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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

The flipside of electrification of vehicles is all the extra metal they need to mine, which is highly environmentally destructive.

We don't even have the metal supplies to fully electrify car production, not even close, although I see South America is going to ramp up production substantially soon.

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Lung cancer rates are higher near major roads due to air pollution from cars. Fossil fuel cars basically means every highway is a superfund site. We just don't talk about it.

Given the choice between toxic waste at a mine and toxic waste in millions of homes, I'll take the mine.

I am optimistic as well but let's not forget the asphalt (major pollutant during construction and repair), breaking and tire degradation that each contribute to this.

How much of that pollution is coming out of the tail pipe vs. off of the brake pads and tires?

Keep in mind that EVs with their regenerative braking use their brake pads effectively never. Modern EV brake systems actually have to deliberately not use their regenerative braking once in a while in order to exercise the brake pads and make sure that they don't rust into uselessness from utter disuse.

And on the flip side, EVs tend to be heavier and therefore work their tyres even harder.

That tire dust though

It’s also important to wonder how much of the pollution is leaked fluids and burnt motor oil.

A while back I saw a video on youtube of someone mining road dust for platinum of all things.

Evs will be a likely improvement for the health of those near roads.

Most. PM2.5 is the danger, particulates of 2.5 microns or less. Polycyclic aromatics and oxides of nitrogen.

Tire scrub and brake pads produce larger particles that wash into stormwater drains and poison downstream aquatic life.

Most of that localized pollution comes from stuff like tire dust which is increased as we buy new heavier vehicles to do the same old getting around. The big win with fuel air quality was the move away from leaded gas and the clean air act, for decades now the major sources of pollution from a car have not been from the tailpipe.

It’s a classic false dichotomy. There are plenty of options in between - from plug-in hybrids to funding public transit. In my ideal world, I’ll drive a sports hybrid for fun and take a well maintained public transport to work.

You'll take the mine because you don't live near the mine.

I think what the parent comment was really hinting at is the need to move towards a less car-dependent life. Of course, electrification is important, but it's not environmentally neutral in any way.

It would be better if we had trains, strong public transport, walkable and cyclable cities rather than electric cars. I think that's kind of what Europe is doing and the USA should try to do similarly. Cars are extremely important for rural life but they're really unnecessary in cities... unless your cities are build as urban sprawls.

We will all be dead before America becomes a city planning utopia. Not because it can't, there's just so much work involved to reconfigure everything. I believe if you fixed your zoning though, it would eventually gravitate towards that on its own as people flee suburbia for the more livable cities. That doesn't mean don't vote for it though, even small improvements to one location can improve livability.

Maybe think of EVs as a stop-gap because if you want clean air for millions in the next 30 years that is our best option. Even the famous Shinkansen took longer than that to build, and they had the benefit of a miracle economy, cities already configured for density and mixed zoning, and a government that could actually achieve things on a horizon longer than 3 years.

> We don't even have the metal supplies to fully electrify car production,

Okay, I need to say that you are not even wrong. Yep, I am slightly irritated on this blatantly false claim that has started popping up. If you think your claim has any merit, could you please provid the metal that you think we are lacking, estimat the amount needed and compare that amoun to the amount in earth's crust. If you get anything but infinitesmally small needs compared to what here is, please explain why that metal can't be replaced.

Localised environmental destruction is such a pittance compared to global environmental catastrophe that its comical people even bring it up.

But it's not an either/or. The mining and transport of metals also releases carbon dioxide.

To give an example every day I see convoys of trucks coming from Zambia to South African ports. These should be transported by train!

The solution is smaller, more efficient cars, electric bikes, public transport and things like that, not expensive 3 ton Tesla cars.

Abandonded mines (with the environmental carelessness) and the coming revelation of abandoned oil/gas operations leaking greenhouse gases is just a slice of history on repeat.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/aba...

It looks like insufficient bonds and bankruptcy just shifted cost burdens for cleanup to government.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cleaning-abandoned-coal-mi...

https://apnews.com/article/business-mountains-environment-an...

Most of the issues with abandonded mines can be confirmed in several countries, but the profits from pump and dump do afford positive GDP (superfund cleanups, etc).

The ROI while in operation keeps it going and keeps the "we need renewables now" crowd focused on (someone elses) goal(s) :)

The oil and gas industries have already started transfering ownership to smaller companies to bypass obligations, so the cycle continues, with new lithium mining just coming on the heels of two other unresolved climate catastrophes.

> It looks like insufficient bonds and bankruptcy just shifted cost burdens for cleanup to government.

