Everyone knows that electric vehicles are supposed to be better for the planet than gas cars. That’s the driving reason behind a global effort to transition toward batteries.
But what about the harms caused by mining for battery minerals? And coal-fired power plants for the electricity to charge the cars? And battery waste? Is it really true that EVs are better?
The answer is yes. But Americans are growing less convinced.
The net benefits of EVs have been frequently fact-checked, including by NPR. "No technology is perfect, but the electric vehicles are going to offer a significant benefit as compared to the internal combustion engine vehicles," Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NPR this spring.
It’s important to ask these questions about EVs’ hidden costs, Trancik says. But they have been answered “exhaustively” — her word — and a widerange of organizations have confirmed that EVs still beat gas.
We’re going to run the country into the ground because we have such a large group of people being totally fine with (or even encouraging) their lack of education and the ability to reason properly. They’re just proud to be “against” something together, they don’t even care what it is they’re against.
There are already EV battery recycling plants springing up now that there are enough used EVs to warrant them, there wasn’t much point building them when there weren’t any battery packs to process.
The renewable energy switch is already happening, because even without subsidies they’re still cheaper.
But no… gotta get out there and roll coal.
North American auto has lost its mind and handed over any chance at being top-tier in the future. Seems game over to me. Canada is joining in on the 100% tariff game and I’m furious that my government will, this late in the game, try and protect an industry that gambled with the oil and gas industry and lost (not to mention their compete fall into profiteering in five to six digit major life purchases) by passing costs of avoiding Elon and subpar selection onto consumers.
I hope the industry wakes up and goes hard for competitiveness in EVs and stops waiting for elections to decide if climate change is real or if the economy will be affected by their decisions. To stop waiting for elections to decide if people want EVs. To allow manufacturing to flourish regardless of who’s fighting for the rights to our money while we briefly have it.
And to your point yeah - just like Asimov said:
Be sure to call a few government reps and speak your mind. Try to do it by asking questions. If you can turn a few aides against the system it can have a snowball effect bc those are people who are young and passionate about politics
100 percent.
I live in Virginia and the other day I saw a Tesla with a custom license plate for friends of coal. like I don’t even…
Wasn’t that what Desantis did, put a coal sticker on his Tesla? Then had dealerships write up a bill to restrict people from purchasing vehicles directly from manufactures without going through a dealership, keeping the costs higher for the people. The bill had an exemption for certain vehicles… Like the Tesla he bought.
I must admit this is a big-brain move — being for electric cars in order to have more coal-fired plants rather than burning gasoline.
Even a coal burning EV emits less carbon than a gasoline car. The payback threshold may increase uncomfortably though. A while back I read something doing that analysis per US state. I believe the threshold ranges from 2 year in states with cleaner energy, up to 14 in coal burning West Virginia and Wyoming
And 14 years isn’t really feasible given battery decay.
“There are two states that have such shitty electricity production systems that it may take more than the lifetime of an electric car for the carbon emissions to break even. That’s how terrible electric cars are!”
🙄
I just find it funny. It’s perfectly logical for someone who really cares about burning more coal to drive an electric car, but I’ve never seen anyone make that connection before. It’s like… I don’t know. A vegan lobbying against lactase pills?
But the coal is cleaned, so it’s better to burn it for electricity. Duh 🙄
That feels like they’re trolling or making fun of themselves a bit. I know a few people in Kentucky with EVs and they also have “friends of coal” plates.
AFAIK it’s the only way to get a black plate hence why they do it. Looks cleaner on darker cars.
This is the bottom line. We all know who these morons are and they’re never going to care what actual repercussions are for their actions. They think it is funny to “own the libs” no matter what the issue may be. I’d a left-leaning person advocate for one thing, their automatic reaction is to oppose it without question.
It’s truly scary to look around (especially in red states) and to know a good percentage of those around you are that dumb.
I don’t consider myself intelligent. One of the scariest moments of my adult life was realizing I’m above average intelligence, maybe by a decent margin.
The end of life battery recycling has been the #1 thing I’ve been looking at. Glad to see they aren’t going to landfill.
Battery upcycling is also becoming a thing. If an old battery is not fit for a car anymore it can still be useful in other contexts; like you could convert it into a battery for home or grid storage with minimal processing.
edit: rephrased to remove double negative
I’m curious to know what you’ve learned. Would you care to share?
If you’ve been looking at it, then perhaps you’ve seen this:
EV Batteries Can Outlast A Vehicle’s Lifetime With Minimal Degradation, Study Finds https://insideevs.com/news/733987/ev-batteries-outlast-vehicle-degradation-study/
““Batteries in the latest EV models will comfortably outlast the usable life of the vehicle and will likely not need to be replaced.” That’s what David Savage, Vice President for the UK and Ireland at Geotab said in the company’s latest study that looked at how EV batteries degrade over time.”
But if not, the article, and research it’s based on is worth a gander. EVs require a whole lot less maintenance, too, as it turns.
So far, the biggest problem with battery recycling is that not enough of it is done locally. Depleted batteries are being shipped to China for recycling.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/27/nx-s1-5019454/ev-battery-recycling-us
But things are improving here, so that’s good!
Ideally what I’d like to see are large, regional, recycling centers and that’s just not a thing yet. I’d say a minimum of 6, 2 in the West, 2 in the East and 2 in the center of the country.
One of the challenges is, ironically, there aren’t enough dead batteries to economically support multiple large domestic battery recyclers. Batteries aren’t failing enough.
The problem with that model is that when they all start failing it will be a crisis without the infrastructure to solve for it.
While I was poking around I found this, on Lithium Ion battery recycling:
Pathway decisions for reuse and recycling of retired lithium-ion batteries considering economic and environmental functions https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52030-0
Abstract Reuse and recycling of retired electric vehicle (EV) batteries offer a sustainable waste management approach but face decision-making challenges. Based on the process-based life cycle assessment method, we present a strategy to optimize pathways of retired battery treatments economically and environmentally. The strategy is applied to various reuse scenarios with capacity configurations, including energy storage systems, communication base stations, and low-speed vehicles. Hydrometallurgical, pyrometallurgical, and direct recycling considering battery residual values are evaluated at the end-of-life stage. For the optimized pathway, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries improve profits by 58% and reduce emissions by 18% compared to hydrometallurgical recycling without reuse. Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) batteries boost profit by 19% and reduce emissions by 18%. Despite NMC batteries exhibiting higher immediate recycling returns, LFP batteries provide superior long-term benefits through reuse before recycling. Our strategy features an accessible evaluation framework for pinpointing optimal pathways of retired EV batteries.
Is Redwood Materials shipping things overseas? They seem to be the big car battery recycler the automakers are signing up with.
They have a very good map on the production end, showing where metals are sourced and refined, then cathodes produced in Japan and sent over, but I’m not seeing anything similar on the recycling side.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/#problem