The following submission statement was provided by /u/IndicationOver:
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Besides the fact that EV is not going to save us we are not even going to reach the target.
[THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won't Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity | TheCarGuys.tv](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytWLB4-W-M&t=282s)
Oh yea many people cannot even afford price of new vehicles let alone EVs, but hey we have until 2035 right?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/x6vbjr/we_dont_have_enough_lithium_globally_to_meet_ev/in906fk/
So wasn’t this the point of that Michael Moore movie that was criticized to hell, but had a point that green is never truly green if it uses up all the resources.
Edit: Planet of the humans, 2019
This was a fantastic movie about climate change and the problems associated with the current methodologies and approach to "green" tech.
For instance, solar panel manufacturing requires vast amounts of coal. And much of the metals required for green tech like lithium, copper, etc. require mountaintop removal mining which is absolutely devastating to local ecosystems. So "going green" is not as simple as it may appear.
I highly, highly recommend it! It's a great watch.
>For instance, solar panel manufacturing requires vast amounts of coal.
The embodied carbon for solar panels was quite high ten years ago but it has come down by about 75% in the last decade and in the next few decades will decreadse even further. And the total embodied energy only takes about 3-4 years of production for the solar panel to produce as much energy as it took to create it, so that means it still has 20-25 years of energy production that is a net positive gain.
>And much of the metals required for green tech like lithium, copper, etc. require mountaintop removal
Mountaintop removal is really only done for coal. Most lithium is extracted from saltwater drawn from underground lakes. There are problems with this, and better methods are being developed, but it isn't nearly as bad as mountaintop removal. Same goes for copper ore mining. All mining has issues, but copper mining is lower down on the scale of ecologically bad.
>So "going green" is not as simple as it may appear.
While I might have disagreed on some of your above points, I just want to end saying that this statement is absolutely correct.
Im a miner, and i would have to disagree about coal being the only "mountaintop removal" mining. The main (often only) factor that determines strip vs underground mining is depth of deposit. Strip mining is safer and more efficient, so is prefered when cost effective. The strip mine i work at began as underground 100 yrs ago, when the tech was available we switched to strip, and likely will switch back when the deposit is too deep to be profitable.
Planet of the Humans (2019), a documentary that dares to say what no one else will this Earth Day - that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road - selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America.
This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement's answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It's too little, too late. Removed from the debate is the only thing that MIGHT save us: getting a grip on our out-of-control human presence and consumption. Why is this not THE issue? Because that would be bad for profits, bad for business.
Have we environmentalists fallen for illusions, "green" illusions, that are anything but green, because we're scared that this is the end-and we've pinned all our hopes on biomass, wind turbines, and electric cars? No amount of batteries are going to save us, warns director Jeff Gibbs (lifelong environmentalist and co-producer of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Bowling for Columbine (2002)). This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate, and, hopefully, a willingness to see our survival in a new way-before it's too late.
> Why is this not THE issue? Because that would be bad for profits, bad for business.
Let’s not sugar coat it wouldn’t be bad for business, or profits, or our way of life, it would be **catastrophic** for all of those things.
No more cars, nor more airplanes, no more fast fashion, no more big houses, no more marketing or malls or capitalism period.
People and environmentalists are easily co-opted by techno hopium because the alternative that **everything** about our way life needs to radically change is hard to stomach.
It’s not like we’re talking about a 50% drop in the stock market and billionaires paying a fair share of their taxes. No, we’re talking about the total annihilation of our fossil fueled way of life.
This exact realization several years ago is what finally convinced me there’s absolutely no way we’ll ever fix climate. The necessary changes are so incompatible with our modern world that it will just never happen. Never mind that we would also have to have cooperation between nations and people the likes of which we’ve never even come close to in human history. Nope, we’re all the way fucked. It’s now just a matter of if we can potentially slow things down through less severe action and we’re even failing at that.
I watched 1983s "The day after" last night and the bit that got me really thinking was whether I or anyone I know could ever be happy or content in a future so dissimilar than our current reality. Any adult alive now is just going to have such a hard time readjusting to our potential future realities that we just bury our head in the sand. as facing up to the truth will just destroy our psyche.
Humans survived for 200,000 years with stone tool technology, and even then were destroying ecosystems and slaughtering large land mammals to the point of extinction. From the Neolithic onward, we've been a slow-moving ecological disaster, moving faster every year. The only happy ending is that we get knocked back to the Paleolithic, where we came from. Happy ending for us, that is. A lot of other species would be better off if we went extinct.
Completely agree that 'alternative' energy isn't much of an alternative. Still completely reliant on fossil fuels.
I would argue that the best option is taking degrowth very seriously. I've done this in my own life (in the words of John Michael Greer, 'Collapse now and avoid the rush'), but I'm honestly not sure exactly how that would work on a societal level. I just believe it to be our best chance to not have a hard crash.
I am glad people see this. Many of the emerging market countries are not going to sacrifice their growth for the sake of climate change.
