Electric car revolution, designed to save the planet, unleashes a toll on it

Everything sounds great until you start considering scale. When you do that, what might look good for a small town or your home and a few friends can quickly turn into a horrific reality.

From the article:

"A mining permit pushed through in the last week of the Trump administration allows the Canadian company Lithium Americas Corp. to produce enough lithium carbonate annually to supply nearly a million electric car batteries. The mine pit alone would disrupt more than 1,100 acres, and the whole operation — on land leased from the federal government — would cover roughly six times that. Up to 5,800 tons of sulfuric acid would be used daily to leach lithium from the earth dug out of a 300-foot deep mine pit."

"The debate over how much damage should be inflicted on the planet to save it may be most intense far out to sea. The Metals Company and others plan within three years to start vacuuming patches of the deep ocean floor for nodules that contain many of the metals that go into electric car batteries along with lithium. Many scientists say the timeline is dangerously irresponsible."

Seriously?

And this is for JUST a million batteries per year. I assume they mean cells rather than the full car battery. Whatever the case may be, at scale, this is horrific. Yes, I said "at scale" because a million per year is not scale. We need many times that, thousands of times that amount if we are going to electrify the global transportation fleet. If we also want to use the same materials for grid energy storage the problem, again, at scale, quickly reaches apocalyptic proportions.

My guess is that the current path to electric energy storage is, at scale, a seriously flawed idea. I am not a chemist, so I can't propose an alternative that would be more benign at scale other than to say two things:

First, we need to be very careful and not allow politicians and various interests to lead us by the nose into causing a global disaster of unimaginable proportions.

Second, I have a sense --and the hope-- that a bright young scientist might just discover a path to store and deliver energy in liquid form in a way that will not have us resort to such things as strip mining the oceans and dumping millions of tons of sulfuric acid into mines to leach lithium out of them. In other words, an evolutionary step that uses the existing gasoline-based energy delivery infrastructure but rather with a cleaner alternative that, yes, ends-up in electric vehicles. Beyond that, I don't really have a clue what this might look like. Perhaps it is an evolutionary step that cleanly turns oil into a clean electricity-producing liquid of some sort.

I don't have the answers. I just know we are probably being led down a path that could be far uglier than pumping petroleum out of the ground.

We are making dumb decisions, like cancelling the XL pipeline...which means oil will have to be trucked...which will burn millions of gallons of refined diesel fuel to move petroleum at a horrific loss in efficiency.

In the meantime, per the article, we are setting ourselves up for problems like dumping thousands of tons of sulfuric acid into mines to get lithium for "clean" electric cars and storage.

Does this really make sense to anyone? At scale?

I hope not.