Environmentalist everywhere have been fighting mining industry for ever, often confused and co-opted by NIMBYs. Yes it is an inconvenient truth that all consumption hurts us. A car is still a car even if it is electric, we are of course better of with no cars at all. Very few people are actually arguing that.
I want to point out you started this quagmire by connecting into a broader narrative. The linked article simply says "we think localized emissions go down when EV adoption rates go up in a particular area" which says nothing about this larger discussion about the net social effects of EVs. Personally I believe we can discuss this until the end of time without a conclusive answer until someone has completely documented and analyzed all the relevant supply chains end to end for every new ICE car and every new EV car.
I really don't have any qualms about posting unpopular facts and truths.
Localized or not, we live in a globalized world and it's a fact that lithium ion battery production is dangerous and dirty work on par with the petroleum that it is trying to eliminate. EV fanatics don't like hearing this, but it is true.
Agree to disagree to agree. One thing that's particularly dangerous and dirty right now is cobalt. (Used primarily in rechargeable batteries, and airbags, jet engines, etc) Unlike some other exotic materials, it's currently a supply chain that cannot prove which materials were obtained using modern techniques and heavy equipment, and which ones were obtained by hand through brutalized labor practices.
I caught an interview on NPR recently[1] with the author of "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives"
The claim that lithium ion battery production is as bad as petroleum production is ridiculous.
The scale of mining required to produce a lithium-ion battery and the solar panels to charge it is far lower than required to produce and refine the petroleum used over the lifetime of a vehicle.
The other little secret about mining is that nasty as it is, the impact of non-petroleum mining on the environment is miniscule compared to farming, which is far more damaging but has much better PR.
It’s on a completely different order of magnitude. And actually, yes, pollution far away from major population centers is much better than pollution within cities- regardless of what country it’s in.
The US has just committed to billions of dollars per year in incentives to bring that pollution to the US. Between the IRA's 10-year expansion of incentives for buying cars with US-manufactured batteries and US-mined minerals, Section 45X, the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit, is the reason billions of dollars of battery manufacturing and associated supply chain investments on US soil were announced in 2022.
1. And what happens when EVs become 30,40,50, or even 90% of the automobile fleets around the world?
You're going to need to ramp up the otherwise dirty and disgusting production of LiOn to meet demand. LiOn production is as dirty if not worse than petroleum distillation and drilling.
EV batteries aren't disposed of, they're reused as stationary storage, then recycled, with over 97% of the raw materials recoverable to put into new batteries as of 2021. Redwood Materials recycles over 60 tons of them per day, and has another facility opening in 2023 that can handle an additional 125,000 tons per year. The materials are too valuable to throw out, so a market for reusing and recycling them has existed as long as li-ion electric cars have existed.