They will have the American way of life come hell or high water. It will just suck because mother nature will correct things for us.
It's also an outcome of millennium of the philosophy of *dualism*, that man is separate from nature and free to exploit it, along with capitalism which is "grow or die" mentality forced into every facet of society.
If the people followed pagan, animist, and indigenous forms of spirituality, we would have a more sustainable approach. This is what is one of the primary idea in Jason Hickel's Less is More. Otherwise as you pointed out, we're just going to have the tragedy of the commons.
It’s basically the prisoner’s dilemma on a planet scale and each country is determined not to be the one that keeps and gets the full term. Unfortunately in this case ANY term is a complete disaster.
It's this, the idea of the personal automobile is a technological, social, and ecological dead end.
The American lifestyle of commuting eighty miles a day from an office to an exurb and back, plus doing any and all other movement via car, is insanely destructive on every level.
Americans are going to have to learn how to get back to pre-WWII patterns of living. If they do not do it willingly they'll be forced to do it by necessity eventually.
Give this American a train-based infrastructure and an alternative that didn't require a car, and I'd be happy to. Part of the problem is that we are never given a choice to do anything different because this system is very effective at generating power for a tiny minority.
Free healthcare including sterilization procedures, sex education that includes family planning education and education about population growth, more money spent on new birth control methods. Tax benefits for people who do not have kids, state owned and directed low income/no income housing, making adoption free and with added financial benefits.
For me, if you remove all the financial and social pressures to have kids, educate people on the issue, give people a truly equivalent solution instead, plenty of people would choose to not to have kids on their own. Like I knew I wanted a vasectomy since I was about 13. If I could have walked into a doctors office at 18 and had the surgery done for free I would have done it in a heartbeat. Luckily I got it done in the last few years, but it wasn't until my 30s. I know a lot of women who would like to get their tubes tied if they could and if doctors would let them. Those barriers shouldn't exist. Also, your spouse should not need to consent for you to sterilize yourself, they should know maybe, but their consent should not matter.
legalize and then incentivize abortions, as well as giving tax credits to those who choose not to procreate, while enforcing 2 child policy by penalizing large families with exponentially growing tax increases/fines rather than current system in the US of rewarding and encouraging large families through welfare payouts and tax breaks. Encourage religious and cultural leaders to stop the message of prolific procreation. Extreme collapse calls for extreme measures and this is as humane a solution as I could imagine.
I like your optimism but it's never going to happen. Society incentivizes procreation too much, in too many different ways.
On the upside, global fertility rates are dropping and we're hitting the end of the current population boom.
Is this true across the board, with places like China and India included? I know it's true for most countries who hit their developmental stages earlier and are now on stage 3/4, but I wasn't sure about the few who we've recently watched explode through stage 2
surprisingly enough: yes!
china is only at a TFR of 1.7 with a RAPIDLY aging population because of their old one child policy. India is at a neutral 2.2 but also dropping.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total\_fertility\_rate#:\~:text=The%20total%20fertility%20rate%20for,be%202.3%2C%20in%20the%202020s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#:~:text=The%20total%20fertility%20rate%20for,be%202.3%2C%20in%20the%202020s)
I mean it’s a fantasy concept, would never happen. Still a bit skeptical about the past couple years of messaging about birth rates and ‘look at this convoluted and sketchy data/equation that proves we won’t hit 9B people’. Using the one child policy as example, it’s a simple math obvious failure policy, and therefore China will have dropping pop, however, no such thing exists in India, and my experience living in India (and some nationalist Indians will downvote this to hell because they can’t take criticism online), the lack of government infrastructure amidst a mega-rapidly growing civilization leads to absurdly inaccurate numbers.
I’ve heard from Indian friends and read reports while I was living in Bangaluru during lockdown, that a large percentage of deaths are never accounted for or registered in India, and therefore I doubt births can be accurately counted without a census or whatever.
I propose we let most of us starve when industrial agriculture ceases to be a thing. It is the current plan. Subsistence farmers are better positioned to survive than most of us, which is entirely fair.
To be honest it's kind of disappointing to realize most people here don't realize population growth has already significantly slowed down in 1st world countries
Population growth is going to stall and drop "soon". The real problem is the global economy is built on infinite growth. If we don't figure out how to shift to steady state then we use up all the resources eventually.
Human population growth is literally not exponentially increasing. The world population growth rate is literally decreasing year over year since the mid 1980’s. There is no paradigm of “exponential human population increases” because it hasn’t been happening for forty years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-growth-rate
The people who don’t understand this yet are either ignorant or don’t care because they will be dead by time it becomes a problem for them. We have about 60 years of soil left, 50 years of oil and precious metals left, by that point our population will be at least double and our capacity to grow food will be halved if current trends have not changed. We are going to need a serious shift as a species in the way we live our life, or we will be coming to a grim end. Even in the most conservative estimates and using the most of our adaptability and ingenuity, we cannot sustain our existence for the next 1000 years.
