> What's the cost of the entire lifecycle? Mining/extraction, carbon emissions, recycling (or not), etc. It is not very high. Specially now that there is serie

> What's the cost of the entire lifecycle? Mining/extraction, carbon emissions, recycling (or not), etc. It is not very high. Specially now that there is series effort going into lithium production and the whole supply chain of batteries. Much more local production. In fact, in examples like this lithium production is not harmful at all. At worst its as bad as mining anything else. At best its a totally brine process where you are just extracting a little bit of salt from geological brine and pump it right back. > worse from a recycling perspective Worse then gasoline that gets burned up? How? The opposite is true, currently almost all lithium batteries are recycled or are simply going to secondary uses. Over the long term all major players have recycling efforts going on, because once you have series amounts of batteries reaching end of life, it simply makes sense to recycle as it will be cheaper then mining new. The air quality around some chemical plant is one thing, even under worse assumptions, its a million times better then driving gasoline cars threw cities where people actually live. > Is this correct? How (or will?) a switch to electric transportation change the geopolitical world? Substantially? All the materials needed for batteries exist in pretty much all continents. All the continents have the knowledge to produce all the required materials. Even if now it often happens in China. It will mean a major lost of importance for the big oil states. Other then that not much will change.