5 ms·

This fast paced transition doesn't sit right with me, still. I feel like people are turning a blind eye to the negative environmental impacts this is going to h

This fast paced transition doesn't sit right with me, still. I feel like people are turning a blind eye to the negative environmental impacts this is going to have. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-vehicles-lithium-consequences-research https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-...

ericmay 4y ago
The question is does this environmental havoc replace or lesson the current environmental havoc + military and political conflict over oil supplies (yes potential for rare earth or other material conflicts persist). As always though, this move is optimizing the wrong thing - we don’t need more efficient cars we need fewer cars. But nobody likes subtractive solutions.
- MBCook 4y ago
  > we don’t need more efficient cars we need fewer cars I don’t think politically viable, despite being the real solution to the core problem.
- hibikir 4y ago
  It's not a matter of subtractive solutions or not: It's that in a low-car environment, way too many people's real estate investments are worth near zero. How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable? Entire subdivisions are worth basically zero. Same thing with commercial areas that are not really reachable on foot. Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised. Reshaping in the other direction would involve a similar amount of hardship, but on people that vote. We can make it easier to increase density, but the kind of efforts that would make us not end up relying on EVs have such economic and political costs that we lack the state capacity to go there.
  - ericmay 4y ago
    > How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable? Idk. How much remains usable if it’s under water? Should we let people in Florida tax the rest of the country for their road development? Can Florida afford to maintain and build the roads they want to build? > Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised. Can you elaborate on this? How are you accounting for highway development that destroyed minority neighborhoods in this assessment?
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      > How much remains usable if it’s under water South Florida will never be underwater. The government would build massive levees around the entire state before that happens.
      - ericmay 4y ago
        Levees break and they cost money. But this follows the same line of reasoning as: > How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable? We'd just build the right transportation so that this doesn't matter.
        HDThoreaun 4y ago
        You're ignoring the political reality that people want cars, not public transportation unfortunately.
        ericmay 4y ago
        Well, many (not all) want car-only infrastructure, but they've also been unable to realize the true cost of their decisions, hence South Florida will be underwater. It costs too much money to build and maintain the infrastructure that would be required to maintain the lifestyle. So far things haven't gotten too bad but insurance companies are beginning to refuse to insure homes in Florida and so it has been left to the state to subsidize at a loss. Similarly as the state continues to build out unmaintainable car-only infrastructure and attempt to keep much of the state from "going underwater" it'll require either transfers of wealth from other states or increases in taxes. Neither of those proposals are politically viable either, so eventually the infrastructure just won't be maintained.
MisterPea 4y ago
The timeline is interesting but I think it's slow enough for regulation to catch up. This shifts the focus of problems from many different places to one. In the article you linked, it mentions alternatives to reduce lithium needs including smaller batteries, and battery recycling. This is much easier to regulate, and there is plenty of time to do so - although yes this is putting some trust on governments doing the right thing.
legulere 4y ago
Mining for combustion cars also breaks havoc and nobody cares. It would be best to reduce our car dependence, but I guess a new electric car is still better than a new combustion car.
epistasis 4y ago
It's so funny to me that a few pounds of lithium brings out so much hand wringing, whereas all that copper and even ton(s) of steel does not. Or for that matter, the far more massive amounts of hydrocarbon extraction! If somebody is even half serious about these concerns, they had better be advocating for extreme reduction in car use. Otherwise it's pure hypocrisy.
cbrozefsky 4y ago
At some point, the illusion that we will be able to avoid changing our transportation infrastructure in the US, will be unmaintainable. The problem is not in EVs, it's in private automobiles, our settlement patterns, and our utter lack of funding public transportation in all of its forms.
- pseudosavant 4y ago
  At some point we need to stop acting like transportation solutions for areas with orders of magnitude higher population density than the US are obvious solutions. Infrastructure for a country like the Netherlands (a popular “see we should bike” example) with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2. It is just as naive to think the US can remake its transportation infrastructure to be like Europe, as it would be to expect every road in Italy to be made wide enough for a Ford F-150 Raptor. Places in the US with high population densities (NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, etc) often do have far better public transportation than the rest of the US.
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    > with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2. This is a silly comparison though. Large swaths of the US are either completely uninhabited or nearly completely uninhabited. If you want a better comparison, look at New Jersey. Its population density is 488 people per km^2, so a little higher than the Netherlands even, yet its infrastructure is dismal comparatively despite having the density to support Netherlands-style infrastructure. Almost all major population centers in the US look like this -- dense enough to support much better, but yet we don't have it. The fact that it wouldn't work in the vast rural expanses of e.g. Wyoming don't mean that it wouldn't work for our big metropolitan areas.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Kinda so-so article that gets some issues exactly right (oversized vehicles, too many individual cars vs transit options) and badly misses others, like lithium sources. Lithium deposits are geologically widespread and abundant, but 95% of global production is currently concentrated in Australia, Chile, China and Argentina. Large new deposits have been found in diverse countries including Mexico, the US, Portugal, Germany, Kazakhstan, Congo and Mali. There are massive Lithium deposits at the salton Sea in souther California which are just bubbling up out of the ground in heated brine, meaning the earth is doing most of the work bringing it to the surface as mud. Refining it will need significant water, either from contested supplies fed by the Colorado river or as-yet-unbuilt water pipelines from desalination plants at the coast. But these deposits are massive and the extraction part of the process would have minimal environmental impact compared to the open-pit mining required elsewhere. It's odd that this article doesn't mention this at all.
pseudosavant 4y ago
In the 50k miles I’ve had my EV, I’ve saved at least 48 barrels (~2400 gallons) of gas from being burned vs the gas car it replaced. The (very slow) rate of battery degradation suggests at least 150k+ miles on this battery pack. I have a hard time envisioning that the impact due to lithium mining for one battery pack is worse than the extraction and pollution from burning ~150 barrels of gas. Plus another 3 barrels of motor oil from oil changes. Not to mention, they are forecasting out over 25 years, on a technology that has been rapidly changing, and is seeing immense investment. Batteries from 15+ years from now will have very different chemistries, and lithium will likely have safer sources. The Chevy EV1 launched with lead-acid batteries about 25 years ago - modern EVs aren’t remotely similar.

