this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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they definitely address it, they just are definitely not the ultimate solution.
going from drilling for oil to mining for lithium is literally just problem shifting.
It doesn't address climate change, it just misdirects the issue away from it being an oil-based climate disaster.
The only solution is less cars, not less of X type of car.
Do you have a rough idea how much oil you need for a fossil car and how much lithium for an electric?
Yeah, instead of flooring it to the cliff of climate change, we shift gear to a leisurely cruise to the climate change cliff.
Sure, it's better. But EVs aren't being pushed because they're better, they're being pushed because if they didn't, then they wouldn't be able to sell cars at all.
To be fair, getting rid of capitalism and stopping climate change, as powerful of a 1-2 punch it would be, is probably the most difficult challenge of our life. Incremental change might work. We already have a reactionary half of the country that wants to shoot the other because they think the other wants to make them stop eating red meat and take away their gas stoves.
So, what’s the solution that fixes this for EVERYONE? It’s not about inconviencing people it’s about getting people on board with the solution. And the people who need to be on board with the solution think the problem is a hoax.
You really ought to step back and compare the amount of lithium needed to be mined vs the current fossil fuel production. There a vast difference. Then adjust it for the Lithium being infinitely reusable, vs fossil fuels not at all.
This is just no true lmao
It's wild but it actually is. BEVs produce around 30% fewer emissions per km than ICEs if you include every emmission on both sides.
With better manufactoring and better energy mix, you could expect maybe 40% fewer emissions compared to ICEs in a couple decades in the EU (likely much worse in the U.S. and other less democratic places).
That's not nothing and an amazing feat of engineering for sure but still nowhere near sustainable because the baseline (ICE) is just incredibly bad. 30-40% less than "incredibly bad" is simply not "good" when we actually need to be as close to 100% as possible.
If we shifted all current ICE transport to BEVs, that'd at best be a very small step in the right direction, not a solution in any shape or form.
We actually cannot put every single person on the planet into ther own 1-3t metal box to move them around, no matter the engine type of that box.
BS. You’re assuming current (or is that past) levels of renewable energy and no recycling. Sure mining and processing done rare earths is polluting and energy intensive, but it gets cleaner every year based simply on increased renewable energy. Also, most of these metals are infinitely reusable, and just aren’t yet because it’s not worth it until they’re widely used
See the 40% figure. It assumes realistically achievable goals in the EU for the next decade or two.
That's not the problem. The problem is that it's not economical to recycle them. You technically could recycle them in the present day but mining new resources and throwing the old stuff into a landfill is just cheaper and I don't see that changing any time soon, especially not in undemocratic neo-"liberal" places such as the U.S.
This argument also misses that the current demand for transport is much smaller than the future demand will likely be. We aren't even close to putting every human on earth into their own metal box yet; that insanity is still in front of us if we continue like we have been the past century.
Nothing is infinitely reusable. We have so much e-waste.