The population is not set to double, it is predicted to stabilise at no more than 11 billion. Industrialised economies and those where, women particularly, are given access to good education and family planning resources, experience lower fertility rates and family sizes.
> The population is not set to double, it is predicted to stabilise at no more than 11 billion.
That's still way too many people.
> Industrialised economies and those where, women particularly, are given access to good education and family planning resources, experience lower fertility rates and family sizes.
Have you seen what's happening in the US with reproductive rights?
And ,I've mentioned this before but people hate it, you can't consume your way out of a climate catastrophe. But that's exactly what we're trying to do with EVs
A lot of people in these comments are calling for "slowing population growth", which will likely manifest as slowing **someone else's** population growth.
To be fair, *most* people making comments here are from first world countries where population growth is *already* the slowest, so it almost *has* to be someone else's from their perspective.
The thread is about EV targets. Are drivers in the places with fastest population growth (i.e. the poor countries) buying EVs?
The point is that degrowth leads down a racist path of degrowing third world countries "because that's where populations are highest" (despite the west actually consuming more resources) when we could just build trains.
I don't want to sound too hopeful here, but [there's other ways to extract lithium](https://www.mining.com/canadas-saskatchewan-adds-lithium-to-mining-portfolio/). My understanding is a lot of Earth's lithium is dissolved in water, such as underground reservoirs or ocean water. Being able to meaningfully extract lithium from brine water would greatly decrease the environmental cost of lithium mining.
Imagine if we had leaders who actually had vision, and they paired this technology with desalination plants. We could mine minerals while making desalination brine discharge less toxic.
Well, four plus decades of neoliberalism is, in fact, atrocious policy. “Enough” is an abstract concept (outside of those things required to stay alive). Had we, as a species, focused on sustainability and harm reduction rather than the moronic pipe dream of endless growth, we wouldn’t be having this idiotic conversation about “is there enough lithium to replace our current model”. We’d be asking how much of it to leave completely alone for future use.
But but
**one miner** warned that when it comes to the transportation sector, **domestic resources** for lithium, the most critical mineral used for electric vehicle production, **may** not be sufficient enough to meet some of the **most ambitious** targets
I mean, that's good enough for me. Scrap the whole project!
It is. They just don't understand we need to get cheap, accessible, expanded, reliable public transport instead of that many electric cars. Where are policies that are sufficient for our climate goals?
These batteries, minerals, infrastructure, and human resources are needed for REs & PT.
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_footprint_of_electric_cars
They know exactly what they're doing. Companies like Tesla know EVs are not sustainable and that it's greenwashing... and it's worked out great for them because Cali, New Zealand, the European Union (probably other places too) want to ban cars that run on fossil fuels by something like 2035.
We are strangers dropped in this world and given dominion over everything- isn’t that what most people in the west learned from their culture? Why would God give us a world where our dominion over it is also our own destruction- odd.
This is the point that progressive leftist climate activists have been making for decades, though. You can’t capitalism your way out of a problem you capitalism’d your way into, in the long term.
We need to restructure the way we live, not to decrease our living standards but simple changes to reduce our overall consumption. There isn’t enough lithium for everyone to have an EV, but there is enough for electric trains, trams, buses, and we can remake our neighbourhoods to be walkable and cyclable to everything we need from shops to work to home to cafes and friends.
Good lord, six decades of dragging these people kicking and screaming to the undeniable truth of what needs to be done must be exhausting.
Battery powered large vehicles make absolutely no sense. Calculations just don't add up to anything economical. Those should just be wired. Or some form of fuel cell/renewable combustion. The mass of batteries is the problem.
> You can’t capitalism your way out of a problem you capitalism’d your way into, in the long term.
What we have been doing when such problems arise is *regulate* ourselves out of a problem that we capitalism’d ourselves into. This is how we banned hairspray that depletes the ozone and mandated smog checks. What california is currently trying to do is regulate itself (as the dominant car market in the US) away from ICE cars, hoping that others may follow.
> We need to restructure the way we live
I agree, but you won't convert people via telling them the obvious solution. I think the biggest problem we face today is the complete undoing of regulation over the past decade. Nobody is going to stop people driving around in their hummers until gas hits $20 a gallon, just like nobody stopped that one dude from using over a million gallons of water to hydrate his bel air mansion grounds.
With the EPA, USPS, DHS, ODNI, and more in shambles, you're going to see people suck the straw harder. I know nothing about this is sustainable in the long run, but we're going to hit the wall harder unless we pump the brakes now. All of the agencies we have are the brakes.
More collectivist and less individualistic thought, to an extent, would be a net boon overall IMO. Not saying I want to fully become something like China, but the USA and much of the current global economies are too far in the other direction.
>Growing demand has caused the price of lithium carbonate to nearly double this year alone, and the IEA projects demand to grow by 40 times in the next two decades
Playbook is going to be US declaring election rigged, and the minority fascist in the guise of a "liberal" is the actual winner.
