[artvark11]

The lie that electric vehicles are better for the environment than internal combustion needs to stop. Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments. We will not clean up when we finish. Lithium batteries will pollute our water supplies here at home when they aren't properly disposed. This is a giant environmental scam promoted to make us feel good about "saving" the earth. I don't believe for a second that corporate democrats care about the environment.

We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.

[avianlyric]

> We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.

Even this is preferable to internal combustion engines. ICEs really aren’t very efficient, and electric car is easily 3x more energy efficient than an ICE. Which means that’s even if you include transmission losses and heat losses at a coal power station, you’re still ahead. Because of coal power stations are significantly more efficient than ICE.

All that is ignoring the other benefits like being able to perform carbon capture at source, filtering waste gasses for pollutants etc. Additionally as the grid gets greener, so does your electric car. Something that will never be true of an ICE car.

> Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments.

This is clearly a concern, and thankfully we’re taking big steps to reduce the amount of rare Earth metals needed to manufacture batteries. Additionally that largest produces of lithium aren’t small countries, they’re places like China and the US.

But heavy metal pollution, and toxins produced through the refining process are still a serious concern. But I would argue less a concern than CO2 release. At least the heavy metals a d toxins can be easily contained, they don’t have a tendency of floating into the atmosphere and spreading around the earth.

Simple fact is that modern western society is currently unsustainable, just because we don’t have all the answers, and don’t have perfect solutions, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I suspect even you wouldn’t be prepared to make the sacrifices needed for a sustainable future using only the technology we have readily available to us today.

[Tade0]

Minor nitpick: li-ion batteries contain no rare-earths.

The catalysts used in oil refining do on the other hand - specifically Lanthanum.

[8note]

The motor being run off it likely has neodymium magnets in it though?

[Tade0]

First Teslas had an AC induction motor - no rare earths here as well, so it's actually possible to avoid them almost entirely.

That is, with the exception of control hardware - but you have the same in regular cars - around a pound of rare earths on average.

[sitharus]

Another big advantage is removing pollutants from densely populated areas, especially unburnt hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides and microparticles emitted by diesel engines.

[1053r]

The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri...

Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP.

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...

Coal is in terminal decline. Solar and wind have been growing exponentially, and are on a path to pass coal within the decade. Projections to the contrary have to explain why decades of industrial economics theory are wrong, where manufactured goods (like solar and wind generators) get cheaper by a fairly consistent % every time you double production. This creates a virtuous cycle that will drive coal and other fossil fuels out of business through profit seeking alone. (We are past the tipping point on costs here.) The burden of proof is on the fossil fuel advocates like yourself at this point. (This article is from 2015, and the IEA and similar keep getting it wrong since then.)

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2015/11/17/why-the-iea-is-consis...

[djsumdog]

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource

The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste.

As far as clean energy, have you watched Planet of the Humans (2020)? I want to say, I despise Michael Moore emotional bullshit, but despite his influence on the film's production, the case it makes is solid: the vast majority of "renewables" are actually trees. When you hear "woodchips" .. there is no amount of industrial wood scrap waste that is viable without also cutting down trees. You start burning fast-growing trees (often planted for paper or lumber) for fuel and you get a system of power production that makes no sense over traditional gas or oil.

Solar and wind may have been growing exponentially, but they still require oil/gas standby plants. They also take a lot of resources to make. Wind turbines aren't currently recycled.

The fact of the matter is, we have one real hope left. The ITER. If real fusion power is possible, we'll find out once it's completed. If ITER fails to produce sustainable and efficient power, it's unlikely anyone else will get the funding to build a bigger reactor.

It's not coal that's in terminal decline ... it's everything. No amount of increasing consumption or building "more green" is going to change that. We need to consume less, and let's face it ... that's fucking impossible.

[creato]

> The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste.

Is this representative of small electronics and not vehicles? It will obviously be a lot harder and more economically significant to improperly dispose of a battery pack for a car than a cell phone.

[Accujack]

You're ignoring current SMR technology in nuclear.

Old style giant, expensive nuclear power plants are a non starter, but small modular reactors have a lot of promise, are zero emissions once running, and can be built using green energy in factories instead of constructed on site.

Fission power plants are pretty much the only way to go fully "green"... renewables are great and have a big place in the future, but unless humanity wants to drastically change their consumption of technologies and products requiring large amounts of energy for production (like Aluminum), they don't provide power in the right amounts and time spans.

[CaptArmchair]

A point few proponents of fission power tend to mention is that Uranium supplies are also finite. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

Unless there are major breakthroughs in nuclear technology which become commercially viable in the near future - that is, in this 21st century - nuclear power, as it stands, is running out of time, and it does so faster then most people assume.

[08-15]

> Uranium supplies are also finite

So is the sun, and they will both last for roughly the same time, i.e. 5 billion years.[1]

[1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html

[CaptArmchair]

You just referred to a HTML page

... having a counter on the bottom which says:

> The number of hits on this page since 1996 Feb 12

... a HTTP Response Header

> Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT

Stating that these aren't "the latest insights" would be putting it mildly.

