[epistasis]

What dirty mining for batteries? Please be specific. This story was always a PR drive that focused on the "dirtiness" of batteries but never compares it to the dirtiness of all the other parts of competing technologies.

And talking about the "dirtiness" of batteries but not every other single part of our industry (steel for everything, all the nasty stuff for electrolyzers, etc.) is all part of prioritizing emotional over rational. Public discussion of our energy system is definitely more emotional than rational, and I would argue that the emotional side of things means that we do a lot more fossil fuels and dirty tech, whereas a more rational approach would have us on far more solar and storage than we currently are, or plan to do.

[cosmic_cheese]

There’s a lot of pressure for batteries to become cleaner too, which has resulted in a lot of money going into R&D of more effective chemistries comprised of more readily available materials. It’s difficult to express the sheer momentum we have in this field right now and it would be a shame if cold water got dumped on it by negative public perception, cooling investments. It’d be a textbook example of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good and of squandered potential.

[kbolino]

Batteries require specific minerals that are largely unique to them. The amount of lithium, for example, needed for all other purposes combined is dwarfed by the amount used to make batteries. Of course all industry and mining is dirty, the question is of unique costs to each solution. You don't need to mine nearly as much lithium, even if you account for all the infrastructure and logistics, to make and distribute biofuel. But then you need to dedicate a lot of arable land, which will have other effects. The point is not to remove batteries from the discussion but to include all solutions.