I like automobiles and don't want them banned, but the real problem that we have is that we're dependent on an unscalable transportation solution: cars.
Furthermore, lithium is an extremely abundant mineral. It's available pretty much everywhere, including the deserts of Nevada and Australia. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous.
1880 AD: Furthermore, oil is an extremely abundant resource. The idea that we have to destroy rare ecosystems to get it is ridiculous.
142 years later: Look how they massacred my boy
16kg of gasoline lasts 1 "cycle" for 18-45 miles. The output requires significant energy input to capture and convert the co2 and H2O back into a fuel.
It’s not that Lithium is actually going to be in short supply, it simply collects in different areas.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mining-lithium-for...
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
[1]: https://desertfog.org/aerial-of-silver-peak-nev-lithium-mini...]
>the average electric vehicle battery requires around 10 kg of [lithium]. In turn, 5.3 tons of lithium carbonate ore yield one ton of lithium
This would suggest that 53kg of ore would be enough to provide one car's worth of lithium.
I could see this happening for lithium also. Get the quantity in global circulation to the level we need and then live off that for the future.
Now, you can say the same thing for oil. Sure. But EVs are bad for the environment and its not obvious they're even a net good.
- You're commenting on a thread about a collapsing water table due to Li extraction.
- Li's price has risen and projected to continue to do so for quite some time.
- You post that Li extraction is cheap, clean and widely available in TX (perhaps the most covetous state of the Union?). Money is literally in a capped oil well and Texans are too lazy to pick it up.
Perhaps Li isn't as easy and clean to extract as you were led to believe?
Tesla has expressed interest in developing a lithium refinery in Texas, so we might see some hoses drinking from those old wells soon enough.
Brine has to be pumped to evap pools and then refined.
>Piedmont Lithium .. will establish a lithium hydroxide processing, refining and manufacturing facility in Southeast Tennessee
I don't think Piedmont is getting into the ore, or brine extraction. They are processing the salts into hydroxide.
Funny enough, soon after this announcement, elon announced his intention to do the same with Tesla.
>its not obvious they're even a net good.
It is extremely obvious. Even if the relevant region of the Andes is completely desertified (which I would prefer not happen) the scale of impact is a pittance next to global warming.
For the most part, Countries are currently mining/producing about 1% of their reserves per year (roughly), and that's a fraction of the resources (which is the 86 MT number).
From the data though -- Reserves seem to be climbing over time, so while there is a dramatic uptick in lithium mining, it doesn't seem like we've hit peak reserve/resources yet.
My dad comes from that region so I really appreciate that you'd rather the area not become a desert just so some SV bro can virtue signal with a Tesla.
Personally, Id rather Californians used their own water to extract their own Li to power their own Teslas.
As to the obviousness of the net good, actually it isn't. Thats why studies are done. Even if it's a net environmental benefit (comparing different types of pollution is a massive value judgement, btw) it doesn't follow its ethically a benefit for the reason outlines above - why should by father's family become environmental refugees?
You're comparing losing a small part of the Andes to half the Mediterranean basin (desertification), a third of the Amazon, the whole world's coastline below 2 meters AMSL, and we don't even know what to expect from the effects of heat stress on wildlife, but we can expect it to kill plenty of people directly. And that's just what I can fit in a sentence.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-what-climate-models-te...
Damage to the environment of the subtropical Andes is probably avoidable and should be avoided. There are other ways to get lithium. There are also alternatives to evaporation ponds that could let you put water back in the ground. But it's annoying when everyone thinks their pet issue is as important as the worst environmental threat humanity has faced in recorded history.
I'm looking forward to revisit this comment when we run out of raw materials for EVs and all the tooling and expertise to make ICE cars is long gone. Should be fun.
Lead acid batteries are recycled at a rate of ~99%[0], is there a good argument for why we won't end in a similar regulatory environment for other transport scale batteries?
I'm a big fan of non-car solutions (I just biked back from my neighborhood grocery store), but if someone's gonna buy a car, I'd rather it not be combusting continuously to run.
[0]https://www.energy-storage.news/lead-acid-batteries-are-us-m...
Perhaps enough for some uses, but challenging for most cars.
I'm gonna use this line whenever my pro-car cheems mindset [0] family complain about new bike lanes getting installed :D
[0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
There is a chasm between “EVs are a false solution” and “we can snap out fingers and implement transit”.
I am all for reducing the share of cars in traffic, but that will take quite some time and not replace all cars. So we need more environment friendly cars and those would be electric.