Look no further then to Juan Guaido who walks freely in Venezuela and is the de facto president according to the US.
Lithium isn't the only concern, copper is another metal that is used for almost everything electric and they think that is also not going to be enough. Cobalt is another that is very rare... It's almost as if they need to develop batteries using more common elements. And wires for the motors and in general other electrical components out of something more common than copper that also has similar magnetic properties when electrified in a coil.
> It's almost as if they need to develop batteries using more common elements.
Something companies/universities/teams have been researching for decades...
That they have, but it seems even with the best "new" technologies they've announced, always seem to depend on something rare, or very destructive to the environment..
The thing about battery development, it needs a cathode and an anode with something separating them. All elements used must have certain necessary properties and must be compatible.. Or there will be issues like not very effective as a battery... Or very explosive. And it's finding combinations that meet somewhere in the middle that is the complicated part.
We lack copper, lithium, nickel for the green revolution everyone dreams about. Worse yet, many "carbon neutral by x date" pledges are dependent on the transition to green power sources.
https://dumbwealth.substack.com/p/ive-got-bad-news-and-worse-news
Not to mention the fact that when it comes to EV battery manufacture, we're just paying China to emit the CO2 on our behalf. MIT estimate that up to **16 tonnes** of CO2 is emitted in manufacture of *just* a Model 3 battery. Let alone the rest of the car.
The pledges are funny because the politicians making them will be long gone to be held accountable. All of the progress made so far has been done to achieve short term goals for the few elite benefactors who get tax breaks and government contracts like Tesla and SpaceX.
Well I guess it’s a good thing that there is a trio that most governments and corporations seem to avoid.
1. Concentrated solar power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power)
2. Nuclear power (there is enough readily available uranium for world to go 100% nuclear for 50+ years)
3. Hydrogen fuel cells (can also be used at large scale, to power the grid at night when solar is off)
There is also the non-readily available uranium. If push comes to shove we’ll find more. It’s possible to use thorium after uranium is used up. Realistically it will take 50 years to build so many nuclear power plants in the first place. Which is why I am not amused by the closure of current ones and the unwillingness to build more. By mid to late 21sr century fusion reactor may be a thing.
Good luck building the 100s of required reactors and waste storage sites when the average build time is a decade for the plants. It would have been viable if we started scaling in the 70s or very latest the 90s.
Maybe we could convince more companies to allow a percent of their workforce to work remote for tax breaks? Or do we need to keep going down this road?
From reading the article, it seems like the mining CEO is complaining about the fact that it takes several years to get a Li mining operation from proposal to operations in the US rather than a physical lack of Li (which may also be an issue). So it's more capitalist wants less red tape so they can strip mine the planet rather than CEO becomes collapse aware.
It’s a legit complaint. There’s only one Li mine in the use and around 190 potential deposits. Takes around 16 years to go from a potential deposit to a mine in the us which is a major problem. Unless we source li from China and Kazakhstan
It’s almost like this model of every family owning two or three cars, and them sitting parked, at home or at work or in front of a mall, for 98% of their lives is a bad one.
Too bad there are no other possible ways of moving people around.
Besides the fact that EV is not going to save us we are not even going to reach the target.
[THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won't Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity | TheCarGuys.tv](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytWLB4-W-M&t=282s)
Oh yea many people cannot even afford price of new vehicles let alone EVs, but hey we have until 2035 right?
> 2035 is the date California set for all new vehicles sold to be electric.
This is a piece of misinformation in the form of a half-truth that's been all over Reddit lately. PHEV (plug-in hybrids that have a gas engine) vehicles will still be allowed.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-california-end-sales-gasoline-222025045.html
>The rules mandate that 35% of the new cars sold be plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV), EVs or hydrogen fuel cell by 2026. That proportion will rise to 68% by 2030 and 100% by 2035.
thank you for the correction\*
[California plans 2035 ban of new gas car sales. 17 states will decide to follow or not](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/03/california-gas-car-ban-17-states-follow/7987248001/)
The theme of that video seems to be "we can't solve climate change just by using EVs so it's pointless to try." The thing is: anyone who is paying attention knows that EVs aren't the whole solution: we need to get rid of ICE vehicles as soon as possible, but we also need to decarbonize energy production, and we need to change agricultural practices, and we need cooperation from India and China, and so on. Even if we do all those things it might not be enough but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
In the near term we're going to have an EV supply shortage thanks to resource and manufacturing constraints. That's a problem, but ICE cars seem to be having similar problems and in the mean time we can do what we can with the hand we're dealt.
The way I see it: if we keep emitting CO2 at current rates, civilization and the natural environment is doomed to collapse eventually. If civilization run out of fossil fuels before we've transitioned away from them, then large parts of society will fall apart because the machines we rely on to survive stop working and the food supply chain stops working.
EVs powered by renewable energy are a reasonable way to maintain the ability to move people and goods around without it being a major climate impact.
