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The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit

The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental scam promoted to make us feel good about "saving" the earth. I don't believe for a second that corporate democrats care about the environment. We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.

h0l0cube 6y ago
Tesla EVs were marketed to the upper-middle class as a status symbol based on cutting-edge looks and performance, and to merely 'signal' environmental consciousness. Most people I know who aspire to own one work in finance and consulting roles, and don't really care that much about the environment, they just want something cool. The poser environmentalism just comes along for the ride. Likewise, when people upgrade to the latest iPhone every generation, they aren't thinking about their recycling program, let alone the environmental cost of extraction of rare earth materials, or the workers at Foxconn. That Elon Musk didn't bother working on the waste part of the equation, doesn't surprise me.
jrockway 6y ago
What's your plan for moving around when our limited supply of fossil fuels are depleted?
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Not the OP but civilisation didn't start with the invention of the motor car. If you look at our general wellbeing it hasn't shifted one iota over the period that cars become pervasive.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    That’s a bold claim, especially in context of running out of transport fuels starting from where we are now. What date range are you using for the period over which cars became pervasive?
  - vel0city 6y ago
    Cars became pervasive around the early 1900's. Are you seriously suggesting the average person's general wellbeing hasn't changed since 1908? I guess we could debate if cars were a critical technology to spur such change, but I don't know I can debate someone who disagrees that the average person was just as well off in 1920 compared to 2020. In what measures would you consider the person in the developed world in 1920 to be just as well off as the average person in the developed world in 2020? I limit this to just developed world because that would be where automobiles would have had the greater impact or lack of impact despite pervasiveness.
vlovich123 6y ago
I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment. 1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage. 2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars. 3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil spills we regularly have would make me think lithium is actually better here. 4. Lithium batteries at grid-scale reduce blackouts which means you don't spin up a bunch of local generators. They also make wind & solar power generation available off-peak reducing reliance on coal & natural gas. 5. Are car batteries likely to be improperly recycled? I would think legislation would minimize the problem. Even without legislation, my impression is that today's used car batteries are still extremely valuable & end up being reused rather than recycled. 6. More investment in lithium ion batteries = more money & investment in better batteries (lithium ion or otherwise). This improves efficiency across the board for mobile applications, cars, grid applications, etc (something we don't get with internal combustion engines). The incomplete reasoning in your post is you're evaluating lithium standalone instead of examining the cost vs replacement (how does lithium ion fare against alternatives? are there better alternatives). Can you propose what you see as better alternatives rather than just making blanket complaints and blaming corporate democrats? (Also, lithium batteries are now a left/right idealogy thing? WTF).
- Chris2048 6y ago
  Are lithium batteries ever used at grid-scale? I though the point was that the high energy-density was convenient for mobility, but poor on most other metrics, including manufacturing complexity, stability, and safety. Grid-scale wouldn't need to care so much about energy density versus stability and maintenance, in which case lead-acid, or compressed-gas storage should shine.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve Australia has a few now.
  - 6y ago
1053r 6y ago
The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine. https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electric-vehicles-continue-to-get-cleaner https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri... Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... Coal is in terminal decline. Solar and wind have been growing exponentially, and are on a path to pass coal within the decade. Projections to the contrary have to explain why decades of industrial economics theory are wrong, where manufactured goods (like solar and wind generators) get cheaper by a fairly consistent % every time you double production. This creates a virtuous cycle that will drive coal and other fossil fuels out of business through profit seeking alone. (We are past the tipping point on costs here.) The burden of proof is on the fossil fuel advocates like yourself at this point. (This article is from 2015, and the IEA and similar keep getting it wrong since then.) https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2015/11/17/why-the-iea-is-consistently-wrong-on-renewables/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2015/11/17/why-the-iea-is-consis...
- djsumdog 6y ago
  > Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste. As far as clean energy, have you watched Planet of the Humans (2020)? I want to say, I despise Michael Moore emotional bullshit, but despite his influence on the film's production, the case it makes is solid: the vast majority of "renewables" are actually trees. When you hear "woodchips" .. there is no amount of industrial wood scrap waste that is viable without also cutting down trees. You start burning fast-growing trees (often planted for paper or lumber) for fuel and you get a system of power production that makes no sense over traditional gas or oil. Solar and wind may have been growing exponentially, but they still require oil/gas standby plants. They also take a lot of resources to make. Wind turbines aren't currently recycled. The fact of the matter is, we have one real hope left. The ITER. If real fusion power is possible, we'll find out once it's completed. If ITER fails to produce sustainable and efficient power, it's unlikely anyone else will get the funding to build a bigger reactor. It's not coal that's in terminal decline ... it's everything. No amount of increasing consumption or building "more green" is going to change that. We need to consume less, and let's face it ... that's fucking impossible.
avianlyric 6y ago