My comment referred to commercial viability. It at this point in time, Uranium has only been extracted from seawater in a laboratory setting, per the Wikipedia article I referenced.

Yes, there's always "but technology will advance to a point where it will be viable". But then I'd argue: Beware of optimism bias when predicting the future. You don't know whether economic, social and political circumstances will converge over the next decades towards such trajectory that extracting uranium from seawater and using it in nuclear reactors becomes a commercial viable enterprise.

You yourself may be confident they will, but that doesn't make it so.

[djsumdog]

and we've wasted so much of our uranium making bombs that can never be used as fuel. There is research in trying to use highly enriched uranium as a fuel source, but I doubt that will ever be a safe reality.

[Accujack]

It's the other way around. Highly enriched uranium has been easy to use as a fuel source for decades. Using less enriched material has always been a problem, actually. CANDU (Canadian design) did a pretty good job making it work, though.

Nuclear weapons didn't use much uranium, they manufactured and processed plutonium.

By the way, a lot of nuclear fuel in the past few decades has been reprocessed material from weapons that were decommissioned. I believe the US even traded with the Russians for their spare plutonium.

[HPsquared]

Molten salt, breeder and Thorium reactors can achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements, and aren't exactly groundbreaking technology. Reprocessing as well. Several examples from decades ago, and new designs in the pipeline. The main problems are politics and lack of funding.

[CaptArmchair]

The Wikipedia page highlights that there's certainly discussion, doubt and controversy surrounding those technologies.

The decisive factor of change I can see here is the unproven commercial viability of alternatives at the moment as Uranium is still cheap. Whether or not those alternatives become viable once Uranium prices increase isn't easily predicted.

So, I remain highly skeptical towars claims that dismiss the issue as merely a problem of "politics and lack of funding".

[wussboy]

“Why is it that when we see nothing but progress behind, we see nothing but disaster ahead?”

[h0l0cube]

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it

... and human labor, and other chemicals. I'm not sure if you read the article, but it claims that recycling is still a somewhat tenuous economic proposition vs digging more out of the ground. This is especially true given the glut of lithium, while cobalt and other rare minerals are slowly being phased out of battery designs.

[hedora]

The second company described in the article claims to recycle using nothing but catalysts, and simply grinds up the used batteries in a giant vat before transportation (rendering them inert, and easier to safely move).

It sounds like their main problem at this point is continuing to scale the business to meet supply (they are already the largest lithium recycler in the US), and that the challenges there are logical, not the underlying technology.

What human labor and chemicals are you referring to?

[h0l0cube]

Some amount of human labor will be required for operations, say maintenance of the in-situ automated systems, or intervention when things go wrong. These costs can't be eliminated with renewable energy, and won't be fixed with robots for some time yet (decades, minimum).

And if a mine can be automated to yield orders of magnitude more material than recycling for the same labor costs, you would need some other financial incentive (government subsidies, backroll by Tesla for marketing purposes) to make it viable.

[jeffreyrogers]

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it

It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical. E.g. recycling the alloy from alloy steel is not done because it is too costly to separate. I'm not sure why batteries would be much different.

[SV_BubbleTime]

> It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical.

It’s not. Other poster is just ignoring reality that it’s currently cheaper to use new lithium than to recover it.

[vlovich123]

I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment.

1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage.

2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars.

3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil spills we regularly have would make me think lithium is actually better here.

4. Lithium batteries at grid-scale reduce blackouts which means you don't spin up a bunch of local generators. They also make wind & solar power generation available off-peak reducing reliance on coal & natural gas.

5. Are car batteries likely to be improperly recycled? I would think legislation would minimize the problem. Even without legislation, my impression is that today's used car batteries are still extremely valuable & end up being reused rather than recycled.

6. More investment in lithium ion batteries = more money & investment in better batteries (lithium ion or otherwise). This improves efficiency across the board for mobile applications, cars, grid applications, etc (something we don't get with internal combustion engines).

The incomplete reasoning in your post is you're evaluating lithium standalone instead of examining the cost vs replacement (how does lithium ion fare against alternatives? are there better alternatives). Can you propose what you see as better alternatives rather than just making blanket complaints and blaming corporate democrats? (Also, lithium batteries are now a left/right idealogy thing? WTF).

[Chris2048]

Are lithium batteries ever used at grid-scale?

I though the point was that the high energy-density was convenient for mobility, but poor on most other metrics, including manufacturing complexity, stability, and safety.

Grid-scale wouldn't need to care so much about energy density versus stability and maintenance, in which case lead-acid, or compressed-gas storage should shine.

[epistasis]

Currently in the Texas grid interconnection queue, there are more GW of lithium ion storage than there are of new gas generation (figure labeled Exhibit 2):

https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/

Lithium ion is currently king here, it's easy and fast to deploy, with lots of off the shelf components, and cheap.

Texas' grid composition responds really quickly to economic changes, because anybody can connect and start making money. More highly regulated grids have been much slower to adapt to the new reality of cheap storage.

[ben_w]

Does this count as grid-scale?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31350880/elon-musk...

