My rough and ready sums put 30,000 pounds of petrol through the lifetime of an average ICE car.
Meanwhile, I see numbers like this a lot and they always seem to trend high. You're talking 250 tons of ores to make perhaps 250-1000kg of the car; an efficiency of between 0.1 and 0.4 percent over some pretty straightforward, widely available ores. That doesn't really stack up with the numbers you get if you look at the efficiency of commercial ores for those minerals.
So I think the mining is comparable between battery and petrol, but as others point out, you can recycle the battery; the petrol had become problematic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
If nothing else, you could grind up the batteries and treat them as ore for any single one of the minerals used, and by your numbers you'd be way better off.
This is basically just an appeal to big numbers. "500,000 pounds? That's a lot! ICE cars must certainly be less polluting. I mean, just look at the numbers: you have to dig up FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS of Earth's crust! FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND! That's HALF A MILLION!"
Can they? I've seen people make this claim, but I've not seen it actually substantiated. Who has successfully recycled one, what was their yield, what was the cost?
The techniques that separate lithium from ore are extreme overkill for separating lithium from dead batteries. Recycling lithium is like mining lithium on easy mode: better yield and cost. If an EV can justify the raw resource extraction within one car lifetime -- and it can, handily -- it justifies the recycling. We should expect recycling to be (average EV lifetime) behind on the scale curve, though, which will make it a prime source for anti-EV talking points until the market saturates in a decade or two.
Well why shouldn't they be? Most major auto makers are phasing out development of new ICE drivetrains, and phasing out ICE manufacturing altogether. Meanwhile Tesla is certainly not without criticism.
YMMV on exactly what counts as "political", but I can easily imagine someone having an honest, good faith belief that investing in Toyota's transition to EVs is just as good for the planet as investing in Tesla's from-scratch EVs.
A electric cars are mostly a luxury item for rich people to feel better. Not sure why you think Tesla should have a good rating.
They are harmful in that they are actively distracting from the proper solution: that people shouldn't have private cars.
The environmental cost to produce car, the space they take up in the cities, in the end private car ownership can not be made sustainable even if they run on electric. Tech wont solve the climate crisis, only societal change will.
Whenever I see an argument like this I'm confused by how hand-wavey "just achieve societal change" is. Like, sure, there's various issues with various technological approaches, but it's not as if the kind of broad social change that'd see private cars outlawed develops overnight.
If anything, the last couple of decades demonstrate pretty convincingly and depressingly that putting together real momentum (read: won referendums on things like carbon taxes, _not_ push polls) is capital-H Hard. It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either. Consider [1]: this is in a constituency electorally dominated by one of the most avowedly socially-liberal cities in the US and year after year it goes down by similar margins, and that's incredibly anodyne compared to straight-up getting rid of private cars.
Conversely, supply-side energy mix changes have, over the same timeframe, made drastic improvements in emissions-per-capita without requiring much/any self-sacrifice. Martyrdom doesn't really scale in the same way.
So: what's your plan for gaining the power required to implement your scenario, taking into account the apparent ineffectiveness of decades of messaging? "just ban the cars" would be sensical if you were emperor for a day, but failing any miracles it seems to me that the real distraction is this sort of utopianism.
That's true, though the intent behind posting the referendum was as a reflection of (lack of) direct public support for potentially personally painful measures. Getting something done through legislative channels obviously isn't worthless or meaningless, but it's not as direct of a reflection of a willingness to incur changes as a referendum is. In a unipolar state like WA, the actions of the legislature can be pretty divorced from actual popular sentiment, and runs the risk of being undone by referendum - which has a lot of precedent in fairly recent WA history.
It's a bit circular to refer to it as personally painful measures though, and that seems to be a regular trope.
Carbon taxes etc., are fairly subtle and boring technocratic method to achieve a goal. The reaction to them is almost entirely based on false impressions, a nested series of false impressions actually. There is no problem, there is no solution, this solution would make things worse, this solution would hurt me personally. this solution is just a scam and so on.
"I don't want to do the thing that economists say is most efficient, because it would be painful" as a democratic opinion doesn't really make any sense. If it's efficient then you can use the efficiency gains to compensate anyone who loses out.
And then that deliberately misinformed reaction is somehow raised as yet another reason for not doing the most sensible thing, and to talk about how "painful" it would be to stop polluting and incentivize efficiency.