> We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal. Even this is preferable to internal combustion engines. ICEs really aren’t very efficient, and electric car is easily 3x more energy efficient than an ICE. Which means that’s even if you include transmission losses and heat losses at a coal power station, you’re still ahead. Because of coal power stations are significantly more efficient than ICE. All that is ignoring the other benefits like being able to perform carbon capture at source, filtering waste gasses for pollutants etc. Additionally as the grid gets greener, so does your electric car. Something that will never be true of an ICE car. > Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. This is clearly a concern, and thankfully we’re taking big steps to reduce the amount of rare Earth metals needed to manufacture batteries. Additionally that largest produces of lithium aren’t small countries, they’re places like China and the US. But heavy metal pollution, and toxins produced through the refining process are still a serious concern. But I would argue less a concern than CO2 release. At least the heavy metals a d toxins can be easily contained, they don’t have a tendency of floating into the atmosphere and spreading around the earth. Simple fact is that modern western society is currently unsustainable, just because we don’t have all the answers, and don’t have perfect solutions, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I suspect even you wouldn’t be prepared to make the sacrifices needed for a sustainable future using only the technology we have readily available to us today.
- Tade0 6y ago
  Minor nitpick: li-ion batteries contain no rare-earths. The catalysts used in oil refining do on the other hand - specifically Lanthanum.
  - 8note 6y ago
    The motor being run off it likely has neodymium magnets in it though?
    - Tade0 6y ago
      First Teslas had an AC induction motor - no rare earths here as well, so it's actually possible to avoid them almost entirely. That is, with the exception of control hardware - but you have the same in regular cars - around a pound of rare earths on average.
mattashii 6y ago
> Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal. With modern coal plants, that isn't _too_ bad actually. Modern coal plants reach 46% efficiency[0], compared to the 30-35% for modern passenger cars (older cars = less efficient). This is a 30-50% [1] efficiency gain, while also emitting 30-45% more CO2 for the same amount of energy released (gasoline vs bituminous coal and anthracite, for diesel it's 25-40%). So, depending on the coal burned, the efficiency of the car that is replaced, and the coal plant making the electricity, you could quite reasonably have a lower carbon footprint by driving a car 100% on coal-powered electricity instead of gasoline or diesel. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_power_generation_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_... [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11
- jacobr1 6y ago
  Also consider industrial carbon capture. It would be costly, but it seems it would easier to capture carbon emissions at the primary coal burning sites than with distributed burners. We still should be looking at non-coal, renewable options and I'm glad we are, but we still have a lot of milage with "cleaner" fossil-fuel based approaches. This IPCC Report[0] suggests 80%+ CO2 sequestration rates extrapolated from known technologies (built on smaller scales). [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100210022620/http://www1.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srccs/srccs_wholereport.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20100210022620/http://www1.ipcc....
djsumdog 6y ago
Yes, and same with fracking. Documentaries like Gasland have gotten some deserved criticism because there is evidence of methane and natural gas coming out of water pipes/wells way back at the turn of the century. But that doesn't dismiss the other points of fracking fluid being incredibly toxic and how they will destroy watersheds (you can't just pump that crap into the Earth and say 'well it's below the water table' .. how do you even know?!) I do agree electric vehicles are a pretty big lie. You can't buy yourself out of an environmental disaster. We can't just consume more. The "Green New Deal" is about replacing tons of buildings and infrastructure that are perfectly fine, and will cause TONS of new waste in an effort to .. reduce waste. The best thing you can do for the environment: don't buy a new car. Just keep driving your current gas vehicle and maintain it (so long as it was made within the past 20 years with good fuel efficiency) and when you do decide to toss it for an electric: buy a used one if possible.
altacc 6y ago
Others have gone into the efficiency trade offs and I would add to that removing the local pollution effect of internal combustion engines is a great benefit. Even electric cars "powered by coal" move pollution away from population dense areas and allow large scale environmental harm reduction e.g. carbon capture. However, coal is a declining power source and a lot of the places with high numbers of electric cars already have significant carbon neutral or renewable electricity generation in place. All you have described, the environmental impact, exploitation, pollution, etc... applies to current fossil fuel usage, if not more, so it's not a black and white choice, as you seem to present it. Fossil fuel had over a century of ever-increasing usage and global environmental damage without having to do anything significant to mitigate the effects. Whereas the relatively new high performance battery industry is already tackling this issue. Without the widespread need generated by electric cars it's questionable if that would happen. It is very rare, possibly unheard of, for such a significant technology to be launched with a perfectly formed lifecycle management in place. The market is created only once the need arises.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
You can list out the harms of lithium ion production, which I agree with, but they are vastly dwarfed by ICE harms. ICE warms the entire planet and changes the climate, which is a much more vast problem than the also problematic issues of resource extraction for lithium ion or any other resource, including fossil fuel too by the way.

h0l0cube 6y ago

Tesla EVs were marketed to the upper-middle class as a status symbol based on cutting-edge looks and performance, and to merely 'signal' environmental consciousness. Most people I know who aspire to own one work in finance and consulting roles, and don't really care that much about the environment, they just want something cool. The poser environmentalism just comes along for the ride. Likewise, when people upgrade to the latest iPhone every generation, they aren't thinking about their recycling program, let alone the environmental cost of extraction of rare earth materials, or the workers at Foxconn. That Elon Musk didn't bother working on the waste part of the equation, doesn't surprise me.

jrockway 6y ago

What's your plan for moving around when our limited supply of fossil fuels are depleted?

