There are several states that have set mandates to eliminate the sales of gas powered vehicles within the next decade or so. The idea is to save the environment by eliminating all those horrible carbon emitting petroleum fueled cars and trucks from America's roads. There are a few basic problems with these plans however. The production of these new green vehicles will rely on both fossil fuels and huge increase on mining, which will undoubtedly have a huge negative environmental impact.
From Forbes
... Critics of policies that mandate or subsidize EVs can also point out that EVs still rely on fossil fuels, which account for 61% of electricity generation today. Setting aside the fact that they still rely on fossil fuels, EVs are not without deleterious environmental consequences.
Professor Richard Herrington, head of earth sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, says “there are huge implications for our natural resources not only to produce green technologies like electric cars but keep them charged…society needs to understand that there is a raw material cost of going green.”
Ramping up the use of EVs will necessitate a substantial increase in mining activity, to which many key government officials, including leading members of the Biden administration, have already demonstrated resistance.
“Everyone having an electric vehicle means an enormous amount of mining, refining and all the polluting activities that come with it,” notes Dr. Thea Riofrancos, a professor at Providence College.
Each electric car necessitates the extraction and processing of 500,000 pounds of materials, according to the Manhattan Institute, which calculated that each mile travelled by an EV “consumes” five pounds of earth. This explains the contention that EVs are not the panacea that politicians and green groups make them out to be.
“They’re too heavy, they use too many materials, they’re not efficient,” Michael Shellenberger, who Time Magazine named a Hero of the Environment in 2008, says about EVs. Shellenberger, who is challenging Gavin Newsom in California’s gubernatorial election this year, sees mass adoption of EVs as “a disaster waiting to happen in many ways.”
Something proponents of EV subsidies and mandates often ignore are the environmental ramifications of increased EV usage. A report in the journal Nature found that the EVs sold in 2017 alone will result in 250,000 tons of battery waste. That battery waste, the report notes, could cause fires and explosions if improperly discarded in land fills.
Critics of government-subsidized or mandated EV adoption also point to logistical and feasibility challenges. Professor Herrington calculates that switching entirely to EVs in the United Kingdom alone would eat up all the neodymium produced on the planet, 75% of global lithium production, and no less than half of the world’s copper. The UK has few than 40 million cars, compared to 280 million in the U.S.
Moving to all EVs globally is projected to require a tripling of cobalt production, a 70% spike in neodymium and dysprosium mining, and a doubling of copper production. Yet the Biden, Trump, and Obama administrations have all taken action to thwart the development of one of one of the world’s largest copper deposits, which is located in Alaska.
That Alaskan deposit, commonly refers to as Pebble, is one of many additional mining projects that will be needed to facilitate increased EV production and usage. Yet such mining projects that have been met with resistance from environmental organizations and progressive politicians. Another example is Piedmont Lithium, which submitted an application to operate a lithium mine on private land near the town of Cherryville, N.C. It is estimated that $839-million dollar project would create approximately 500 jobs with an average salary of $90,000. Environmental organizations are now seeking to stop that mine’s development.
“The area targeted by Piedmont Lithium is home to hundreds of families, businesses, and a thriving agriculture industry,” wrote the group Stop Piedmont Lithium on Facebook. “Why destroy the livelihoods and homes of thousands for less than 3% usable lithium product?”
There appears to be growing demand for EVs, demonstrated by the 50% increase in EVs sales from 2020 to 2021, along with the 67% jump in sales projected for 2022. However, limited mining capacity will not allow EV production to meet future sales projections.
“World nickel and lithium production will be enough for 3.8 million EVs this year—fewer than half the 7.7m that automakers say they want to make,” Steve LeVine, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Georgetown adjunct professor, tweeted on April 24.
“By 2030, metals will be enough for 15.6M EVs,” Levine, added, “But stated EV production is over 40M.”
And if you need some more information check out this article. Green energy isn't so 'green' after all.
From the Manhattan Institute
Mines, Minerals, and "Green" Energy: A Reality CheckAs I explored in a previous paper, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,”[1] many enthusiasts believe things that are not possible when it comes to the physics of fueling society, not least the magical belief that “clean-tech” energy can echo the velocity of the progress of digital technologies. It cannot.
This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.
This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy—currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas)—will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals, radically exacerbate existing environmental and labor challenges in emerging markets (where many mines are located), and dramatically increase U.S. imports and the vulnerability of America’s energy supply chain.
As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.
Among the material realities of green energy:Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.
A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.
Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.
Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.
By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
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