And the only reason we appear to need to talk about what people want in this weird, third-hand, circular way, is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change. And since that answer isn't acceptable to some people, they need to come up with elaborate ways to prove that people don't actually want what they say they want, and that economists say is the best thing to do.
> It's a bit circular to refer to it as personally painful measures though, and that seems to be a regular trope.
I guess I should have said "popularly perceived to be personally painful" - which I think you'd agree with? Carbon taxes are fantastic measures that are one of our best shots at success, and I think it's a shame the referendums didn't pass. The actual harm to voters would objectively be pretty low, but again, perception is what matters. Fact can obviously feed into perception, but in a case like this where we're explicitly dealing with misinformation campaigns correctness is necessary but, alone, insufficient.
And yeah, of course that reaction is deliberately misinformed - I tried to catch that in my original comment:
> It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either.
The proponents of these bills had their shot. So did the deceptive oil majors. So far, hasn't worked out. What's the new plan - cede the fight for public opinion and try to do everything via administrative rearguard actions? I'm sticking to this point because the implicit response usually seems to be either that or "wait for a utopian mass moral awakening" - and neither is much of a strategy.
> is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change.
Well, kinda, and that's what I was getting at by mentioning push polling. If you position addressing climate change as a common-sense positive-balance deal requiring zero self-sacrifice, then sure. However, the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do is well-documented. If you drill down a little into what that willingness to incur change actually looks like, you get results like [1]. This is why referendum results are interesting as indicators of revealed preference. What I'm trying to avoid here is taking the push-poll cheap idealism as deep commitment, and using that to inform commitment to dead-end policy choices.
The core of my argument here is
1) real climate action is essential, and carbon taxes are one of the best means of implementing this from a technical perspective
2) voting outcomes and polling suggest that public support for changes that are popularly perceived as personally painful is limited, even in cases of subtle and boring technocratic methods like (1)
3) given (2), attaining the popular support necessary to wholesale ban private cars appears wildly unlikely
4) therefore, maybe focus on the stuff that we're actually somewhat close to (2016 vs 2018 referendums gained ~4%) instead of utopian pipe dreams that inspire fierce opposition
I may have been unclear because I feel like a lot of your point is addressing arguments I didn't make - I agree that carbon taxes are great and that opposition to them is largely not substantive. The problem I'm trying to point out is that if _even in this case_ things are ropey, talking about banning cars is beyond pie-in-the-sky. There's a strong need to focus on interventions that are minimally disruptive to lifestyles in order to maintain the degree of popular support necessary for long-term change. Convincing someone of the (true facts!) that a supply-side intervention like carbon pricing will have a minimally negative or positive impact on their day-to-day is way easier than talking that hypothetical person out of their car.
Transitioning from car-centric to human-centric cities is not about sacrifice. It is about understanding how cars actually keep cities from being places that could be much more enjoyable to live in.
Having finding trouble an apartment? Without all the wasted space for cars we could have much denser cities. Problem solved!
Want to have a place where children can actually play outside safely? Again, ban cars and you don't have to move to the country or suburbia.
Tired of how loud cities are? Oh boy, do I have a solution for that.
I am not preaching sacrifice, I am saying if we change some things we can achieve much better living conditions for everyone, a plus in living standard.
So it is more of a matter of getting people to be conscious about how things actually work.
So no, I am not Utopian. The point still stands that Tech wont solve the issues. It is sink or swim for humanity.
OMG . Not personal, but you're delusional and/or straight up lying.
Denser cities are more enjoyable to live ? Wrong.
Denser cities safer for children to play outside ? Wrong.
Cities are loud because of cars ? With all that increased density you will have your surroundings much noisier when it hurts most - at the end of the day, when everyone is back from the job, and having a good time at home. Loud music, celebrations, brawls, arguments, etc.
No, cramping more people in the same space will not this space more livable; ask Chinese .
I don't get why I am getting such emotional responses.
Most of the noise in cities comes from cars, that is a fact. Even dense cities can be fairly quiet. I suggest watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
Plus China has probably not the best building codes, the problem can be further improved by having proper sound isolation in homes.
Dense cities mean you will have everything in walking distance. There will be much more space for parks and other areas of recreation.