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Not the OP but civilisation didn't start with the invention of the motor car. If you look at our general wellbeing it hasn't shifted one iota over the period that cars become pervasive.
- ben_w 6y ago
  That’s a bold claim, especially in context of running out of transport fuels starting from where we are now. What date range are you using for the period over which cars became pervasive?
- vel0city 6y ago
  Cars became pervasive around the early 1900's. Are you seriously suggesting the average person's general wellbeing hasn't changed since 1908? I guess we could debate if cars were a critical technology to spur such change, but I don't know I can debate someone who disagrees that the average person was just as well off in 1920 compared to 2020. In what measures would you consider the person in the developed world in 1920 to be just as well off as the average person in the developed world in 2020? I limit this to just developed world because that would be where automobiles would have had the greater impact or lack of impact despite pervasiveness.

vlovich123 6y ago

I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment. 1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage. 2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars. 3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil spills we regularly have would make me think lithium is actually better here. 4. Lithium batteries at grid-scale reduce blackouts which means you don't spin up a bunch of local generators. They also make wind & solar power generation available off-peak reducing reliance on coal & natural gas. 5. Are car batteries likely to be improperly recycled? I would think legislation would minimize the problem. Even without legislation, my impression is that today's used car batteries are still extremely valuable & end up being reused rather than recycled. 6. More investment in lithium ion batteries = more money & investment in better batteries (lithium ion or otherwise). This improves efficiency across the board for mobile applications, cars, grid applications, etc (something we don't get with internal combustion engines). The incomplete reasoning in your post is you're evaluating lithium standalone instead of examining the cost vs replacement (how does lithium ion fare against alternatives? are there better alternatives). Can you propose what you see as better alternatives rather than just making blanket complaints and blaming corporate democrats? (Also, lithium batteries are now a left/right idealogy thing? WTF).

Chris2048 6y ago
Are lithium batteries ever used at grid-scale? I though the point was that the high energy-density was convenient for mobility, but poor on most other metrics, including manufacturing complexity, stability, and safety. Grid-scale wouldn't need to care so much about energy density versus stability and maintenance, in which case lead-acid, or compressed-gas storage should shine.
- selectodude 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve Australia has a few now.
- 6y ago

1053r 6y ago

The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine. https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electric-vehicles-continue-to-get-cleaner https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri... Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... Coal is in terminal decline. Solar and wind have been growing exponentially, and are on a path to pass coal within the decade. Projections to the contrary have to explain why decades of industrial economics theory are wrong, where manufactured goods (like solar and wind generators) get cheaper by a fairly consistent % every time you double production. This creates a virtuous cycle that will drive coal and other fossil fuels out of business through profit seeking alone. (We are past the tipping point on costs here.) The burden of proof is on the fossil fuel advocates like yourself at this point. (This article is from 2015, and the IEA and similar keep getting it wrong since then.) https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2015/11/17/why-the-iea-is-consistently-wrong-on-renewables/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2015/11/17/why-the-iea-is-consis...

djsumdog 6y ago
> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste. As far as clean energy, have you watched Planet of the Humans (2020)? I want to say, I despise Michael Moore emotional bullshit, but despite his influence on the film's production, the case it makes is solid: the vast majority of "renewables" are actually trees. When you hear "woodchips" .. there is no amount of industrial wood scrap waste that is viable without also cutting down trees. You start burning fast-growing trees (often planted for paper or lumber) for fuel and you get a system of power production that makes no sense over traditional gas or oil. Solar and wind may have been growing exponentially, but they still require oil/gas standby plants. They also take a lot of resources to make. Wind turbines aren't currently recycled. The fact of the matter is, we have one real hope left. The ITER. If real fusion power is possible, we'll find out once it's completed. If ITER fails to produce sustainable and efficient power, it's unlikely anyone else will get the funding to build a bigger reactor. It's not coal that's in terminal decline ... it's everything. No amount of increasing consumption or building "more green" is going to change that. We need to consume less, and let's face it ... that's fucking impossible.