ericmay 4y ago

The question is does this environmental havoc replace or lesson the current environmental havoc + military and political conflict over oil supplies (yes potential for rare earth or other material conflicts persist). As always though, this move is optimizing the wrong thing - we don’t need more efficient cars we need fewer cars. But nobody likes subtractive solutions.

MBCook 4y ago
> we don’t need more efficient cars we need fewer cars I don’t think politically viable, despite being the real solution to the core problem.
hibikir 4y ago
It's not a matter of subtractive solutions or not: It's that in a low-car environment, way too many people's real estate investments are worth near zero. How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable? Entire subdivisions are worth basically zero. Same thing with commercial areas that are not really reachable on foot. Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised. Reshaping in the other direction would involve a similar amount of hardship, but on people that vote. We can make it easier to increase density, but the kind of efforts that would make us not end up relying on EVs have such economic and political costs that we lack the state capacity to go there.
- ericmay 4y ago
  > How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable? Idk. How much remains usable if it’s under water? Should we let people in Florida tax the rest of the country for their road development? Can Florida afford to maintain and build the roads they want to build? > Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised. Can you elaborate on this? How are you accounting for highway development that destroyed minority neighborhoods in this assessment?
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    > How much remains usable if it’s under water South Florida will never be underwater. The government would build massive levees around the entire state before that happens.
    - ericmay 4y ago
      Levees break and they cost money. But this follows the same line of reasoning as: > How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable? We'd just build the right transportation so that this doesn't matter.
      - HDThoreaun 4y ago
        You're ignoring the political reality that people want cars, not public transportation unfortunately.
        ericmay 4y ago
        Well, many (not all) want car-only infrastructure, but they've also been unable to realize the true cost of their decisions, hence South Florida will be underwater. It costs too much money to build and maintain the infrastructure that would be required to maintain the lifestyle. So far things haven't gotten too bad but insurance companies are beginning to refuse to insure homes in Florida and so it has been left to the state to subsidize at a loss. Similarly as the state continues to build out unmaintainable car-only infrastructure and attempt to keep much of the state from "going underwater" it'll require either transfers of wealth from other states or increases in taxes. Neither of those proposals are politically viable either, so eventually the infrastructure just won't be maintained.

