EV Autos and Emissions

Disclosure: I do NOT own any Tesla, thank Reagan.  Second Disclose: Cathie Wood is a two-bit assclown.

Annyong.  I’m ripping this from someone’s post on LinkedIn so if the facts are wrong, don’t blame me.  Obviously, the future is green energy at the source and we’re slowly pushing in that direction and even if it’s slow, we shouldn’t stick with ICE engines solely because green energy isn’t powering 100% of the grid.  It’s a slow process but it needs to happen.  I don’t understand why the U.S. – other than due to heavy lobbying – is so slow to adopt green energy technology.  If China gets there first, they’ll eat our lunch in selling the technology to the rest of the world.  Why aren’t we concerned about that risk?  Anyway, here’s my plagiarized work:

To say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Batteries, they do not make electricity, they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. 40% of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that 40% of the EVs on the road are coal-powered.

For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. A typical EV battery weighs 1,000 pounds and is about the size of a travel trunk. It contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

To manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for one battery.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1,688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1,300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. “Going Green” may sound like the utopian ideal but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye. I’m not opposed to mining, electric vehicles, wind, or solar. But showing the reality of the situation.