We can’t replace petroleum-fueled motor vehicles with ones powered by electricity, according to a new report, because mining enough lithium to power the batteries for those electric vehicles will destroy the world. Or part of it, anyway. The only solution, says the report, is for countries like the United States to replace private vehicles with public transit.
The only way to prevent this, according to a group called the Climate and Community Project, is to ban cars.
Why is it that, no matter what the problem, leftists think the only solution is to ban cars and spend more money on mass transit? According to a sociologist I once knew named John Finley Scott — who is better known for having created one of the first mountain bikes than his sociological research — most auto opponents are people who didn’t learn to drive until their late 20s or later, by which time they knew they were mortal and found driving to be terrifying. They can’t imagine anyone actually liking cars or driving, so they see nothing wrong with ridding the earth of such an evil invention.
Another possibility is that many auto opponents are communitarians who are dismayed by the freedom automobiles give people. Mass transit only goes where the powers that be allow it to go, so it allows more control over the populace. Notably, the group advocating transit over cars to save the planet from lithium mining calls itself the Climate and Community Project.
Whatever the reason, what these people don’t understand is that mass transit costs a lot more than personal mobility. Americans spend 25¢ a mile driving their cars and well over $1 a mile moving people on mass transit. Even in the New York urban area, the most transit-oriented region of the country, transit cost $1 per passenger mile in 2019. At that high cost, what would happen is that high-income people would use transit and low-income people would be forced to walk.
Replacing automobiles with transit would also mean giving up a lot of things that people today take for granted, including single-family homes, supermarkets, shopping malls, Costcos, summer vacations to Yellowstone, and any semblance of income or wealth equality. I estimate that 30 percent of Americans would continue to enjoy some of these things and the rest would live in crowded public housing projects that would be little better than slums.
Of course, everyone who proposes to ban cars think they will be among the 30 percent. The fact that 70 percent would be virtually immobilized is a small price to pay to save the planet from pickup trucks, Walmarts, and people who wouldn’t truly appreciate Yellowstone Park anyway.
The possibility that we might be able to reduce or eliminate the negative effects of lithium mining, or find an alternative to lithium, never enters their elitist minds. While lithium mining does have environmental impacts, there are ways of mitigating those impacts.
Moreover, it’s not like we’ll have to destroy the entire planet to get lithium for electric vehicles. One study found that the earth has plenty of lithium to meet the demand for electric vehicles and that more than 80 percent of known lithium resources can be found in just ten deposits. Close to 100 percent of the worldwide demand for lithium from electric vehicles through 2010, the study estimates, could be met from just one deposit of lithium in North Carolina. Of course, for the auto opponents, the possibility that lithium might be mined by people in the United States, which has some of the strongest environmental standards in the world, is scariest of all.
Even worse is the fact that electric cars can be made without Lithium. Baker electric worked without lithium.
Some recent hybrids didn’t use lithium.
And new chemistries are on the way!
$100 / yr and Walmart will deliver. Taking away cars won’t end them. 🙂
Successor batteries aren’t coming.
So called sodium batteries easier to mine as it comes from sea water. Sodium EXPLODES on contactvwith water.
Environmentalists whine it takes 30,000 lbs (15 tons) of raw material to make a 3000 lb car. It takes Over 4000+ tons of rock/ore to make ONE EV car, ICE engines made with iron/aluminum come from melting down cans and scrap. EV’s require fresh resources of cobalt, lithium, copper, etc. You have to start an industrial revolution over again but instead of coal/iron; you’re now digging up HALF the periodic table all of which is dug, mined, processed, manufactured, and shipped using fossil fuels. Under the guise of technology which is supposedly gonna “Rid us” of fossil fuels. Driving is only a small portion of a cars energy embodiment/life cycle, there’s heavy energy investment in the beginning and late stages of it’s life, namely manufacturing and recycling.
Electric cars have been the next big thing for the last 127 years.
One big dimension of this that most people don’t seem to be questioning is the speculative, pump and dump, nature of EV lithium investment. Although it is a new technology and there is always room for improvement, there are certain fundamental aspects of EV technology that do not make it any where nearly as viable as it is portrayed to be. A lot of what you hear in the media is over-hyped nonsense about how EV’s are going to change everything. A closer look at those media outlets, like Bloomberg, shows that the same interests bought shares in EV tech about 10-15 years ago. Musk is probably the most extreme example. What this gets down to is that I suspect a good chunk of what is going on with EVs is little more than a speculative pump and dump. Those who bought in early know that the tech is not really that good and will cash out before it becomes painfully obvious that the technology is not a real solution. As with all bubbles there is a certain amount of irrational exuberance that is definitely being exploited.
Motorscooters like Vespas are heavily underrated as a transportation solution. They are fuel efficient and fun to ride. They can’t go on highways, but the car is best for them anyway. Urbanist idiots most likely don’t want to consider them because “Well they run in gasoline, so they MUST be as bad for the environment as cars” which is WRONG because scooters are so fuel efficient that their emissions are very small.