At first glance, electric cars are absolutely more efficient and ecological in terms of emissions, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency itself, an electric car emits on average around 4.4 tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared to 11.4 tons of a gasoline car that seems quite promising at first, but it's not that simple.
Electric cars in many aspects are as ecological as the electricity that feeds them and that is because we have been led to believe that an electric car does not pollute, but where does that electricity come from and how are the cars stored? This is the mask of electric cars. .
The United States Energy Information Administration As of 2020, almost 61% of the electrical energy in the United States cars comes from fossil fuels, this includes 23.4% of Coal and 38.4% of natural gas, so if your electric car it is charged with electricity produced by coal, so it is not really reducing carbon emissions as much as we have been led to believe.
According to another study from the University of Cambridge, in 2021 the production of a single electric car generated around 63% more carbon dioxide compared to a traditional gasoline car, 63% It is a huge difference, this happens mainly because what more contaminates in the process of creating an electric car, is what is presumed so much, its batteries.
And it is that the batteries of electric cars are not simple alkaline batteries that you can buy in a local store, they are highly sophisticated and powerful lithium-ion batteries, this type of batteries according to a report by the BBC can represent up to 50% of the total cost of production of an electric car, put another way, unless you can make those batteries efficiently and green, we're starting at a disadvantage in terms of carbon missions.
And it is the materials that make up the battery that pollutes so much, such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, in fact, according to Science magazine, around 500,000 gallons of water are needed to produce a single ton of lithium, the extraction lithium often involves the use of toxic chemicals that can contaminate water and soil, and now to add to this whole equation cobalt and nickel a study from leiden university in the netherlands estimates that the demand for cobalt could increase up to 47% by 2030, largely due to the growing demand for electric vehicles.
Cobalt is essential for electric car batteries due to its ability to handle high temperatures and maintain chemical stability and here comes perhaps the darkest part of this story, most of the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. , which I have already told in other publications.
Human rights violations and child labor in cobalt mines have been well documented, according to Amnesty International around 40,000 children work in cobalt mines in the Republic of Congo, this is not just a matter of carbon missions and environment, it is about Human Rights and that is why they are called blood batteries.
Then we have the problem of the water footprint of these minerals, a 2020 study in the journal nature revealed that the extraction of lithium, cobalt and nickel for electric car batteries can deplete local water supplies and contaminate water with Toxic chemicals in places like the Salar de Atacama in Chile, which is one of the largest lithium deposits in the world, water wells have been reported to be running dry due to lithium mining.
And this is just beginning, we are talking about pollution only in the process of creating the electric car, which perhaps is not the worst thing, what nobody tells us when selling us that electric car is that it will happen to all the car batteries electric once they no longer serve, and it is that lithium-ion batteries that are the most used in electric cars have a limited useful life according to research published in the journal of Energy storage in 2021, the useful life of these Batteries only last 10-20 years, after that they end up in a landfill and pollute in an extremely lethal way.
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 2019 around 3 million tons of lithium ion batteries were discarded worldwide, to really visualize what that is you could put all those batteries online and they could range from the Mexico City to Buenos Aires Argentina not once but three times and this is just the result of a single year.
We are talking about chemical compounds that can have a long-lasting and dangerous impact on our environment and as you can imagine, recycling these batteries is a complex and expensive process and neither Tesla nor the largest electric car manufacturers are going to pay for it, because that one is not going to know
your problem, then think before you get into “ecological fashion”.
While you clearly are better researched in this topic than I am I have always wondered how scarce lithium actually is. I'm under the impression that it is one of the rarest substances on earth. Is this the case?
I think it is like all substances on earth, an example is oil; At one point it was very difficult to find it, until enough money and resources were invested to track it down, all you have to do is look in the right place.
well i certainly hope that is the case because we are using the bejesus out of it these days.
I agree that the electric car industry, as it stands, is far from perfect and is only as clean as the energy it uses as 'fuel'.
However, it's important to remember that:
Neither solution is perfect - however, the oil industry easily rates as one of the most evil constructs in human history, proven over and over again. Electrical components are engrained into all areas of life already, including oil based cars. I think the process of improving electrical car construction is far more straightforward and likely than anything equivalent from the oil industry. History makes this clear.
Thanks in advance for your comments, it is very accurate on many points and I agree on many of them, but:
I assure you that the same investor groups that have a stake in the oil companies are in the companies that manufacture electric cars, so we are talking about the same, with the same evil system.
I assure you that there are other technologies to be used in cars such as the hydrogen engine (there are others), which pollute much less and that it is not convenient for "them" to develop.
In addition, everything that is behind the "environmental wave" promoted by globalists, who demand higher taxes from taxpayers to give subsidies to these companies through laws promoted by corrupt politicians who only obey the elites; You don't see the same pattern.
As for the parts or components, of course there is a greater demand from combustion cars because there are many more than electric cars, the car business sells parts; the electric car business is the subsidies and the battery; That is why many traditional companies that manufacture cars are beginning to manufacture electric cars, it is another business, do not fall for innocent and believe that they do it for the planet.
And not to mention Musk's character, it is more than documented that he is part of the evil elite that you mention.
And you are wrong in comparing an electronic device, or the 8 -12 4.8 g lithium cells used by a laptop that I don't have, because I use a desktop one; with the 10,000 grams of lithium that an electric car uses.
Also, I wouldn't worry much about the CO2 that cars burn, I would worry about the millions of harmful substances that are everywhere produced by the millions of industries that the corporate elites you mention manage and that are present in our food and medicines, A professional in the area tells you.
Everything can be improved, the problem is that it doesn't suit "them".
I was involved in the free energy community 20 years ago and am well aware of the situation and of the people who have been murdered trying to deliver truly free alternatives, such as engines that run on water. I am not ignorant of these things, I am simply focusing on the topic of oil vs electricity, since that is where the dynamic of the commercial world is stuck at present. In reality, there is no 'best' technology because all of these technologies - even the totally clean ones - are a replacement for the allowance of the development of our own internal energy, which is the actual source of creation.
So I am not 'pro electric car' per se, I simply know that the electric car option is better for us - once mature - than the oil one is. The lithium batteries are likely only a temporary design and there are alternatives that are more efficient and that don't use lithium already on the way to market.
Yes, the same shady groups control most/all large corporations and no we should not trust them to be operating in our best interests. None the less, we are using cars.
It is estimated that we currently have something like 18.5 billion cell phones on earth (https://www.statista.com/statistics/245501/multiple-mobile-device-ownership-worldwide/). Using the measure of lithium you quoted, that roughly equates to 888 million KG of lithium within them.
It is estimated that a Tesla batter has between 5 and 75kg of Lithium (depending on the model): https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/13/instagram-posts/instagram-post-misleads-about-lithium-mining-and-t/
If we take a figure near the top end, of around 60kg per car, then this equates to roughly 14.8M Telsas to equal the amount of lithium in the cell phones currently in use. In 2022 just over 10M EVs were delivered globally (across all manufacturers), but they don't all use that much lithium.
If we add in the other electric devices that use Lithium batteries, it seems possible that very roughly, the total EVs might use less than the other devices combined at this point. Ultimately, it is less important whether cars or computers use the most than it is to understand the damage being done and how it can be fixed. However, I just make this point to highlight that it is entirely relevant to compare these two technology types if you are trying to frame one as being terrible and the other as irrelevant.
I agree that overall pollution is more of a concern than CO2 and I agree that there are huge lies being told in this regard. The truth gets denied 10 times in a news article or news show before I even have time to open my mouth.
Despite all of the downsides and challenges, I am still pretty clear that on balance the electric option is the safer when compared to oil.