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Electric Vehicles Are Very Polluting
Why the current enthusiasm for EVs is the result of hype, not reality
Let me begin by saying that I really enjoy the driving experience with electric vehicles. Instant torque means instant acceleration. If you turn off the silly noise piped into the cabin via the sound system, EVs are somewhat quieter than internal combustion engine vehicles and I like things to be quiet. Plus, on the engineering side, EVs have fewer moving parts in the drivetrain and so there’s a lot less to go wrong: no valves and camshafts, no complex multi-geared transmission, no pistons and conrods. So I’m not one of the people who think that the only “real” automobiles are those that can belch fumes out of the tailpipe. That’s as silly as thinking the only “real” trains are pulled by steam engines or the only “real” airplanes must have propellers.
But I’m also not someone who is a sucker for marketing noise. I like to research topics and really understand things before I come to an opinion. When we research the reality of EVs rather than the “save the planet” nonsense that self-aggrandizing halfwits like Musk babble endlessly, we discover that far from being cleaner and greener than internal combusion engine vehicles, EVs are actually more polluting. EVs harm the planet, they aren’t saving it.
To see why this is so, we begin at the far end of the supply chain. Electric motors require electricity. That has to come from somewhere, and in EVs it comes from batteries. Lots and lots of them. These batteries use lithium. It is astonishingly polluting to mine lithium salts and even more polluting to turn those salts into useable lithium. It also requires a lot of energy, and for the foreseeable future that energy will continue to come from burning hydrocarbons. So already we’re seeing a lot of CO2 being pumped into the air, and that’s before we’ve even transported the lithium from where it was mined to where it will be used. Lithium today is very difficult (e.g. impossible in most cases) to recycle from worn-out batteries, so it gets dumped in landfills and it’s highly toxic. Lithium leaching into the water supply is a very very bad thing indeed.
Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the bad news, the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