You're preaching to the choir: I personally agree with much of this (lived in metro Tokyo), but that's honestly quite irrelevant. The point of contention isn't whether it'd be better in some absolute sense - it's whether you can convince enough people of the correctness of your vision to attain the support required to implement it.
It's not like your average American isn't aware of these arguments; they're just not broadly convincing (even if, from your or my perspective, they are). If they were, population flows would be headed in the other direction.
I'm pushing back here because your solution appears to be to continue to make the same arguments that have, so far, failed to convince enough people to deflect us from our current trajectory. More of the same, but louder? And given the urgency of the position, it's not like waiting on natural generational shift is much of an answer.
That's more or less why I take the exact opposite position and am bullish on anything that involves supply-side efficiency and bearish on anything that involves people having spontaneous moral awakenings.
It's not about car-free life. It's about dense cities being terrible places to live unless you're at a level of wealth high enough to isolate yourself from the poverty, crime, noise, etc in a secure luxury apartment in an upmarket area.
IMHO, big cities are dying, they're a relic of the past. The Internet had already killed physical retail. The pandemic killed off more businesses while WFH workers fled the cities. Soft-on-crime policy trends seem to be hastening the decline.
And in a digitally connected world there's simply fewer reasons to physically pack ever more people into small spaces.
I don't live in a city. I'm 20 miles from the nearest grocery store. I build real physical things with my hands that require physical materials like lumber to haul around. I can't haul 2000 lb of lumber on the back of my road bike.
What would be the issue with just having your stuff delivered then?
And yeah every rule needs exceptions, of course there should be ways to rent cars for special occasion, I am just against general private car ownership for most people.
Edit: General private car ownership of people living in the cities that is
I hate cars as much as the next guy, but transitioning all urban life away from cars is a much more difficult project than transitioning urban life to electric cars.
The no-cars world requires a huge amount of political buy-in and you’d be going through the most politically annoying group in the US – homeowners. The transition to electric cars can be done through simple laws that change the incentives (like by implementing a federal gas tax so it’s cheaper to drive electric, or heavily subsidizing electric cars)
I think your view is skewed towards living in a city. your solution doesn't work for a number of reasons. if I wanted to go somewhere I would call an Uber and they would drive 20 or 30 miles to pick me up and then 40 or 50 miles more to drop me off and then the reverse would happen when I wanted to go home Rather than me just driving the 100 miles there and back You have additional overhead of somebody having to come pick me up doubling the miles driven. That person has to get paid which makes it even more expensive. And there are still cars! I'm just not allowed to own one. if I'm sharing a ride which is unlikely it will take up way more time which is also an expensive drag on the economy.
delivery here is unreliable and expensive. if I'm picking out wood I have to go through dozens of boards to find ones that aren't fucked up. I need to find ones that are suitable for the job that I'm trying to use them for. A delivery guy would just grab whatever and throw it in the truck. It's not like I'm ordering an iPod off of Amazon. no mileage savings would be had because it is unlikely that anybody else would be having something delivered in the middle of nowhere.
These are fair points. I am actually sorry that my last post might have been more dismissive than was called for.
The thing is most people live in urban areas (and the general trend is for that to increase) and don't work in woodworking. So this caused me to be a bit dismissive as it doesn't really effect the main point that much.
As I said, there will always be exceptions. I think the more productive discussion is to find what would work for most people, that is people in an urban setting. Then we can figure out how to make it work for people farther out.
I am not sure what the best solution for your situation would be. I guess the biggest quick win would be just to get private cars out of the cities. It doesn't really matter if a few people farther out own cars as long as they are a minority. Maybe that is where electric cars would come in handy but then again they lack the range.
Again, most people live in urban areas and prefer to live in urban areas and once cities become more green they will become even more attractive furthering urbanization. Whether the few people living outside own a car or not will hardly matter.
I personally think the best “solution” to needing any vehicle (car, truck) “outside a city” is one that runs on petrol alternatives (biodiesel, among others, being a common one). For remote/very very cold regions gasoline still has high value because they’re easier to start in way sub zero temps.
for the record there’s no bias against EVs here
> 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium
> 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt
> 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, 25,000 pounds of ore for copper
> Digging up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust
> For just - one - battery.
https://twitter.com/brianroemmele/status/1503176565974216710
Would appreciate a fact check if this is anyone's business here