Let’s complain about about water damage from firefighting when the other option is to let it burn.
Lithium mining causes extremely localized harm, ICE engines cause worldwide damage.
Lithium mining causes extremely localized harm, ICE engines cause worldwide damage.
ICE cars cause damage and lithium causes damage so the damage from lithium must also be significant. Mining the non lithium components of EV’s cause more environmental damage than mining the lithium does.
Large infrastructure changes take time. You can of course also improve infrastructure, in road charging largely eliminates the need for giant EV batteries, but waiting is losing. If people want huge big batteries in EV’s then build them, you can always recycle lithium in a few decades it doesn’t get consumed.
But if we start with this (OPs) false dilemma then yes of course, let's all buy a tesla, just don't pretend it'll save the world
Sure, after we have electrified highways and improved cities they become more viable and could hopefully be the norm. But, in the short term the biggest impact of small batteries is convincing people EV’s suck. Especially when they don’t last for the full lifetime of a car.
Not buying a personal vehicle is infinitely better than forcing people to live in car centric societies, buying an EV will just perpetuate the issues we're already facing
btw it takes 130k km in Germany to make en EV pollute less than an ICE, with the average of 19km driven per day/per car, I'll let you do the maths.
Electric cars aren't here to save the planet, they're here to save car manufacturers
If you want to cut the average in half, it’s going to take longer than the breakeven point. Meanwhile in 2006 62% of electricity in Germany was produced by fossil fuels, that dropped to 40.9% in 2021.
So even ignoring inaccuracies in the study your thinking of, the breakeven point just keeps falling as both producing and using EV’s keeps releasing less CO2.
How you can manage to construe that as a bad thing is baffling.
To use your analogy it's like attacking someone who wants to stop the arsonist while the firefighters do their job instead of building a new water reservoir.
Lithium mining is ~4 orders of magnitude less harmful than ICE engines. Perhaps someone could have improved the situation by rearranging deck chars on the titanic into a more aesthetic pattern, but it’s not the kind of thing that deserved their attention.
As for the Lithium production figures:
> Let us consider, for example, electric cars. To give an idea of this effect, producing a battery weighing 1,100 pounds emits over 70% more carbon dioxide than producing a conventional car in Germany, according to research by the automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors.
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-paradox-lithium-net-zero-emiss...
which to be sure isn't a full life cycle comparison .. but let's be very clear, the full G20 country demand for an electric future creates an unreasonably high demand on copper and rare earth mining and directly impacts all manner of marhinalised people - the US has a $64 billion copper reserve in Arizona on sites considered sacred by Native American tribes.
Those are useful for other things, if you want smaller batteries add in road charging. Just don’t wait for perfection when you can dramatically improve things today.
> 70% more carbon dioxide than producing a conventional car in Germany
Only today. Manufacturing currently produces carbon dioxide due to things like a fossil fueled electric grid not as an inherent part of the process. Fixing the grid is also required.
The reality is the only thing stopping most trips from being made in a light vehicle is the unchecked externalities from the large ones. And only one long range vehicle is 'needed' per household
I am all for improving cities, but just as a baseline not everyone lives in cities. Any long term plan needs to consider everyone not just people who live in dense enough areas public transportation is a clear win. Sure, ban cars in the center of cities, just don’t expect that to change how large most people want their car’s battery to be.
This article and discussion is doing the thing where you exaggerate a small problem to promote something that’s almost but not quite entirely unrelated to it. If you want people to use small batteries in EV’s electrify roads so people can travel on them without using a battery. If you want to reduce the need for cars do that, but don’t pretend lithium mining somehow requires changing cities. Because arguing from a false premise weakens your argument when people see through it.
Driving is the singularly most destructive and dangerous thing that humans have invented and CO2 is just the worst of its many downsides, the resources and space that go into them and the infrastructure is probably about third on the list after the millions it kills, lithium is just one aspect of that.
You may pretend I am talking about one person, yet I am describing the vast majority of humanity when I say the car has been one of the greatest inventions of all time. Greatly surpassing computers, telephones, and just about everything else you depend on daily.
> Dense rural environments served by transit exist
There are no dense rural environments, you may be confused at what this term means but towns are not rural. The term is referring to a lack of density.
<20% of the US population lives in rural areas, and <20% of those are more than 10 miles from their third nearest food shop.
If a region can service three food shops and a hospital it can support regional transit.
Personally not wanting to doesn't make it impossible to travel 10 miles by bike or LEV.
> There are no dense rural environments, you may be confused at what this term means but towns are not rural. The term is referring to a lack of density.
You can have a region with low density where the services are all concentrated.
Your straw man about making it so people can do something OTHER than use a car somehow meaning all cars vanish is also extremely tiresome.
> You can have a region with low density where the services are all concentrated.
We call such things towns.
Which is not a privately owned car with associated infrastructure. Ie. The thing that does the harm.
> We call such things towns.
Google the words 'rural town'. You're attempting to overload the word 'rural' to include those people but simultaneously claim they could not possibly live within 5km of transport and therefore must he forced to use a car. Edge cases on edge cases don't justify removing the freedom of 99% of the population to live comfortably without one.
But explain again how on earth is someone driving themselves or a loved one to a hospital in their private car not a privately owned car?
> Edge cases on edge cases don't justify removing the freedom of 99% of the population to live comfortably without one.
Again you’re pretending the vast majority of people are somehow in areas where public transportation is viable. This is 100% absolutely false.
> Again you’re pretending the vast majority of people are somehow in areas where public transportation is viable. This is 100% absolutely false.
Citation needed. Also "At least one safe sustainable transport option" isn't "transit only".
Also it's amazing how quickly you went from "there's a bunch of reasons to reduce car dependence but you should dismiss this one" to a gish gallop of reactionary nonsense. Almost like it was a bad faith rhetorical technique to dismiss it.
Australia has long been the major supplier of raw lithium concentrate [1] - sending it on to either China or Malaysia [2].
Soon we'll be shipping concentrate to Texas [3] [4] [5] so that the filthy dirty toxic work of heavy rare earths separation can take place as close to the greedy end consumers as possible.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221110-how-australia-be...
[2] https://lynasrareearths.com/
[3] https://www.mining-technology.com/news/lynas-heavy-rare-eart...
[4] https://thetexan.news/rare-earths-processing-plant-to-open-o...
[5] https://www.miningmagazine.com/supply-chain-management/news/...
As to externalities, no one said that there shouldn’t be taxes or rules in place that make sure that the consumers of lithium don’t internalize the cost.
In terms of total harm, even people working lithium mines are better off if that eliminates ICE engines.