For your other points, I believe you are correct, but the reason lithium gets used anyway is because it’s now really cheap compared to the alternatives.

[vlovich123]

As Tesla has demonstrated Lithium-ion is pretty critical for balancing out a grid that has renewables in the mix. It drastically cuts costs and improves efficiencies because it can detect instability in the grid more quickly and arbitrage different power sources more efficiently (+ coal plants take a while to start up so it’s an important stop gap).

[selectodude]

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

Australia has a few now.

[mattashii]

> Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.

With modern coal plants, that isn't _too_ bad actually. Modern coal plants reach 46% efficiency[0], compared to the 30-35% for modern passenger cars (older cars = less efficient). This is a 30-50% [1] efficiency gain, while also emitting 30-45% more CO2 for the same amount of energy released (gasoline vs bituminous coal and anthracite, for diesel it's 25-40%).

So, depending on the coal burned, the efficiency of the car that is replaced, and the coal plant making the electricity, you could quite reasonably have a lower carbon footprint by driving a car 100% on coal-powered electricity instead of gasoline or diesel.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_... [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11

[jacobr1]

Also consider industrial carbon capture. It would be costly, but it seems it would easier to capture carbon emissions at the primary coal burning sites than with distributed burners. We still should be looking at non-coal, renewable options and I'm glad we are, but we still have a lot of milage with "cleaner" fossil-fuel based approaches. This IPCC Report[0] suggests 80%+ CO2 sequestration rates extrapolated from known technologies (built on smaller scales).

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100210022620/http://www1.ipcc....

[h0l0cube]

Tesla EVs were marketed to the upper-middle class as a status symbol based on cutting-edge looks and performance, and to merely 'signal' environmental consciousness. Most people I know who aspire to own one work in finance and consulting roles, and don't really care that much about the environment, they just want something cool. The poser environmentalism just comes along for the ride.

Likewise, when people upgrade to the latest iPhone every generation, they aren't thinking about their recycling program, let alone the environmental cost of extraction of rare earth materials, or the workers at Foxconn.

That Elon Musk didn't bother working on the waste part of the equation, doesn't surprise me.

[WhompingWindows]

You can list out the harms of lithium ion production, which I agree with, but they are vastly dwarfed by ICE harms. ICE warms the entire planet and changes the climate, which is a much more vast problem than the also problematic issues of resource extraction for lithium ion or any other resource, including fossil fuel too by the way.

[altacc]

Others have gone into the efficiency trade offs and I would add to that removing the local pollution effect of internal combustion engines is a great benefit. Even electric cars "powered by coal" move pollution away from population dense areas and allow large scale environmental harm reduction e.g. carbon capture. However, coal is a declining power source and a lot of the places with high numbers of electric cars already have significant carbon neutral or renewable electricity generation in place.

All you have described, the environmental impact, exploitation, pollution, etc... applies to current fossil fuel usage, if not more, so it's not a black and white choice, as you seem to present it. Fossil fuel had over a century of ever-increasing usage and global environmental damage without having to do anything significant to mitigate the effects. Whereas the relatively new high performance battery industry is already tackling this issue. Without the widespread need generated by electric cars it's questionable if that would happen. It is very rare, possibly unheard of, for such a significant technology to be launched with a perfectly formed lifecycle management in place. The market is created only once the need arises.

[jrockway]

What's your plan for moving around when our limited supply of fossil fuels are depleted?

[tonyedgecombe]

Not the OP but civilisation didn't start with the invention of the motor car. If you look at our general wellbeing it hasn't shifted one iota over the period that cars become pervasive.

[vel0city]

Cars became pervasive around the early 1900's. Are you seriously suggesting the average person's general wellbeing hasn't changed since 1908? I guess we could debate if cars were a critical technology to spur such change, but I don't know I can debate someone who disagrees that the average person was just as well off in 1920 compared to 2020. In what measures would you consider the person in the developed world in 1920 to be just as well off as the average person in the developed world in 2020? I limit this to just developed world because that would be where automobiles would have had the greater impact or lack of impact despite pervasiveness.

[ben_w]

That’s a bold claim, especially in context of running out of transport fuels starting from where we are now. What date range are you using for the period over which cars became pervasive?

[djsumdog]

Yes, and same with fracking. Documentaries like Gasland have gotten some deserved criticism because there is evidence of methane and natural gas coming out of water pipes/wells way back at the turn of the century. But that doesn't dismiss the other points of fracking fluid being incredibly toxic and how they will destroy watersheds (you can't just pump that crap into the Earth and say 'well it's below the water table' .. how do you even know?!)

I do agree electric vehicles are a pretty big lie. You can't buy yourself out of an environmental disaster. We can't just consume more. The "Green New Deal" is about replacing tons of buildings and infrastructure that are perfectly fine, and will cause TONS of new waste in an effort to .. reduce waste.

The best thing you can do for the environment: don't buy a new car. Just keep driving your current gas vehicle and maintain it (so long as it was made within the past 20 years with good fuel efficiency) and when you do decide to toss it for an electric: buy a used one if possible.