That's the goal of capitalism, privitise the profits, socialise the losses.

I actually only looked at north america, knowing that it happens in every country that mines. Capitalism is not the scapegoat.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...

The psuedo-environmentalists getting played like a 2-bit....crypto investor (not my 1st word choice, but still relevant) is funny though :p

Capitalism exists in every country today. You would not have chinese billionaires today if they were not a capitalistic country. They are socialist in almost name only these days; they are clearly not interested in redistributing wealth or favoring the health of the collective over the wealth of the elite. IMO there aren't many great examples of socialist governments, since many of the historical examples we've seen have been from a powerful elite using the mass appeal of the socialist message solely to put themselves in charge of an authoritarian state and use that position to further their own personal interests, versus to focus on collective benefits.

No it isn’t. Where does such a statement even come from?

That’s like saying the goal of socialism is to starve everyone.

In capitalism, attempts to change the status quo are always met with "but this will hurt profits!"

In socialism, attempts to change the status quo are not met with "but fewer people will starve this way"

Whether or not the GP is correct, it's silly to feign ignorance of how this idea could come about.

>In capitalism, attempts to change the status quo are always met with "but this will hurt profits!"

This is laughably stupid. The entire point of capitalism is to constantly disrupt the status quo of competitors to eat their margin.

What you’re describing is some state run capitalism or state guaranteed monopolies where the only possible disruption could come from the government.

Attempts to reduce externalities are met with "but this will hurt profits!"

Actually no. Im not describing anything about capitalism than what I see and hear on the broadcast/cable news and from the people who parrot it.

Congress wants to pass a law making it illegal to torture children by throwing them into piles of burning puppies? Cue talking heads rambling on and on about economic impacts. Politicians on the other side talking about how $market_segment will suffer. Ceos/business owners talking about how it hurts them or worse, helps the competition. All with the terrifying footer note "opponents say this move will hurt profits".

I'm not imagining anything, I'm merely saying what happens. If you want to claim that I'm stupid for saying what I see, call me Forest Gump and keep pretending you can't see what's in front of you. I'm sure your emperor is wearing clothes or whatever other fantasy makes you feel smug and safe.

You're the one making a non-sequitur. Capitalism is an ideology about maximizing profits. You can make a lot more profit if you externalize all your costs. "Privatize the profits, socialize the losses" is a way of saying that corporations have a lot of magical legal devices that let them avoid responsibility for externalities they themselves created once the revenue stream is no longer flowing.

Can't you think of time and again examples of this? For instance, all fossil fuel using companies are participating in this exercise in real-time today; they certainly are not paying anything for the massive pollution damage they are creating. Corporate fraud never leads to meaningful punishment of the executives and they often make a profit even after "punishment".

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

Benjamin Franklin (with a hint of Einstein) :p

>Corporate fraud never leads to meaningful punishment of the executives and they often make a profit even after "punishment".

No, this is a meme that needs to die. Please link examples where profits from a specific activity did not outsize the profit from that activity.

People get confused when some international massive company made a profit overall after some big fine and think the illegal thing was therefore profitable. This is never the case and the fines drastically exceed the profit from the specific activity (every country levying fines structures them explicitly this way).

BP absolutely did not make a profit on the deep water horizon.

>all fossil fuel using companies are participating in this exercise in real-time today

Red herring in a discussion about fraud. This is purely because governments don’t charge for CO2 (quite bafflingly).

>Corporate fraud never leads to meaningful punishment of the executives

Enron, Madoff, Theranos, Worldcom, Tyco, Qwest, Rite Aid… the list goes on.

>Localised environmental destruction is such a pittance compared to global environmental catastrophe that its comical people even bring it up.

While every environmentalist ever talks about "the greater good" they pouted and whined and tossed the plate on the floor when there was nuclear energy on it. You'll have to forgive the general public for not taking you (as a group) at your word.

I think the issue with nuclear energy is the combined threats of local destruction and global environmental catastrophe. They may be overblown, but mining lithium to make electric cars doesn't increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, for example.

Do you have a reliable source for the lack of supply?

Ideally with a detailed breakdown for each potentially problematic material.

I keep seeing claims that go both way on that matter. But none were backed by serious research.

Ultimately, scarcity is determined by cost. Here's the cost history: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

The cathode accounts for just over half a battery's cost: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

I came across this before:

- The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth (https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/16_2021.pdf)

Just to note, that is making pretty questionable assumptions to get to the conclusion that there are not enough metals. For example, they assume that there is a set need of cobalt/nickel per kWh of lithium batteries, which obviously is completely false (see LFP chemistry). They also use 2018 reserves as the yardstick, completely oblivious to the fact that already by 2021 the lithium reserves had increased compared to 2018 by more than what their own numbers say a generation of EVs need.

