Posted on 05/11/2021 5:25:38 AM PDT by Red Badger
Answer: Of course they will, with mining being among the many other issues in pushing to eliminate internal-combustion engines in favor of an all-electric fleet. No one who has studied the composition of the energy-storage systems in electric cars could possibly miss the environmental dangers of such a transformation.
The most interesting point of this brief review of one potential environmental catastrophe is the media outlet raising the issue. Even if it got buried over the weekend, the fact that the New York Times raises the mining issues is significant:
The United States needs to quickly find new supplies of lithium as automakers ramp up manufacturing of electric vehicles.
Lithium is used in electric car batteries because it is lightweight, can store lots of energy and can be repeatedly recharged. Other ingredients like cobalt are needed to keep the battery stable.
But production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people, Ivan Penn and Eric Lipton report for The New York Times. Mining is one of the dirtiest businesses out there.
The NYT did a deeper dive on the specifics one day earlier in a high-profile, front-page piece that mainly hit on Friday. “Electric cars and renewable energy may not be as green as they appear,” Penn and Lipton warned:
But the project, known as Lithium Americas, has drawn protests from members of a Native American tribe, ranchers and environmental groups because it is expected to use billions of gallons of precious ground water, potentially contaminating some of it for 300 years, while leaving behind a giant mound of waste.
“Blowing up a mountain isn’t green, no matter how much marketing spin people put on it,” said Max Wilbert, who has been living in a tent on the proposed mine site while two lawsuits seeking to block the project wend their way through federal courts.
The fight over the Nevada mine is emblematic of a fundamental tension surfacing around the world: Electric cars and renewable energy may not be as green as they appear. Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.
That environmental toll has often been overlooked in part because there is a race underway among the United States, China, Europe and other major powers. Echoing past contests and wars over gold and oil, governments are fighting for supremacy over minerals that could help countries achieve economic and technological dominance for decades to come.
If we don’t mine it here, we will have to depend on mining elsewhere. That will be just as destructive to the global environment, plus make us dependent on the regimes that will ruthlessly extract these rare minerals. That puts us in no better position than we were when we refused to extract our own oil for our own consumption.
However, the environmental issues don’t end with mining. Manufacturing batteries is a highly toxic process, for instance, but battery disposal is even more so. Each car has its own battery, which means we’re already dealing with this, but forcing vehicles to go electric means multiplying those issues exponentially. The life cycle of the batteries will likely encourage shorter life cycles for vehicles as well, as the replacement costs of batteries might make disposal a better idea than refits.
Even more problematic is the question of energy distribution. Internal combustion engines allow for efficient production of energy within each car as needed, without needing to account for peaks and valleys in usage. Our current electric grid has become less reliable of late thanks to green-energy mandates, such as in California, where rolling blackouts are a regular summer feature before everyone’s car needs a charge from the grid. Where will the necessary energy originate to charge hundreds of millions of vehicles every day? Rather than use local internal combustion engines for power on demand, we will have to burn massive amounts of fossil fuels in less-efficient ways to provide the energy — or turn America’s vehicles into stationary statues for most of their life cycle.
Conversion to hydrogen makes more sense than conversion to electric storage systems, or even to clean-burning natural gas. Hydrogen has safety issues, and natural gas requires the kind of fracking that Biden hates but which provides a plentiful domestic supply. Every other path either requires more environmental damage, more reliance on foreign supplies, less ability for mobility, or a combination of all three. When the New York Times starts front-paging this point, perhaps even the Left will figure it out.
Update: A big welcome to readers of Citizen Free Press! CFP recently reminded us that solar panels have massive environmental consequences, too.
Yes
And wait till these batteries start to become "junk".
The whole subject is a joke without adding massive base load capacity to electrical power generation.
Windmills and solar panels are not going to make it.
Why not just use gasoline-powered generators that fit in the trunk? /s
Just like forcing plastic bags on the system versus paper, enviros will realize their idiocy when they see and feel it. Then, as always, they will blame the car manufacturers for their lack of environmentalism, not themselves and their blindness.
But none of the above have enough IQ points to research the truth. Heck, they're all stupid enough to believe they can change the weather.
plus electricity loses 50% in transmission
Thorium based nuclear is the answer, and it isn’t going to happen. The entire end of nuclear power is to turn Uranium into Plutonium.
You put a cup of silver in one end, and you get a cup of platinum out of the other, and you get some electricity as a useful waste product.
With Thorium (LFTR reactors) the only waste produced is used in new LFTRs as an activator element.
Put one of these reactor facilities (about the size of a two bedroom residential home) along the coastline of the US and you solve 1) the electrical energy crisis, 2) the fresh water scarcity crisis, and 3) Sea level change (if you believe in that BS).
But it is only going to happen in countries that are actually motivated to solve these problems. So where are all of these reactors now? India and China, primarily.
It’s a pity too, since the US has 40 percent of all the Thorium on the planet.
It was never about ‘Climate Change’, it was about ‘control’.....................
LOL electric cars get their energy from those little holes in the walls.
Why should a 15 yr old girl waiting in line at Starbucks worry about that. She’s too busy saving the world from fossil fuels on her phone.
And so the seeds are planted for the real push to electric vehicles, to eliminate private transportation ...
“battery disposal”
Lithium motor vehicle batteries will be recycled.
“the proposal establishes specific requirements at each stage of the battery value chain.
“In very broad terms, this includes ensuring that raw materials are supplied sustainably and responsibly, that battery cells, modules and packs are manufactured using clean energy, contain low amount of hazardous substances, are energy efficient and designed to last long, and that are properly collected, recycled or repurposed. Specific focus on the end of their life phase is needed to ensure that no battery is lost to waste, but that batteries are rather repurposed or remanufactured and that the valuable materials they contain feed back into the economy.
“In order to have a significant impact on the EU battery market, these measures are legally binding and adopted at EU level.”
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_20_2311
Even Elon Musk, the schizoid, cult like figure who leads Tesla and who’s goal is to die on Mars, admits that “green energy” can never power a modern industrial society. Nor will Americans ever maintain their standard of living as long as people like Biden, Kerry, Soros and their ilk have power.
Yes, coal produced energy, mining for minerals, dead batteries and obsolesent technology junked. There are “auto graveyards/scrapyards but people do still use them to harvest parts for cars.
Electronics is a disposable world.
And that oil is still going to leak loose in the Gulf from the bottom of the sea.
And for the time being the rest of the world (especially new users of gas powered cars) aren’t going “electric” so there will still be use of these fuels, exhaust, etc.
All we have done is diminishes our industrial production capacity and given up our freedom of travel.
This isn’t a better mousetrap. This is a government mandated change. Follow the money. See who lobbied, see how they profit.
“plus electricity loses 50% in transmission”
No it does not.
Transformers are used to step up voltages, greatly reducing transmission losses.
Yep! Here in CA, we have now seasonal brown-outs due to demand along with multi-day shut-downs due to fire risk. Oh, and we have also gone completely insane and mandated that all vehicles sold here must be “zero emission” by 2035.
BS article.
Stopped reading when it got to lamenting about cobalt. Tesla is eliminating cobalt from battery production.
Lithium is highly recyclable. Yes we’ll need a lot of it, but not like there’s a no-impact alternative.
Million-mile battery life is being achieved. 3M+ is predicted as battery management software improves.
Yes, EVs aren’t as “green” as evangelists & naysayers claim - but there’sa lot going for them. Obsolete arguments are getting tiresome.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.