4 ms·

So happy to see so much sane critical thinking in the comments here. What I’d like to add is that the article lacks any reflection over the long term perspecti

by audunw 3y ago

So happy to see so much sane critical thinking in the comments here. What I’d like to add is that the article lacks any reflection over the long term perspective. Mining/transportion/refining of materials could be completely carbon neutral. What’s missing for that to happen? Electrification. We’ve already seen some mining equipment move to electrification. What’s helping drive this? EV and battery technologies. We’ve also seen great strides in battery recycling. I have no doubt that lithium batteries will be part of a near 100% circular economy in the future. Similar to what’s already the case with lead acid batteries. Apple seems to have made serious commitments in this area and it’s significantly harder to make it economical for their use case than for EV batteries. By some accounts it seems like it’s already economical to reuse and recycle EV batteries. In this regard the skepticism in the article is deeply flawed: the materials mined for EV batteries will most likely provide economical value and offset CO2 emissions for decades after the life of the vehicle. In the best case the EV battery pack can be directly repurposed for grid energy storage after the life of the vehicle.

tzs 3y ago
> We’ve also seen great strides in battery recycling. I have no doubt that lithium batteries will be part of a near 100% circular economy in the future. Even if it takes a while to get good battery recycling it won't be a problem. Imagine every single person on Earth had an EV, and that they used them so much that the batteries had to be replaced every 5 years, and that we have no battery recycling so all those old batteries just get dumped in a landfill to await some future recycling advances. So we start building huge battery landfills in deserts and other uninhabited places, say 20 miles x 20 miles by 50 feet deep. If it took 200 years of this before we figured out how to recycle the batteries we'd have only needed to build ~70 of those landfills.
freedude 3y ago
"In this regard the skepticism in the article is deeply flawed: the materials mined for EV batteries will most likely provide economical value and offset CO2 emissions for decades after the life of the vehicle." The article addresses this exact issue in the executive summary and then later on in detail. "No one knows how much, if at all, CO2 emissions will decline as EV use rises. Every claim for EVs reducing emissions is a rough estimate or an outright guess based on averages, approximations, or aspirations."

by audunw 3y ago

tzs 3y ago

> We’ve also seen great strides in battery recycling. I have no doubt that lithium batteries will be part of a near 100% circular economy in the future. Even if it takes a while to get good battery recycling it won't be a problem. Imagine every single person on Earth had an EV, and that they used them so much that the batteries had to be replaced every 5 years, and that we have no battery recycling so all those old batteries just get dumped in a landfill to await some future recycling advances. So we start building huge battery landfills in deserts and other uninhabited places, say 20 miles x 20 miles by 50 feet deep. If it took 200 years of this before we figured out how to recycle the batteries we'd have only needed to build ~70 of those landfills.

freedude 3y ago

"In this regard the skepticism in the article is deeply flawed: the materials mined for EV batteries will most likely provide economical value and offset CO2 emissions for decades after the life of the vehicle." The article addresses this exact issue in the executive summary and then later on in detail. "No one knows how much, if at all, CO2 emissions will decline as EV use rises. Every claim for EVs reducing emissions is a rough estimate or an outright guess based on averages, approximations, or aspirations."