In 8th grade I read a book on Zinc and it projected the world's supply would run out by ~1985. The book was published in like 1970 and I was reading it in 1994. Since then I've had a big of skepticism of "it's running out" when it comes to raw industrial materials.

> The flipside of electrification of vehicles is all the extra metal they need to mine, which is highly environmentally destructive.

The environmental destruction of climate change is almost certainly worse

If you think 10kg of lithium in a Tesla is a lot of extraction, you're never going to believe how much steel and aluminum is in a car.

Yes that's why we need to move to small, efficient, reliable cars and public transport.

100% true. But objections to resource extraction for lithium should just be ignored. There are literally 1000x larger extraction sites for other purposes, especially iron and aluminum, but also table salt, laundry soap, etc. There are nation-sized areas of America that have been scraped flat for oil and gas production. The land sacrificed for lithium extraction is so far down the list of important environmental issues that it can't even be ranked more precisely than "tied for last place".

Keep in mind that you have to move your population to higher density housing. Essentially to really prompt public transit in the US you will have to introduce draconian laws that prevent the creation of single family houses and their future sales. This is if you work from the idea that we only have 9 years left until we can’t prevent the climate damage.

Is that necessarily true? I'm a more optimistic about gradual densification. Across the US, we've seen an increase in offices moving to the periphery of cities [1]. I think we keep reinventing mini-cities in the suburbs and will eventually end up with an American-style polycentricity, especially in the South and West [2]. Remote work will increase these pressures.

Let's look at the sprawling suburbs of Houston, Texas. These suburbs have necessities covered within 10-15 minutes by car. If you look at this map [3] and this one [4] of a newer neighborhood in Katy, TX (about 30 miles) from downtown Houston, you'll notice a few points:

* The schools and stores are already close to the neighborhoods. Biking to the store takes ~12 minutes vs 8 mins driving * It's ~4.5 mi (7km) to the park & ride. Biking takes ~22 mins vs 12 mins by car. * There's several food places, dentist offices, and doctors offices along the way.

This neighborhood is following the same developmental pattern as the earlier neighborhoods, which some iterative refinements. Of course there is still some low handing fruit that could be addressed: * This area could add bike lanes whenever they did planned road expansions (which is often) * Add safe bike and pedestrian over/underpasses for the freeways & busy intersections * Connect existing paths that connect neighborhood amenities (i.e. parks, schools) to inter-neighborhood paths * Prevent commercial and industrial site boundaries from harming neighborhood inter-connectivity

These fixes would allow an extremely car-dependent area more "transit options" at very little cost. These would not require rezoning, rule changes (i.e. parking minimums), or forced increases in density. The market repeatedly identifies that people want the same things basic things nearby. But the chosen zoning and local car-centric ordinances perpetuate this car centrality. Parking minimums set a floor on store size, which limits store density, which undermines convenient access by any means other than cars. Builders don't know how the commercial sites are going to be used and exactly what-for.

Within the neighborhoods, access to locals schools and parks are considered in the planning stages. That's why it's common to see schoolchildren riding their bike or walking home from school in groups -- sometimes with chaperones / crossing guards. It's designed to be convenient, for example adding shortcuts between streets to the school [5]. Making these slightly larger to explicitly accommodate bikes, especially for accessing nearby essentials is not a tough sell. This is largely a consequence of builders' presumptions about homeowners' expectations/preferences. It has taken a while, but these same builders are finally starting to run fiber alongside or instead of coax to these newer neighborhoods -- a convenient selling point post-covid.

Regarding densification, there are already apartments [6] built nearby the highway, adjacent to these new neighborhoods. Changes that would require more effort than the points mentioned above include: * Allow duplexes and small apartments to be built within the neighborhoods * Apartments and duplexes [7] are currently like standalone "communities," isolated from the surrounding neighborhoods * Let small shops and offices be built within the neighborhoods, not just immediately adjacent

Note that a lot of these zoning changes only require changing builder presumptions. Often they're building in unincorporated areas. You can see an increasing mix of home-types and nearby shopping in very new communities like Bridgeland [9]. There's even a "desired path" emerging behind this Lifetime Fitness [8]. This path isn't even possible in the older neighborhoods. Basically, builders are rezoning large areas (often displacing cows), so better inter-mixing of stores and community centers (for transit stops) can be done ahead of time.