avianlyric 6y ago

> We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal. Even this is preferable to internal combustion engines. ICEs really aren’t very efficient, and electric car is easily 3x more energy efficient than an ICE. Which means that’s even if you include transmission losses and heat losses at a coal power station, you’re still ahead. Because of coal power stations are significantly more efficient than ICE. All that is ignoring the other benefits like being able to perform carbon capture at source, filtering waste gasses for pollutants etc. Additionally as the grid gets greener, so does your electric car. Something that will never be true of an ICE car. > Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. This is clearly a concern, and thankfully we’re taking big steps to reduce the amount of rare Earth metals needed to manufacture batteries. Additionally that largest produces of lithium aren’t small countries, they’re places like China and the US. But heavy metal pollution, and toxins produced through the refining process are still a serious concern. But I would argue less a concern than CO2 release. At least the heavy metals a d toxins can be easily contained, they don’t have a tendency of floating into the atmosphere and spreading around the earth. Simple fact is that modern western society is currently unsustainable, just because we don’t have all the answers, and don’t have perfect solutions, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I suspect even you wouldn’t be prepared to make the sacrifices needed for a sustainable future using only the technology we have readily available to us today.

Tade0 6y ago
Minor nitpick: li-ion batteries contain no rare-earths. The catalysts used in oil refining do on the other hand - specifically Lanthanum.
- 8note 6y ago
  The motor being run off it likely has neodymium magnets in it though?
  - Tade0 6y ago
    First Teslas had an AC induction motor - no rare earths here as well, so it's actually possible to avoid them almost entirely. That is, with the exception of control hardware - but you have the same in regular cars - around a pound of rare earths on average.

mattashii 6y ago

> Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal. With modern coal plants, that isn't _too_ bad actually. Modern coal plants reach 46% efficiency[0], compared to the 30-35% for modern passenger cars (older cars = less efficient). This is a 30-50% [1] efficiency gain, while also emitting 30-45% more CO2 for the same amount of energy released (gasoline vs bituminous coal and anthracite, for diesel it's 25-40%). So, depending on the coal burned, the efficiency of the car that is replaced, and the coal plant making the electricity, you could quite reasonably have a lower carbon footprint by driving a car 100% on coal-powered electricity instead of gasoline or diesel. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_power_generation_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_... [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11

jacobr1 6y ago
Also consider industrial carbon capture. It would be costly, but it seems it would easier to capture carbon emissions at the primary coal burning sites than with distributed burners. We still should be looking at non-coal, renewable options and I'm glad we are, but we still have a lot of milage with "cleaner" fossil-fuel based approaches. This IPCC Report[0] suggests 80%+ CO2 sequestration rates extrapolated from known technologies (built on smaller scales). [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100210022620/http://www1.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srccs/srccs_wholereport.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20100210022620/http://www1.ipcc....

djsumdog 6y ago

Yes, and same with fracking. Documentaries like Gasland have gotten some deserved criticism because there is evidence of methane and natural gas coming out of water pipes/wells way back at the turn of the century. But that doesn't dismiss the other points of fracking fluid being incredibly toxic and how they will destroy watersheds (you can't just pump that crap into the Earth and say 'well it's below the water table' .. how do you even know?!) I do agree electric vehicles are a pretty big lie. You can't buy yourself out of an environmental disaster. We can't just consume more. The "Green New Deal" is about replacing tons of buildings and infrastructure that are perfectly fine, and will cause TONS of new waste in an effort to .. reduce waste. The best thing you can do for the environment: don't buy a new car. Just keep driving your current gas vehicle and maintain it (so long as it was made within the past 20 years with good fuel efficiency) and when you do decide to toss it for an electric: buy a used one if possible.

altacc 6y ago

Others have gone into the efficiency trade offs and I would add to that removing the local pollution effect of internal combustion engines is a great benefit. Even electric cars "powered by coal" move pollution away from population dense areas and allow large scale environmental harm reduction e.g. carbon capture. However, coal is a declining power source and a lot of the places with high numbers of electric cars already have significant carbon neutral or renewable electricity generation in place. All you have described, the environmental impact, exploitation, pollution, etc... applies to current fossil fuel usage, if not more, so it's not a black and white choice, as you seem to present it. Fossil fuel had over a century of ever-increasing usage and global environmental damage without having to do anything significant to mitigate the effects. Whereas the relatively new high performance battery industry is already tackling this issue. Without the widespread need generated by electric cars it's questionable if that would happen. It is very rare, possibly unheard of, for such a significant technology to be launched with a perfectly formed lifecycle management in place. The market is created only once the need arises.

WhompingWindows 6y ago

You can list out the harms of lithium ion production, which I agree with, but they are vastly dwarfed by ICE harms. ICE warms the entire planet and changes the climate, which is a much more vast problem than the also problematic issues of resource extraction for lithium ion or any other resource, including fossil fuel too by the way.