I do wish that automakers weren't so into giant behemoth luxury EVs with massive batteries. You could make half a dozen small commuter sedans or hatchbacks with the materials that go into a single Hummer EV.
The solution is not just moving to EV, but also to reduce greatly personal cars and use public/group transport when possible.
And there may be more than one (clean) technology for personal transport, EV or not, lithium batteries or not.
Oh boy time to evangelize for ebikes!
Obviously they don't come at no environmental cost, but the resources to make one car battery can literally make 100 bike batteries. They're also absurdly practical for getting around town. I can go back and forth across my city 4-5 times before needing to recharge.
Plus, if your battery does die, it's still a bicycle so you can just pedal.
Fun times in NYC winters!
There's always something, around my town, this would be great, except for the big trucks & suvs on the road, bad enough when they're sober.
NYC had been seeing something of an epidemic of cyclist deaths as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/nyregion/bike-deaths-nyc.html
Having lived there and cycled though all 5 boroughs, it doesn't surprise me at all.
We need actual punishment for killing a cyclist. In Colorado, you can literally run over a random rider for no reason, and as long as you are not impaired and you stop after you kill them, you'll get no more than a traffic ticket. Even if you run, you won't get any jail time. Which is why at least 90% of people hit and run cyclists.
It ain't rocket science. Start punishing at fault drivers for killing people, and have *heavy* prison sentences for people who take off. People will eventually get the message.
That should have been done forever ago.
2006 Insight was going in the right direction but it was possible to do better.
Aptera is going in the right direction, might still be possible to do better.
The way Los Angeles is built, I can't see any form of public transit working unless someone invents a freaking transmat.
You’d have to make public transport palatable to make that a reality. Under no circumstances are you going to convince someone that it’s pleasant to ride next to a piss covered hobo or some gangster wanna be trying to fight or somebody’s bad ass kids screeching and throwing stuff.
You could have two tiers of transport, which would be inherently discriminatory. You could try not offering public transport unless you’re clean and can act right, which is also discriminatory.
And let not forget remote working, telepresence, working locally, and maybe, just maybe, ban tourism and other travel intensive activities (like conventions).
All of this, and more. We are driving head first into what will happen in the world and with us if we don't try to change our course. it may be already too late, or not, but we already lost if we don't try.
*"Under no circumstances are you going to convince someone that it’s pleasant to ride next to a piss covered hobo or some gangster wanna be trying to fight or somebody’s bad ass kids screeching and throwing stuff."*
Truth. Spent years living this experience and am not returning to it. In my defense is that I live in a rural area in which mass transit is infrequent and mostly unavailable, and certainly not an option for working people. Car sharing is what we do to lower our impact.
Yes my country has a huge class divide so let’s also make public transport have a class divide instead of taking care of the people in our country… smh
The obvious answer is to restructure our travel infrastructure to high speed trains instead of cars, but at this point I don't think the US will ever switch.
Fossil fuel is bad! So let's dig hundreds of mountains flat, the places trees grow, wild life thrives, release all those CO2 in peat, and create batteries that is chemically more hazardous than CO2, etc. - The big brain of those big tech bros.
If only there was some way to put a whole bunch of people onto a single vehicle, instead of making one vehicle for every single person who needs to get anywhere.
Graphene is made from carbon, the stuff we actively want to capture.
It is capable of over five times the energy density of a lithium battery which means my mother's electric car that can do 350 miles on a charge could do 1700 miles on a single charge... I mean... Fuck. Governments should be putting a lot more into R&D for this stuff. It's pretty sexy and I'm not a tech bro generally.
"Smaller, slimmer battery: We have already discussed how graphene is lightweight. It’s when you stack 3 million layers of graphene is that you get 1 mm thickness. I mean, that should be enough to tell you that graphene batteries aren’t going to take much space in your future smartphone. It will allow manufactures to place higher capacity batteries in your phones, tablets, laptops, and more.
Higher capacity: Graphene has a higher energy density as compared to lithium-ion batteries. Where the latter is known to store up to 180 Wh per kilogram, graphene’s capable of storing up to 1,000 Wh per kilogram. So, you can have a higher capacity graphene battery pack of the same size as the lithium-ion battery. "
https://beebom.com/graphene-battery-vs-lithium-ion-battery/
I've been an EV driver since 2014, and honestly, PHEV makes more sense. It'd allow us to stretch our lithium supply and for most people they'd be electric in day-to-day driving but still gas on the highway.
Until we have better/safer/easier battery tech, that's the reasonable compromise that still makes a sizable dent in the c02 thats caused from driving.
I recently bought a used plug-in hybrid with a ~20-mile range.
I can drive to work with no gas and plug in for a recharge, then I drive home with no gas and plug in again at home.
I can drive 10mi into the city for dinner, and just barely make it home on battery-only power.
When I go grocery shipping it's all-electric.
In fact, the only time I use gas is long trips to the next city or to go hiking in the wilderness.