These changes are tied to the demand for a resource intensive new product in a way which barely compares to the established production of ICE vehicles using supply chains that are decades old. With all that this requires, we can certainly spend a little time thinking about painting bike lanes and subsidizing ebikes. You can make 80-100 ebike batteries or you can make a single electric car battery. We should really consider how diversifying our transport infrastructure could facilitate a faster change to electric transport while reducing our impact on the natural world.
Note that I agree with you - if we are going to have cars then they should ideally be electric. But some people see EVs as kind of an ultimate solution, and those people are mistaken. Which is why I and many others are screaming about the need to look at transportation in a holistic way rather than a one size fits all "replace ICE with EVs" approach. Cars were never ideal to begin with, lets not perpetuate old mistakes with a new resource intensive type of car.
Instead of buying a car, you pay for a subscription. Instead of taking your own car you call a car to come at your house and pick you up.
Less cars standing parked at the parking lots at the office 8-10 hours a day. Less cars parked at the grocery stores. Less cars parked at home.
Less cars needed to be built to transport the same amount of people as today.
Customer service is non-existent and I can’t afford to pay to remove the down rank event.
Also it is hard to imaging taking a car to the grocery store, shopping for ten minutes, and then waiting for a new car versus hiring the car to stay waiting.
Should we move to EVs while we're building trains? Of course. Have we started moving to EVs without any movement on trains? Sadly, yes.
You may not realize it, but California's GDP is many times "most European countries." They have a way to go to catch up.
This is because the US is no longer capable of infrastructure projects. There are number of reasons why and good articles on the topic if you are interested.
And higher taxes usually come before the results.
Also, California has Elon Musk doing everything he can to avoid hearing the word "train".
Since 150 years an extensive tram network existed, with horse carriages like in many other European cities before it was electrified.
Every part of the city is walkable and always has been.
Few cities in the US are comparable, maybe New York but it's not really desirable to live there for a lot of reasons - being full of cars in a place where none should be being one of them.
When the population are used to this and the car trafic goes down, the bike lane will be too crowded to be a two-way. Then you do the same on the other side of the street and make them both one-way roads with car lanes in the middle.
In our town they are rebuilding the bus stops on streets so if two busses stop, they will block the whole road for car traffic. The bikes can pass on the separate bike lanes though. This by design so people will choose bike instead of car. Not quite thought through though since this will also block blue-light traffic...
Labor cost and cost of living is so high that it prohibits the existence of small neighborhood stores. I live in South America and have lived in many different places here, you can buy everything within walking distance wherever you are. In my neighborhood probably 5% of the houses have a small shop. Twice per week the streets turn into a market in different parts of the city. Even in the big cities you have small convenience stores operated by families in every corner. Public transportation is probably the best in the world, you can go anywhere without a car for very low prices - even for our income levels.
Europe is somewhat in the middle between these two. Public transportation doesn't get you everywhere and its expensive. Most small stores which existed 30 years ago are dead because of supermarkets and online stores. You still won't see extreme examples of a car-centered culture like public high schools with 5000 students and you can usually get to a smaller supermarket within 15 minutes. But having higher labor cost lead to more centralization.
Also keep in mind that the first thing people buy once they have money is a car, even if public transportation works. You see this in places like China. We won't get rid of cars anytime soon. The best outcome we can hope for within the next 50 years is driverless ridesharing.
https://cayimby.org/california-yimby-statement-on-governor-s...
However, similar density (standard or population-weighted) alone doesn't automatically make public transit any more politically or socially viable. According to an early paper on COVID-19 death rates, population-weight density (but not standard density) could explain cross-country variance in the initial rate of spread of COVID-19, but not the subsequent evolution of the pandemic. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.01167.pdf For the latter, the researchers needed to turn to the Hofstede cross-cultural measure of individualism to explain country variance.
That points to the more likely reason the U.S. has trouble with public transit--not because we live sparsely (we don't), but because of our highly individualistic culture. IOW, we don't like it. Indeed, as COVID-19 has arguably shown, as compared to many other countries, we would literally prefer to die than to be more pro-social.
We radically modified our country for cars in a very short amount of time. We can do the san with cheaper and more efficient transit methods in a shorter amount of time, for at least a core that covers 60% of people in very little time, if that is what we wanted.
Instead we have public processes that take five years to decide on installing a bike lane. We took all the inefficiency of centra planning, then took away the only advantage, speed of decisions.
