This fast paced transition doesn't sit right with me, still. I feel like people are turning a blind eye to the negative environmental impacts this is going to have.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-...
As always though, this move is optimizing the wrong thing - we don’t need more efficient cars we need fewer cars. But nobody likes subtractive solutions.
I don’t think politically viable, despite being the real solution to the core problem.
Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised. Reshaping in the other direction would involve a similar amount of hardship, but on people that vote. We can make it easier to increase density, but the kind of efforts that would make us not end up relying on EVs have such economic and political costs that we lack the state capacity to go there.
Idk. How much remains usable if it’s under water? Should we let people in Florida tax the rest of the country for their road development? Can Florida afford to maintain and build the roads they want to build?
> Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised.
Can you elaborate on this? How are you accounting for highway development that destroyed minority neighborhoods in this assessment?
South Florida will never be underwater. The government would build massive levees around the entire state before that happens.
> How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable?
We'd just build the right transportation so that this doesn't matter.
I have a hard time envisioning that the impact due to lithium mining for one battery pack is worse than the extraction and pollution from burning ~150 barrels of gas. Plus another 3 barrels of motor oil from oil changes.
Not to mention, they are forecasting out over 25 years, on a technology that has been rapidly changing, and is seeing immense investment. Batteries from 15+ years from now will have very different chemistries, and lithium will likely have safer sources. The Chevy EV1 launched with lead-acid batteries about 25 years ago - modern EVs aren’t remotely similar.
Lithium deposits are geologically widespread and abundant, but 95% of global production is currently concentrated in Australia, Chile, China and Argentina. Large new deposits have been found in diverse countries including Mexico, the US, Portugal, Germany, Kazakhstan, Congo and Mali.
There are massive Lithium deposits at the salton Sea in souther California which are just bubbling up out of the ground in heated brine, meaning the earth is doing most of the work bringing it to the surface as mud. Refining it will need significant water, either from contested supplies fed by the Colorado river or as-yet-unbuilt water pipelines from desalination plants at the coast. But these deposits are massive and the extraction part of the process would have minimal environmental impact compared to the open-pit mining required elsewhere. It's odd that this article doesn't mention this at all.
If somebody is even half serious about these concerns, they had better be advocating for extreme reduction in car use. Otherwise it's pure hypocrisy.
The problem is not in EVs, it's in private automobiles, our settlement patterns, and our utter lack of funding public transportation in all of its forms.
It is just as naive to think the US can remake its transportation infrastructure to be like Europe, as it would be to expect every road in Italy to be made wide enough for a Ford F-150 Raptor. Places in the US with high population densities (NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, etc) often do have far better public transportation than the rest of the US.
This is a silly comparison though. Large swaths of the US are either completely uninhabited or nearly completely uninhabited.
If you want a better comparison, look at New Jersey. Its population density is 488 people per km^2, so a little higher than the Netherlands even, yet its infrastructure is dismal comparatively despite having the density to support Netherlands-style infrastructure. Almost all major population centers in the US look like this -- dense enough to support much better, but yet we don't have it. The fact that it wouldn't work in the vast rural expanses of e.g. Wyoming don't mean that it wouldn't work for our big metropolitan areas.
This shifts the focus of problems from many different places to one. In the article you linked, it mentions alternatives to reduce lithium needs including smaller batteries, and battery recycling.
This is much easier to regulate, and there is plenty of time to do so - although yes this is putting some trust on governments doing the right thing.