[epistasis]

Lithium is not typically mined from rock today, though it may be in the future.

And "concerns" about that mining would carry far more weight if there was also concern about one or both of 1) extracting 1000s of tons of rock for steel and other parts of car manufacturing, or 2) extracting many multiples of that from the earth in the form of fossil fuels, which end up in the atmosphere and change the climate.

If a typical car travels for 200,000 miles, and gets 30mpg, then that car will consume 47,000 pounds of gasoline (requiring even more oil extraction), and emit 128,000 pounds of CO2 in its lifetime.

Though all of my personal political effort is directed at ways for people to live their lives with less car and still live their life as happy or happier, I find gripes about lithium extraction to be completely counterproductive to my goals. For all their faults, EVs' extraction of lithium is an order of magnitude better than the alternative and the status quo. And the people complaining about lithium are not proposing anything better, the are proposing sticking with fossil fuels.

[otikik]

> If a typical car travels for 200,000 miles, and gets 30mpg, then that car will consume 47,000 pounds of gasoline (requiring even more oil extraction), and emit 128,000 pounds of CO2 in its lifetime.

For non-imperialists:

If a typical car travels for 320,000 kilometers, and gets 13km/l, then that car will consume 25,000 liters of gasoline (requiring even more oil extraction), and emit 58,000 Kgs of CO2 in its lifetime.