With minimal effort I could align my schedule to share my car with almost anyone, if I didn't have to drive it.
Whereas self-driving cars have the potential for taking over the bigger trips. A self-driving car does not need to park, so ideally it drops you of at a 'bus' stop nearby and you walk the part yourself. This also separates the cars from the urban centres and makes the self driving problem much less hard.
Train tracks are much much much easier and cheaper to build than your planes and bombs, albeit less profitable
Many American cities could be 1/4th of the size they currently are while still being full of single family residential + townhouses. We could be even denser if we wanted to. It'd, however, make the current homes of 3/4ths of the homeowners basically worthless. The world might be a lot better if the latest ring of single family exurbs didn't exist, but it does, and people are not going to be happy to abandon their new houses. Do we give people their money back from their now unsellable houses? Are we happy with the fact that the lucky winners that are the real targets of rezoning becoming very rich, as their land is now going to house more the families than before? How many construction workers, and construction materials, are we going to get to increase our homebuilding speed by orders of magnitude? That's a lot of materials in exchange for abandoned houses.
In practice, a change like this has to take 30-40 years minimum, and we sure shouldn't we waiting that long with gas cars. It's not a case of true solutions and false solutions: The problem is large enough that we'll have to apply many solutions at once.
there's a potential fix for that that's being tried in australia: rezoning windfall taxes (https://www.prosper.org.au/rezoning-windfalls/ ; posted here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957896)
They're also a huge financial enabler for us scaling our battery production, and the grid scale battery technology that is resulting is hugely useful in terms of transitioning away from fossil fuel electricity production.
Thats not obvious to me. Why is that the case?
What are the assumptions in your assertion?
are you assuming continuous innovations in mtls science?
Are you assuming a certain electrical grid and generstion mix that may or may not exist?
For example, large ships certainly fall under "commercial" vehicles, but any electrical energy storage (even inexistent ones) would be hard pressed to compete on CO2 emissions with our current grid make up. 50% thermal efficiency is really good!
Well the same can be said about tractor trailers. Their engines aren't 50% efficient, but they're pretty darned good! Id be surprised if an EV drivetrain can beat them on CO2 emissions.
And if ships and trucks diesel engines are made to run NG (LNG tankers already do) Forget it. EV's are a CO2 environmental disaster by comparison.
So, again, what are your assumptions?
See: Rapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of all-electric interregional container shipping
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y
> Modeling 5 to 10 GWh electrified containerships, researchers find that 40% of routes today could be electrified in an economically viable manner, before considering environmental costs.
Electric Semi trucks are already happening.
The reason is straightforward, the grid has a certain thermal efficiency, one that ships basically match and semis approach.
Almost certainly already better in most of the world, and anyway if you're building ship charging stations you can buy new renewable PPAs at the same time to supply power.
"Of course it is"
"Of course it is" is not science. It might pass muster in CS, but in engineering with heavy objects "of course it <>" is the mother of all f-ups.
Even if mining all of the lithium and copper weren't such a disastrously extractive and exploitative process, big personal steel boxes would still be an awful mode of transportation for most people. Our insistence on building infrastructure such that cars are the only truly viable method of getting around diminishes my enthusiasm about what is otherwise amazing technological progress.
You could say the same thing about literally anything as no supply chain is perfect. But if there's a problem somewhere, like with mining, you zero in and fix it. The fact that a problem exists doesn't invalidate the entire system.
First principles approach - there's no shortage of materials in the crust, no shortage of energy from the sun, and no problem with cars. Your argument is that they're 'unscalable' well they don't need to be because the population will soon be declining.
In the future there will be a variety of cheaper EVs with shorter ranges which will both lower demand for battery resources while also achieving climate change goals.
Car batteries will also undoubtedly be critical parts of the electrical grid in 5-10 years, so they'll be doing double duty.
* Nissan Leaf * Fiat 500e * Honda E * Ford Focus EV * VW Golf e-something * BMW i3
These are all fine cars that get you from A->B as well as any of the $100,000+ EVs that seems to be all over the road. They all have ranges that will get 95% of the population to work.
51% of all habitable land is not "very little": https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#half-of-the-world-s-habi...
But pretending that somehow we don't need a giant lithium battery industry because we'll just eliminate vehicles of all kinds seems horrifyingly wrong.
Personally, I'd love to see the post office running freight rail for the country, investing in electrification of rail, and focusing on moving as much freight as possible by train.