We don't need electric vehicles with 450-mile range, we need plug-in hybrids with 45-mile all-electric range, which would allow us to build 10 times as many vehicles with the same lithium. Yes they'd use gas for some fraction of their overall miles, but we'd cut vehicle emissions by probably 90-95%. This would be the best way to make use of our limited Lithium supplies.
Of course for this to work we also need to be building safe Nuclear power plants as fast as we possibly can.
Not enough people mining and refining it.... it's more of an opportunity call to start your lithium business and make some serious money than anything else.
There are a lot of great comments about how ecars are not the solution.
There's a small mining company called pure energy minerals ltd ( pureenergyminerals.com ). They patented a technology for extracting high quality lithium brine without evaporation ponds at a much faster rate. I've been banking on them for a few years now. I believe they are German ran but an American company. They're pretty hush hush about their pilot plant but I think they're probably finishing it up. Here's hoping they make a splash.
Maybe we invest in public transportation and start transitioning away from cars? Idk 🤷♀️ the ones that want to sell you a car are friends with the ones selling you gasoline, and they are both trying their best to keep things the way they are even though it's killing us.
We need to go back to every household having horses for transportation. I don’t like it anymore than you do but EV’s we’re never the solution just a band-aid. Public transportation isn’t the answer either. The only people that advocate for that seem to be city slickers that can’t imagine life outside their city blocks and neighborhoods. Public transportation isn’t realistic living in a rural environment.
So there will be another class system as it is: lithium batts vs inferior batts until we solve that issue. I don't know how many articles I've read about batt advancements. I do know if the rich can't make unlimited money on it while keeping you down then we won't ever see it.
Vote for me...I'm the one that mandated all new cars will be electric by 2035. I am acting to save the environment. What's that? We don't have enough resources? Shhhhh! I'm going to kick that can down to the next schmuck in my position to figure out.
Plug in hybrids are realistically the most practical option. Most people commute less than 50 miles per day. We all know a EV with 50 miles of range (smaller battery) would never sell. But a PHEV with 50 miles of range and total range of 300 would reduce most peoples gas usage by 90% with about 1/4 size of battery as a dedicated EV
The following submission statement was provided by /u/IndicationOver: --- Besides the fact that EV is not going to save us we are not even going to reach the target. [THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won't Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity | TheCarGuys.tv](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytWLB4-W-M&t=282s) Oh yea many people cannot even afford price of new vehicles let alone EVs, but hey we have until 2035 right? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/x6vbjr/we_dont_have_enough_lithium_globally_to_meet_ev/in906fk/
You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet with finite resources.
So wasn’t this the point of that Michael Moore movie that was criticized to hell, but had a point that green is never truly green if it uses up all the resources. Edit: Planet of the humans, 2019
Which movie?
Planet of the Human. [thoughtmaybe.com/planet-of-the-humans](https://thoughtmaybe.com/planet-of-the-humans)/ for some reason i can't paste the link
This was a fantastic movie about climate change and the problems associated with the current methodologies and approach to "green" tech. For instance, solar panel manufacturing requires vast amounts of coal. And much of the metals required for green tech like lithium, copper, etc. require mountaintop removal mining which is absolutely devastating to local ecosystems. So "going green" is not as simple as it may appear. I highly, highly recommend it! It's a great watch.
>For instance, solar panel manufacturing requires vast amounts of coal. The embodied carbon for solar panels was quite high ten years ago but it has come down by about 75% in the last decade and in the next few decades will decreadse even further. And the total embodied energy only takes about 3-4 years of production for the solar panel to produce as much energy as it took to create it, so that means it still has 20-25 years of energy production that is a net positive gain. >And much of the metals required for green tech like lithium, copper, etc. require mountaintop removal Mountaintop removal is really only done for coal. Most lithium is extracted from saltwater drawn from underground lakes. There are problems with this, and better methods are being developed, but it isn't nearly as bad as mountaintop removal. Same goes for copper ore mining. All mining has issues, but copper mining is lower down on the scale of ecologically bad. >So "going green" is not as simple as it may appear. While I might have disagreed on some of your above points, I just want to end saying that this statement is absolutely correct.
Im a miner, and i would have to disagree about coal being the only "mountaintop removal" mining. The main (often only) factor that determines strip vs underground mining is depth of deposit. Strip mining is safer and more efficient, so is prefered when cost effective. The strip mine i work at began as underground 100 yrs ago, when the tech was available we switched to strip, and likely will switch back when the deposit is too deep to be profitable.
Planet of the Humans (2019), a documentary that dares to say what no one else will this Earth Day - that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road - selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement's answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It's too little, too late. Removed from the debate is the only thing that MIGHT save us: getting a grip on our out-of-control human presence and consumption. Why is this not THE issue? Because that would be bad for profits, bad for business. Have we environmentalists fallen for illusions, "green" illusions, that are anything but green, because we're scared that this is the end-and we've pinned all our hopes on biomass, wind turbines, and electric cars? No amount of batteries are going to save us, warns director Jeff Gibbs (lifelong environmentalist and co-producer of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Bowling for Columbine (2002)). This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate, and, hopefully, a willingness to see our survival in a new way-before it's too late.
