> Battery powered cars are going to be the next disaster
> I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.
"Battery powered cars are a small disaster, so I'll keep my big disaster instead".
> I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.
"Battery powered cars are a small disaster, so I'll keep my big disaster instead".
There are certainly enough old diesels out there and enough people willing to go around collecting old oil to keep a small number of people occupied and mobile.
It is also not really a viable large scale solution to "how do you move people around?"
There are lots of really good answers (walking, public transit, electric bicycles) but one obvious answer is "cars" and electrifying those is probably a good solution.
Electricity can be generated from fossil fuels more efficiently at large scales than small (a power plant produces less CO2 than a car for a given amount of work). Electricity can also be generated by extracting "free" energy from the environment (wind / solar / hydro / dogs on treadmills). The distribution system for electricity is already quite robust and is already everywhere, and people like cars. There's even lots of inexpensive electricity available at night, when most people aren't driving their cars. All we need is a way to get the power to the cars that park where people don't own the parking space.
Disposing of the waste stream of parts of the cars has always been a problem. Hopefully people come up with a way to solve it; there's enough valuable metal in a car battery that it is likely they will.
There are already all sorts of terrifying industrial processes which I can't imagine are possibly cost effective and yet they're the foundation of modern society. There are also all sorts of hideous "farm out the cost to someone else" processes relying on destroying somewhere else / poisoning someone else.
People refine gasoline by boiling crude oil in a rusting metal tank; people refine gasoline in trillion dollar oil refineries. Why and where and for who answers how it gets done.
Can one cost-effectively convert refined materials in a battery (cobalt / nickle / lithium) back into raw inputs for a new battery? Can it be done profitably by a child in a toxic fire pit or can it be done profitably by a chilled shredder in inert gas?
Not a simple problem, but probably one that can partially be solved with market incentives and partially solved by laws and partially it won't get solved. But we should probably try, right?
Not every solution needs to be large scale to be usefull. I think biofuels should be promoted and used as much as possible (obviously within the limits where it makes sense ecologically speaking, e.g. not destroying ecosystems to plant more biofuel crops or burning coal to synthetize (m)ethanol). Both the idea that EVs are suited for every purpose and that they'll quickly take over the entire ICE car pool are ludicrous. Where EVs can not / not yet be used it makes perfect sense to use alternative fuel sources.
It's not nothing and certainly better than just a few years ago, but it's still not exactly like a significant fraction of diesels use a significant fraction of vegetable oil.
Probably just going to land in the river, and then the sea.
Go ahead and try drinking a glass of lithium, or try growing vegetables with lithium instead of water.
The claim that electric cars are good for the environment is a lie. They are not "good", they are not even "neutral". They are "bad".
People that really care about the environment ride a bike. They don't buy an electric car and try to justify the currently unknown long term environmental consequences of their purchase as somehow being better than the known consequences of gasoline and diesel cars.
Today we just ship car batteries oversees to be scrapped for parts in the cheapest possible way by children. That doesn't sound good to me at all.
So....exactly like normal cars then? Buying a brand new car is bad for the environment, full stop, ICE or EV.
The statement above makes sense if taken in isolation - take an existing ICE car and an existing EV car - the EV car is undoubtedly better for the environment, there is no discussion. But it would also be a lot better if neither existed, as manufacturing new cars is EXTREMELY wasteful and produces incredible amounts of CO2 debt, again, EV or not.
>>oday we just ship car batteries oversees to be scrapped for parts in the cheapest possible way by children.
As opposed to stripping out electronics and precious metals from ICE cars, which is only ever done by well regulated workers in rich western countries, right? /s
Like, come on - I get your point. Shitty "recycling" practices exist. That doesn't mean that's the standard or the default, and it definitely can be fixed going forward. We aren't destined or doomed to only recycle our lithium batteries with 10 year old children with rocks, and for some reason you're framing it as if that's the only available method.
#1: The whole point of preserving the environment is to keep it inhabitable for humans. Fueling humans is non-negotiable up to at least a baseline level of survival, and still desirable beyond that level because we like being well fed.
and
#2: Due to that whole "we like being well fed" thing, most humans in the first world -- the part of the world where people worry about things like whether biking to work is good or bad for the environment -- are already overfueled. We have a surplus of human fuel that we're consuming anyway because it feels good. Might as well burn some of it off on transportation.
I don't, because I don't feel like putting my life at risk on a regular basis just to get where I need to go.
There's a reason that bike ridership skyrockets when useful protected bike infrastructure gets installed. The demand is there.
Not all, but many.
> People that really care about the environment ride a bike. They don't buy an electric car and try to justify the currently unknown long term environmental consequences of their purchase as somehow being better than the known consequences of gasoline and diesel cars.
This is so much false dichotomy that I'm having trouble assuming good faith.
In many parts of the world, you would take a train or other forms of public transport to travel distances too far to ride by bike. Those often have last-mile problems when the train doesn't go quite where you need it to, but given sufficient density at the source/destination bikes are an effective solution to the last-mile problem.
Of course, in the US, we typically have sprawl at the source/destination, unsafe infrastructure for bicycling, and often not-very-useful public transport, which does rather limit this option.
Hopefully by 2030 there will be a robust network of recycling facilities around the world, for the majority of exhausted lithium batteries.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumio...
We are enormously expanding our use of lithium, and the biggest problem for the places that are currently trying to recycle lithium batteries is that there aren't enough of them to recycle. A big source of their current batteries are just the defects from the current manufacturing process.