MisterPea 4y ago

The timeline is interesting but I think it's slow enough for regulation to catch up. This shifts the focus of problems from many different places to one. In the article you linked, it mentions alternatives to reduce lithium needs including smaller batteries, and battery recycling. This is much easier to regulate, and there is plenty of time to do so - although yes this is putting some trust on governments doing the right thing.

legulere 4y ago

Mining for combustion cars also breaks havoc and nobody cares. It would be best to reduce our car dependence, but I guess a new electric car is still better than a new combustion car.

epistasis 4y ago

It's so funny to me that a few pounds of lithium brings out so much hand wringing, whereas all that copper and even ton(s) of steel does not. Or for that matter, the far more massive amounts of hydrocarbon extraction! If somebody is even half serious about these concerns, they had better be advocating for extreme reduction in car use. Otherwise it's pure hypocrisy.

cbrozefsky 4y ago

At some point, the illusion that we will be able to avoid changing our transportation infrastructure in the US, will be unmaintainable. The problem is not in EVs, it's in private automobiles, our settlement patterns, and our utter lack of funding public transportation in all of its forms.

pseudosavant 4y ago
At some point we need to stop acting like transportation solutions for areas with orders of magnitude higher population density than the US are obvious solutions. Infrastructure for a country like the Netherlands (a popular “see we should bike” example) with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2. It is just as naive to think the US can remake its transportation infrastructure to be like Europe, as it would be to expect every road in Italy to be made wide enough for a Ford F-150 Raptor. Places in the US with high population densities (NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, etc) often do have far better public transportation than the rest of the US.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  > with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2. This is a silly comparison though. Large swaths of the US are either completely uninhabited or nearly completely uninhabited. If you want a better comparison, look at New Jersey. Its population density is 488 people per km^2, so a little higher than the Netherlands even, yet its infrastructure is dismal comparatively despite having the density to support Netherlands-style infrastructure. Almost all major population centers in the US look like this -- dense enough to support much better, but yet we don't have it. The fact that it wouldn't work in the vast rural expanses of e.g. Wyoming don't mean that it wouldn't work for our big metropolitan areas.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Kinda so-so article that gets some issues exactly right (oversized vehicles, too many individual cars vs transit options) and badly misses others, like lithium sources. Lithium deposits are geologically widespread and abundant, but 95% of global production is currently concentrated in Australia, Chile, China and Argentina. Large new deposits have been found in diverse countries including Mexico, the US, Portugal, Germany, Kazakhstan, Congo and Mali. There are massive Lithium deposits at the salton Sea in souther California which are just bubbling up out of the ground in heated brine, meaning the earth is doing most of the work bringing it to the surface as mud. Refining it will need significant water, either from contested supplies fed by the Colorado river or as-yet-unbuilt water pipelines from desalination plants at the coast. But these deposits are massive and the extraction part of the process would have minimal environmental impact compared to the open-pit mining required elsewhere. It's odd that this article doesn't mention this at all.

pseudosavant 4y ago

In the 50k miles I’ve had my EV, I’ve saved at least 48 barrels (~2400 gallons) of gas from being burned vs the gas car it replaced. The (very slow) rate of battery degradation suggests at least 150k+ miles on this battery pack. I have a hard time envisioning that the impact due to lithium mining for one battery pack is worse than the extraction and pollution from burning ~150 barrels of gas. Plus another 3 barrels of motor oil from oil changes. Not to mention, they are forecasting out over 25 years, on a technology that has been rapidly changing, and is seeing immense investment. Batteries from 15+ years from now will have very different chemistries, and lithium will likely have safer sources. The Chevy EV1 launched with lead-acid batteries about 25 years ago - modern EVs aren’t remotely similar.