Batteries can be recycled, reused or repurposed. It’s nowhere near as damaging as drilling for/refining/shipping/burning oil and we decided we are perfectly okay with that.
Batteries can be recycled, reused or repurposed. It’s nowhere near as damaging as drilling for/refining/shipping/burning oil
Why is the alternative to an EV SUV a combustion engine SUV? Why isn't cycling and public transport?
I'm not saving ICEs are good and EV are bad but that maybe... both aren't great anyway, especially when actual alternatives that make people healthier do exist.
Anything else but driving doesn't work well in the US because the "way of life" is indeed car centric. It will never change without infrastructure, including but not limited to bike lanes. Large distances are possible with (electric) bike but this at least needs to be safe.
So... yes I'm not advocating for somebody leaving the middle of absolute nowhere to give up on their cars. This is not even about cities (as the article mentions a parking lot I assume it's next or even inside a city).
No, my point instead is to question the false dichotomy.
I did spend last week biking 45min somewhere and back (so 1h30) for 4 days in a row. It's not for everyone ... but not only it's feasible but (and I know it will sound crazy to some) I actually did enjoy it. On the last day I even did the last trip with a new friend, chatting the entire ride.
Again, I'm not arguing that anybody should do that, or have fun doing, only that's it not impossible.
The lithium mining process is laborious, dangerous, and releases radioactive elements into groundwater and into the air as mine tailings. Not to mention, most of Earth's lithium reserves are in Chile, Bolivia, and Rwanda. With Western investors backing corrupt national governments, this means that exploitative labor (read: slavery) is the primary means of extraction.
It is, in comparison to other extraction methods, literally just as bad.
Actually lithium isn’t the long term plan, it’s just the plan for today. Sodium is the long term. But huge lithium deposits exists in the US and China too.
Agreed. The person you're responding to is using the same logic as "wind turbines kill birds", "EVs run on FF electricity", etc. Anyone trying to convince you to let perfection get in the way of progress is almost certainly being disingenuous, or at best has been talked into it by someone who was.
I thought it was widely accepted that lithium mining is far more harmful to the environment than drilling for oil, and that the hope was that not burning oil/gas we offset the mining (to the point if u drive ur electric car x miles it's cleaner overall than if u drive an ICE vehicle). Do you have information that states otherwise?
Alright here's more effort than you could be bothered with- drilling oil out of the ground involved a drill that goes deep into the ground. Their not all that big. Have you seen a lithium mine before? Massive hole in the earth miles wide and quite deep, a hole in the earth that will be visible for centuries. A big open wound on the planet that cannot heal itself. I know this is a tough comparison because oil is more of a consumable, and lithium for batteries sure it's technically a consumable but with a much longer life than say a 50 gal drum of oil. I'm not taking into account refining for either material, or the waste involved with disposing of batteries or emissions of cars burning gas. It's an apples to oranges comparison and hard to say which is worse at the end of the day. What is a fact, however, is that producing an electric car is more harmful to the environment than producing an ice car. And keeping an old ice car alive is better for the environment than producing any new car. Both lithium mining and oil drilling quite frankly awful for the environment. So do you have the gusto to help me understand and produce a productive conversation or are u happy to just troll? It is an incredibly complex issue to account for the exact environmental impact of either, but an issue that intrigues me and I think an important conversation to have.
Yea but we both know you wont, because your just as credible. It's a fact that it you average ev has twice the carbon footprint of a ice car, and takes 3 years roughly to offset its carbon emissions assuming 15k miles driven a year. At 10 years, carbon footprint of an ice car is roughly double that of the ev, but from 10 years on your subject to battery failure and now need to dispose of a big nasty battery pack and replace it. It will take a few decades to see what the true footprint of evs are, and there is no published studies with the long term effects because we haven't gotten there yet. This is the closest thing I found upon a brief search, so fesrlst yer eyes on a graph. Keep in mind that's based off a Nissan leaf and fiat 500, you could choose a more economical car with smaller footprint and a larger footprint ev to skew results in my favor, or compare the leaf to a truck or whatever ur average American drives and steer the conversation towards evs but I think it's a reasonable apple to apples comparison. This whole conversation has been speculation and I thank you for ur engagement 👍
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/electric-vehicles-contribute-fewer-emissions-than-gasoline-powered-cars-over-their-lifetimes/
I've got a nonsense idea with no sources do you have sources to contradict it?
Start with sources that back-up the nonsense you just made up. Because there is just no possible way that extracting 1 EV's worth of lithium is equivalent pollution to the expected 200-400 thousand miles of ICE driving it offsets.
Oil spills are far worse for the environment than mining could be. Also, electric cars keep air pollution in cities down. Not saying there is zero environmental impact but mining is not nearly as bad as fossil fuels can be, and same could be said for nuclear as well.
Lithium is pretty stable. Those dumbtrucks will rot there for some time, then got reposessed and eventually moved to a recycling plant, and almost all of the lithium will eventually be used for something useful.
They probably won't even actually recycle the batteries. The packs and batteries are still gonna be good. They'll just pull the whole battery packs out and use them in other vehicles or stationary storage.
Afaik, both him, Superfast Matt, and others were using packs from the comparatively sane Teslas, ones that were designed by engineers, not by a child with dementia. I am afraid to assume what the poorly rendered rustbucket is made of.
Dude hydrogen is a bait and switch. We’ve had hydrogen engine tech forever. As for the source, you CAN get it from water after putting in more energy into it than you get out of it, or you can just refine it from oil. Guess what the plan has always been?
there are modern ways of doing it they're pretty efficient from what I've been reading using natural gas and water or electrolysis but I'm no scientist so I'm not going to try to explain it here I think maybe you should look into some more modern methods than what you're talking about.
Natural gas is not green. Not even close. It’s just more convenient. Electrolysis cannot magically be made more efficient here either. It takes a certain amount of energy to break those chemical bonds and you can’t magically break those bonds using less energy. The amount of energy you get from burning that hydrogen is less than what you put in to break those bonds via electrolysis.
EVs were never about saving the environment. It does so much damage making a new EV. If companies wanted to save the environment they would have invested in refurbishing and updating older used cars.
EDIT: Sad how many ignorant people are down voting this without even attempting to look up the environmental cost of making a brand new car loading with rare earth minerals. While destroying a slightly older car that's already been built and whose environmental impact has already been dealt with and would best be put to use rather than sit in a junk yard for 50 years.
Too many corporate boot lickers believing the car companies based on nothing more than "Green" buzz words.
The most environmentally friendly thing you can do as a car owner is just keep the oldest car u have alive as long as possible. Cash for lunkers wasn't about getting people in cleaner cars, it was about subsidizing companies so they could sell more while destroying perfectly good vehicles. This shredded the used car market and we are paying for it now. Literally. If you need to get a new car anyways, sure an ev or hybrid might be the way. But keeping a stinky old diesel running, while it may seem counterintuitive, is the cleaner thing to do. What we wmit driving pails in comparison to the production pollution associated with all these throw away cars.
Spoken like a true pedestrian. I live in one of the bigger "cities" in my state and it's smaller than a "small town" in the last state I lived in, not having a car here is impossible. The most environmentally friendly thing to do would be abandon all technology and eat berries in a cave and die at 30 because of poor hygiene, your comment is irrelevant to the conversation at hand.
Don't worry about it. You'll be dead from a multiple simultaneous crises. Your car won't save you.
We in the "rich" world already have a housing crisis where masses would love a cave over their current sleeping rough. Berries would be nice too and hunger is all too well known in the developed world.
You are way out of touch. Congratulations to be so fortunate.