not be perfect; it need not be risk free to be better than everything else; it only needs to be better than everything else, which it is.

Regrettably, this clear and unambiguous statement has gotten me in a lot of trouble. Over at DailyKos, where the "Green Editor," the ethically challenged Tim Lange (Meteor Blades) made his mark on the world by selective attention on uranium miners in the four corners region back in the 1950's, while clearly not giving a shit about the 19,000 people who will die today, all over the world, from air pollution, I was banned for telling the truth by referring to a paper by the climate scientist Jim Hansen:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

What was amusing was that the populace over there used to fall all over themselves claiming that they loved Jim Hansen because they loved "science," until Jim Hansen said something they didn't like, whereupon he became persona non grata. There's something kind of Trumpian in that: isn't there, the notion that science needs to embrace one's biases or else it should be rejected.

I can only laugh bitterly and shake my head.

Of course our minds are generally clearer on the left, but there are many regions of our rote ideology about energy that are frankly, dangerous and ill advised. There are regions in which we embrace pure ignorance - one can hear all kinds of worship of the pig Elon Musk and his car for millionaires and billionaires right here at DU - and we are doing a great wrong to future generations by closing our minds, using gimmick delusions, in this very important arena in which we are failing future humanity: Climate change.

History will not forgive us; nor should it.

I very much appreciate your awareness of the human cost of batteries.

[Budi]

15. We need our own Thread.

Campaigning against fossil fuels is admirable & necessary but I often hear that convo followed with, Go Green buy a Prius .

Without addressing the lithium problem, the Green campaign is simply choosing to end one toxic industry while cheering another.
It makes zero sense, except in a poltical game.

I rarely ever hear the Green toxins like cobalt & lithiun etc, spoken about at all.

In fact they are sold as the new allternative. To what , I'm not sure they know nor care.


Thanks 🍃

[Dopers_Greed]

9. He's viewed as "hip" because he is a corporate CEO that makes weed jokes

[Budi]

6. Apologies to you brooklynite.

I had no intentions of heading off in a rant on your OP until the subject of Lithium came up.

It's ben a subject of concern & ire as to the lack of attention it's received, while we all on the fossil fuel bandwagon.

This has to be addressed also, asap.

Thanks for the space to rant.

👍🍃

[keithbvadu2]

7. Why would he need Thiel's money?

Why would he need Thiel's money?

During the last election, Trump bragged that he was so rich that he would self-finance his campaign.

[Scarsdale]

14. All the money that was flowing

into the inauguration fund was being siphoned off by Ivanka tRump. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $19 million is unaccounted for. This is over and above the obscene prices they got for rooms at tRump hotel. The tRump cabal made quite a haul during this administration of daddy. No big surprise they want another 4 years.

[Hortensis]

8. Suggests Thiel is not worried about possible criminal charges.

I don't know what those would be, just believe that in a just world it'd be very different.

[certainot]

10. thiel, you dumbass shit-fer-brains

[Captain Zero]

11. I knew there was a reason I don't buy Teslas and don't use PayPal

Really. I don't. Probably surprised a lot of you, huh?

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. 1.25m was a productive investment for him last time - 3 or 4 years of low taxes

and a chance to move money around the world. And it was a marginal case - Trump needed all the money he could get, but it stood a chance of making the difference, and he squeaked through in the vital 3 states. This time he's so far behind it won't make any difference, and the ultra-rich will hunker down, keep money offshore, and plot on how to get a Republican president/Congress in to allow them to move their profits again in a few years' time.

[oasis]

16. Informative thread kick.

Facts are a DUer's best friend.

[Cha]

17. Thiel is one reason I don't use paypal.. he supports a Treasonous

perverted asshole, who can't put his money where his mouth isl

[Bengus81]

18. Don't believe this HS for a second. Donate even MORE to Biden and Dems running for Congress

A very,very old trick that probably dates back to KKKarl Rove.

[BadGimp]

19. "does not believe in the portly president this time around"

Donald Death...

[dustyscamp]

20. That Asshole helped destroy Gawker

[oasis]

21. Kick

[Maxheader]

22. Oh! Oh!....that's gonna hurt..

That's gonna leave a mark...

Fuck you stumpy...