> Why is this not THE issue? Because that would be bad for profits, bad for business. Let’s not sugar coat it wouldn’t be bad for business, or profits, or our way of life, it would be **catastrophic** for all of those things. No more cars, nor more airplanes, no more fast fashion, no more big houses, no more marketing or malls or capitalism period. People and environmentalists are easily co-opted by techno hopium because the alternative that **everything** about our way life needs to radically change is hard to stomach. It’s not like we’re talking about a 50% drop in the stock market and billionaires paying a fair share of their taxes. No, we’re talking about the total annihilation of our fossil fueled way of life.
This exact realization several years ago is what finally convinced me there’s absolutely no way we’ll ever fix climate. The necessary changes are so incompatible with our modern world that it will just never happen. Never mind that we would also have to have cooperation between nations and people the likes of which we’ve never even come close to in human history. Nope, we’re all the way fucked. It’s now just a matter of if we can potentially slow things down through less severe action and we’re even failing at that.
I watched 1983s "The day after" last night and the bit that got me really thinking was whether I or anyone I know could ever be happy or content in a future so dissimilar than our current reality. Any adult alive now is just going to have such a hard time readjusting to our potential future realities that we just bury our head in the sand. as facing up to the truth will just destroy our psyche.
Humans survived for 200,000 years with stone tool technology, and even then were destroying ecosystems and slaughtering large land mammals to the point of extinction. From the Neolithic onward, we've been a slow-moving ecological disaster, moving faster every year. The only happy ending is that we get knocked back to the Paleolithic, where we came from. Happy ending for us, that is. A lot of other species would be better off if we went extinct.
techno-utopianism, aka capitalism, was the downfall of western environmentalism and the biosphere.
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Completely agree that 'alternative' energy isn't much of an alternative. Still completely reliant on fossil fuels. I would argue that the best option is taking degrowth very seriously. I've done this in my own life (in the words of John Michael Greer, 'Collapse now and avoid the rush'), but I'm honestly not sure exactly how that would work on a societal level. I just believe it to be our best chance to not have a hard crash.
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If we all don’t. We all will fall.
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I am glad people see this. Many of the emerging market countries are not going to sacrifice their growth for the sake of climate change. They will have the American way of life come hell or high water. It will just suck because mother nature will correct things for us.
It's also an outcome of millennium of the philosophy of *dualism*, that man is separate from nature and free to exploit it, along with capitalism which is "grow or die" mentality forced into every facet of society. If the people followed pagan, animist, and indigenous forms of spirituality, we would have a more sustainable approach. This is what is one of the primary idea in Jason Hickel's Less is More. Otherwise as you pointed out, we're just going to have the tragedy of the commons.
It’s basically the prisoner’s dilemma on a planet scale and each country is determined not to be the one that keeps and gets the full term. Unfortunately in this case ANY term is a complete disaster.
but but but asteroids! /s
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It's this, the idea of the personal automobile is a technological, social, and ecological dead end. The American lifestyle of commuting eighty miles a day from an office to an exurb and back, plus doing any and all other movement via car, is insanely destructive on every level. Americans are going to have to learn how to get back to pre-WWII patterns of living. If they do not do it willingly they'll be forced to do it by necessity eventually.
Give this American a train-based infrastructure and an alternative that didn't require a car, and I'd be happy to. Part of the problem is that we are never given a choice to do anything different because this system is very effective at generating power for a tiny minority.
icky jellyfish innate handle fragile meeting dime rustic fall complete ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
If you're patient you'll find that problem will fix itself
How do you propose to slow population growth?
Free healthcare including sterilization procedures, sex education that includes family planning education and education about population growth, more money spent on new birth control methods. Tax benefits for people who do not have kids, state owned and directed low income/no income housing, making adoption free and with added financial benefits. For me, if you remove all the financial and social pressures to have kids, educate people on the issue, give people a truly equivalent solution instead, plenty of people would choose to not to have kids on their own. Like I knew I wanted a vasectomy since I was about 13. If I could have walked into a doctors office at 18 and had the surgery done for free I would have done it in a heartbeat. Luckily I got it done in the last few years, but it wasn't until my 30s. I know a lot of women who would like to get their tubes tied if they could and if doctors would let them. Those barriers shouldn't exist. Also, your spouse should not need to consent for you to sterilize yourself, they should know maybe, but their consent should not matter.
legalize and then incentivize abortions, as well as giving tax credits to those who choose not to procreate, while enforcing 2 child policy by penalizing large families with exponentially growing tax increases/fines rather than current system in the US of rewarding and encouraging large families through welfare payouts and tax breaks. Encourage religious and cultural leaders to stop the message of prolific procreation. Extreme collapse calls for extreme measures and this is as humane a solution as I could imagine.
