Hurricane Helene dropped more than 2 feet of rain on Spruce Pine, N.C. The town is home to one of the world’s only sources of high-purity quartz, which is used to manufacture silicon chips and solar panels.
Would someone please think of the tech industry.
I mean, if you don’t mind solar cell production also taking a hit, yeah.
It isn’t going to doom the world or anything, but if the mines aren’t recoverable in a fairly short amount of time, it will put a major crimp in solar deployment. That includes driving up the price (which, unless we’re willing to kick off a revolution, is a major factor in a capitalist system) of solar right when it’s really starting to be so much cheaper than fossil fuels that it can be a big shift for energy.
Short term, it isn’t going to do anything at all. Even a few months would be a blip. But if the mines take much longer than that, it’s a big problem for everyone.
And, as an added problem, you’ve got the people that do the work now displaced. They’ll only be able to just sit idle for so long before they have to move on to other jobs, likely well away from the area. So you have a talent drain involved that can ripple out just as badly as the production drop for solar.
I don’t think anyone legitimately gives a fuck about the semiconductor makers taking a hit financially (well, assuming it doesn’t fuck the rest of us down the road too), but the “tech” industry isn’t just companies churning out the next GPU model or AI scam.
