[cogman10]

> So I want us to be collectively better than that. But the responses that I am getting when I raise this point, does not give me much hope. Because people latch on the easiest thing. That I am "Fear mongering"!

It's been studied. You have no concrete problem you can point to. You are fear mongering because you are worried about a potential heretofore demonstrated or observed problem.

And your fears are particularly unfounded because we are actually already producing and recycling these batteries today. If there's a risk, you could point to an exact problem that's being commonly observed right now.

> On concrete terms, this would look like some regulation that require EV companies to declare a plan regarding how they will process/recycle old batteries before they launch a product. And a way to closely watch that it is being carried out.

I don't really disagree with this. My argument is entirely around the fact that even with the absence of such a regulation, the batteries come out on top in terms of their environmental impact. And they are valuable enough that recycling naturally happens without any sort of plan being put into place to handle them.

> As of now, anything "green" gets a free pass.

What you are giving a free pass to is fossil fuels. You are failing to account for the amount of damage they are provably doing right now because they drop their pollutants into the atmosphere.

That's why I call your comments fear mongering. You are hyper focusing on a potential unproven issue that will provably be nowhere near as damaging as burning fossil fuels even in the worst imaginable case as a way to say "Maybe we should just keep burning fossil fuels because they are a better known bad thing".

If we grounded up every single battery ever produced and dumped that particulate matter into the ocean, we will have done far less damage than what's already been done to the ocean from fossil fuel extraction and burning. There is simply not enough material in these batteries to cause the sort of damage you are worried about. Even if these things were all made of the worst most toxic elements imaginable (they aren't).

[qsera]

The concrete issue is this. We seem to want to give every incentives to these companies as possible to get them to drive the EV transition as soon as possible. Even when these incentives are in the form of free pass in terms of lax regulations that I mentioned earlier.

You are asking me to give a concrete example of how it will be abused. I don't have that. Sorry. You win, I guess.