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God the environmental damage caused by making all these batteries, only to be used in a cyber truck and dumped in a car park.
Remember when Elon was pretending to be saving the environment, well now he isn't.
Batteries can be recycled, reused or repurposed. It’s nowhere near as damaging as drilling for/refining/shipping/burning oil and we decided we are perfectly okay with that.
Why is the alternative to an EV SUV a combustion engine SUV? Why isn't cycling and public transport?
I'm not saving ICEs are good and EV are bad but that maybe... both aren't great anyway, especially when actual alternatives that make people healthier do exist.
Biking doesn’t always work well in the us because shit is spread out further.
Anything else but driving doesn't work well in the US because the "way of life" is indeed car centric. It will never change without infrastructure, including but not limited to bike lanes. Large distances are possible with (electric) bike but this at least needs to be safe.
So... yes I'm not advocating for somebody leaving the middle of absolute nowhere to give up on their cars. This is not even about cities (as the article mentions a parking lot I assume it's next or even inside a city).
No, my point instead is to question the false dichotomy.
I agree we shouldn’t have set things up as we did but it’s done and there is no way I’m biking what would be a 40 minute drive to microcenter.
I did spend last week biking 45min somewhere and back (so 1h30) for 4 days in a row. It's not for everyone ... but not only it's feasible but (and I know it will sound crazy to some) I actually did enjoy it. On the last day I even did the last trip with a new friend, chatting the entire ride.
Again, I'm not arguing that anybody should do that, or have fun doing, only that's it not impossible.
Agreed. The person you're responding to is using the same logic as "wind turbines kill birds", "EVs run on FF electricity", etc. Anyone trying to convince you to let perfection get in the way of progress is almost certainly being disingenuous, or at best has been talked into it by someone who was.
The lithium mining process is laborious, dangerous, and releases radioactive elements into groundwater and into the air as mine tailings. Not to mention, most of Earth's lithium reserves are in Chile, Bolivia, and Rwanda. With Western investors backing corrupt national governments, this means that exploitative labor (read: slavery) is the primary means of extraction.
It is, in comparison to other extraction methods, literally just as bad.
Mexico has a giant deposit but they insist on silly things like environmental regulations.
Actually lithium isn’t the long term plan, it’s just the plan for today. Sodium is the long term. But huge lithium deposits exists in the US and China too.
You can even filter it out of the oceans. It's just not worth the cost right now
I thought it was widely accepted that lithium mining is far more harmful to the environment than drilling for oil, and that the hope was that not burning oil/gas we offset the mining (to the point if u drive ur electric car x miles it's cleaner overall than if u drive an ICE vehicle). Do you have information that states otherwise?
No. Not even close.
I've got a nonsense idea with no sources do you have sources to contradict it?
Start with sources that back-up the nonsense you just made up. Because there is just no possible way that extracting 1 EV's worth of lithium is equivalent pollution to the expected 200-400 thousand miles of ICE driving it offsets.
Oil spills are far worse for the environment than mining could be. Also, electric cars keep air pollution in cities down. Not saying there is zero environmental impact but mining is not nearly as bad as fossil fuels can be, and same could be said for nuclear as well.
They won't be, though :(
They absolutely will. Those minerals are valuable.
Wait, where is this parking lot again?
Lithium is pretty stable. Those dumbtrucks will rot there for some time, then got reposessed and eventually moved to a recycling plant, and almost all of the lithium will eventually be used for something useful.
They probably won't even actually recycle the batteries. The packs and batteries are still gonna be good. They'll just pull the whole battery packs out and use them in other vehicles or stationary storage.
Probably. Unless it's something very proprietary that is specifically incompatible with everything, I wouldn't put that past the current Tesla people.
They literally already are and have been for years.
Lithium mining is horrible for the environment too. I don't think that's a bit improvement over gas\oil
It happens once and is reusable forever. It’s a massive improvement.
Sure, and it's a good interim tech until we get things like hydrogen working better.
Dude hydrogen is a bait and switch. We’ve had hydrogen engine tech forever. As for the source, you CAN get it from water after putting in more energy into it than you get out of it, or you can just refine it from oil. Guess what the plan has always been?
Hydrogen is just a way to greenwash big oil.
there are modern ways of doing it they're pretty efficient from what I've been reading using natural gas and water or electrolysis but I'm no scientist so I'm not going to try to explain it here I think maybe you should look into some more modern methods than what you're talking about.
Natural gas is not green. Not even close. It’s just more convenient. Electrolysis cannot magically be made more efficient here either. It takes a certain amount of energy to break those chemical bonds and you can’t magically break those bonds using less energy. The amount of energy you get from burning that hydrogen is less than what you put in to break those bonds via electrolysis.
I actually do know what I’m talking about here.
Elon was always about making money. The marketing department was all about saving things.
EVs were never about saving the environment. It does so much damage making a new EV. If companies wanted to save the environment they would have invested in refurbishing and updating older used cars.
EDIT: Sad how many ignorant people are down voting this without even attempting to look up the environmental cost of making a brand new car loading with rare earth minerals. While destroying a slightly older car that's already been built and whose environmental impact has already been dealt with and would best be put to use rather than sit in a junk yard for 50 years.
Too many corporate boot lickers believing the car companies based on nothing more than "Green" buzz words.
Lithium can now be produced in the USA. It’s 99% recyclable and most new tech behind batteries is getting away from lithium all together.
It is technically recyclable, but it's so cost prohibitive compared to just building new that no one really does it at this point. Maybe someday.
It's almost certainly something that will get worked out on its own. There isn't enough volume to justify lithium battery recycling at this point. After a decade of EVs being mainstream, there will be.
That said, GP is correct that EVs are about saving the car industry, not about saving the environment. Getting better walking/biking/public transportation infrastructure is the way to go. Ebikes, in particular, open up biking transportation to a lot of people who hesitated before. The amount of lithium used in them is tiny compared to cars, and the market can likely be served by sodium-ion batts, anyway.
You say that like it's already happening at scale. Get real.
Well. It can at least be produced without the toxicity of destroying places.
The most environmentally friendly thing you can do as a car owner is just keep the oldest car u have alive as long as possible. Cash for lunkers wasn't about getting people in cleaner cars, it was about subsidizing companies so they could sell more while destroying perfectly good vehicles. This shredded the used car market and we are paying for it now. Literally. If you need to get a new car anyways, sure an ev or hybrid might be the way. But keeping a stinky old diesel running, while it may seem counterintuitive, is the cleaner thing to do. What we wmit driving pails in comparison to the production pollution associated with all these throw away cars.
The most environmentally friendly thing you can do as a car owner is stop being one. Ride a bike. Take Mass Transit. Walk.
That's a great idea unless you are rural. City folks can do these things far easier than people that the nearest store is 10 miles away.
Ride a horse! ;)
Spoken like a true pedestrian. I live in one of the bigger "cities" in my state and it's smaller than a "small town" in the last state I lived in, not having a car here is impossible. The most environmentally friendly thing to do would be abandon all technology and eat berries in a cave and die at 30 because of poor hygiene, your comment is irrelevant to the conversation at hand.
Don't worry about it. You'll be dead from a multiple simultaneous crises. Your car won't save you.
We in the "rich" world already have a housing crisis where masses would love a cave over their current sleeping rough. Berries would be nice too and hunger is all too well known in the developed world.
You are way out of touch. Congratulations to be so fortunate.
Fuck off, shill.
The batteries could be salvaged and used for something useful.