That's why I don't think the changes required for more transit are so significant. Transit agencies are already using existing parking (e.g. stores and theaters) for park & rides. To be clear, I personally know people taking park-and-rides to work at Oil & Gas companies because it's more convenient. Expanding access to these facilities, adding some transit interconnections between suburbs, and expanding to important non-office destinations (malls, community colleges, and airports) are low-risk expansion opportunities. Adding compelling optionality can be a means to build support for more expansive projects later on. I think if builders thought adding autonomous trams through their master planned communities would help make them more money, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

If you look at a older part of the suburbs (south of I-10), you see the same sidewalks and shortcuts for access to the school. But somehow they haven't extended the walking/biking infrastructure to the shopping center across the street from the high school [10]. Even further south, you see the same thing [11]. Sidewalks will connect you to the park, but it's impossible to that Target from the neighborhood directly adjacent! These shortsighted mistakes are (slowly) being remediated with each new neighborhood built. We can achieve substantial emissions reductions by enabling families to get by owning only 1 vehicle instead of 2, especially if those vehicles are EVs or Plug-in hybrids. Hopefully we'll even see more innovations like shared heating / cooling for whole neighborhoods, like this one in Austin [12], while we aim for ever-lower emissions.

--- [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/10/06/moving-off... [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23998083209512... [3] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Stockdick+Junior+High+School... [4] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Stockdick+Junior+High+School...

[5] https://www.google.com/maps/@29.8434568,-95.7820818,121m/dat... [6] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brea+Luxury+Apartments/@29... [7] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Greenbrae+Ln,+Cinco+Ranch+...

[8] https://www.google.com/maps/@29.9310744,-95.7259749,113m/dat... [9] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bridgeland,+Cypress,+TX+77... [10] https://www.google.com/maps/place/LaCenterra+at+Cinco+Ranch/... [11] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Meadow+Lake+Park/@29.59629... [12] https://www.whispervalleyaustin.com/why-youll-want-to-live-i...

I know this is a low value comment before I write it, but I just cannot see any possible future where americans buy smaller cars. This level of societal innovation feels inaccessible now.

In the face of severe climate and weather events, I can hear the buyer still thinking "yes, but the larger model is safer in a storm or fire..."

Steel and aluminum prices didn't rise 12x in the last 2 years [1]. It doesn't matter how much that lithium weighs on a scale. It matters how much it weighs against your wallet.

1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

I thought we are talking about the sizes of holes in the ground, not the cost.

Doesn't it seem likely the cost of the material directly relates to the size and difficulty of creating said hole in the ground?

No, that doesn't seem likely to me at all. Lithium prices are high because the industry is not very well developed and the demand is skyrocketing. Borax is co-located with lithium deposits (in some places) and is extracted by a similar process at similar scales and it costs 100x less than lithium. And for some reason nobody looks at the gigantic land scar at a borax mine and starts screaming about the environmental cost, because there's no oil billionaire astroturf fund dedicated to whining about boron.

Open pit mines are huge and the biggest ones are for boring things like iron and copper: https://www.mpirecruitment.au/news/the-worlds-deepest-bigges...

Yes and 10kg if lithium is fully reusable at the end of life of the car.

400k km in an ICE vehicule is 24000 liter of refined petroleum product.

Assuming 90% recovery rate for lithium (very conservative) in fine you compare 1kg of lithium to 24000 liters of refined petroleum product.

99% recovery rate makes it 100g of lithium vs 24000 liters of refined petroleum products.

It's quite a shock to me that people even discuss/compare when there is such a wide 5 order of magnitude difference.

Afghanistan has something like $1T worth of lithium reserves. Who gets access and how it ends up being exploited remains to be seen but that country is not going to become some forgotten backwater anytime soon.

Afghanistan is landlocked. To its north is Russia. To its east is China. To its south are Pakistan and India. And to its west is Iran.

Fun neighborhood. Nothing could go wrong with the above countries fighting for their share of Afghanistan's mineral resources.

India does not share land border with Afghanistan , although Afg and Indian people apparently share warm relations (not Taliban)

> India does not share land border with Afghanistan

I'm guessing India would claim that it does. Pakistan would argue otherwise.

Reading about the line of control that splits Kashmir is pretty interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Agreement

>Afghanistan is landlocked

Which is not that great if you intend to export raw bulk goods (e.g. ore). You really want to have ports for that. The extra few percent efficiency of ship vs rail makes a huge difference because margin is so thin.

One of its neighbors will build out rail lines to their borders so they can take the position of lucrative refiner and exporter of a massive lithium reserve that only their infrastructure has good access to.

>highly environmentally destructive

Is there any reliable information on this?

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