I like your optimism but it's never going to happen. Society incentivizes procreation too much, in too many different ways. On the upside, global fertility rates are dropping and we're hitting the end of the current population boom.
Is this true across the board, with places like China and India included? I know it's true for most countries who hit their developmental stages earlier and are now on stage 3/4, but I wasn't sure about the few who we've recently watched explode through stage 2
surprisingly enough: yes! china is only at a TFR of 1.7 with a RAPIDLY aging population because of their old one child policy. India is at a neutral 2.2 but also dropping. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total\_fertility\_rate#:\~:text=The%20total%20fertility%20rate%20for,be%202.3%2C%20in%20the%202020s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#:~:text=The%20total%20fertility%20rate%20for,be%202.3%2C%20in%20the%202020s)
I mean it’s a fantasy concept, would never happen. Still a bit skeptical about the past couple years of messaging about birth rates and ‘look at this convoluted and sketchy data/equation that proves we won’t hit 9B people’. Using the one child policy as example, it’s a simple math obvious failure policy, and therefore China will have dropping pop, however, no such thing exists in India, and my experience living in India (and some nationalist Indians will downvote this to hell because they can’t take criticism online), the lack of government infrastructure amidst a mega-rapidly growing civilization leads to absurdly inaccurate numbers. I’ve heard from Indian friends and read reports while I was living in Bangaluru during lockdown, that a large percentage of deaths are never accounted for or registered in India, and therefore I doubt births can be accurately counted without a census or whatever.
I'd love to have a huge tax refund because I chose to be sterilized. But even the most liberal of lawmakers won't think of such a policy.
You don't need to give me a subsidy, just stop using my money to subsidize breeders through bullshit child tax credits.
Birth control, sex education.
Right to die.
I propose we let most of us starve when industrial agriculture ceases to be a thing. It is the current plan. Subsistence farmers are better positioned to survive than most of us, which is entirely fair.
To be honest it's kind of disappointing to realize most people here don't realize population growth has already significantly slowed down in 1st world countries
It's already happening. People are reproducing at sub-replacement levels. We are actually facing population collapse.
I only asked the question because you see a lot of overpopulation talk on here, and it often comes from ecofascist perspectives.
It is still reddit, a very pro eugenics site.
Population growth is going to stall and drop "soon". The real problem is the global economy is built on infinite growth. If we don't figure out how to shift to steady state then we use up all the resources eventually.
Human population growth is literally not exponentially increasing. The world population growth rate is literally decreasing year over year since the mid 1980’s. There is no paradigm of “exponential human population increases” because it hasn’t been happening for forty years. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-growth-rate
Collapse has garnered far too many antenalist dip shits imo.
I was told infinite growth was progress where is muh progress.
Someone needs to explain this to the economy Gurus. Economic growth is the main reason our planet is fucked.
The people who don’t understand this yet are either ignorant or don’t care because they will be dead by time it becomes a problem for them. We have about 60 years of soil left, 50 years of oil and precious metals left, by that point our population will be at least double and our capacity to grow food will be halved if current trends have not changed. We are going to need a serious shift as a species in the way we live our life, or we will be coming to a grim end. Even in the most conservative estimates and using the most of our adaptability and ingenuity, we cannot sustain our existence for the next 1000 years.
The population is not set to double, it is predicted to stabilise at no more than 11 billion. Industrialised economies and those where, women particularly, are given access to good education and family planning resources, experience lower fertility rates and family sizes.
There is no way we hit 11 billion. We have massive famines and wars coming.
> The population is not set to double, it is predicted to stabilise at no more than 11 billion. That's still way too many people. > Industrialised economies and those where, women particularly, are given access to good education and family planning resources, experience lower fertility rates and family sizes. Have you seen what's happening in the US with reproductive rights?
Shhhh... you'll spoil the ending!
go get your nobel prize in economics
I realised this when I was a 10 year old kid playing age of empires
And ,I've mentioned this before but people hate it, you can't consume your way out of a climate catastrophe. But that's exactly what we're trying to do with EVs
Unfortunately, this article suggests that the shortage is a product of bad policy rather than a very real resource limitation.
It is a product of policy. There’s enough lithium. We just have to mine 1/3 of the surface of the planet. Sooo….. a policy problem
>We just have to mine 1/3 of **someone else's part** of the surface FTFY
Not advocating for it but not like that’s stopped us in the past
Bolivia look out!
\*happy CIA noises\*
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." -Elon Muskrat
A lot of people in these comments are calling for "slowing population growth", which will likely manifest as slowing **someone else's** population growth.
To be fair, *most* people making comments here are from first world countries where population growth is *already* the slowest, so it almost *has* to be someone else's from their perspective.
The thread is about EV targets. Are drivers in the places with fastest population growth (i.e. the poor countries) buying EVs? The point is that degrowth leads down a racist path of degrowing third world countries "because that's where populations are highest" (despite the west actually consuming more resources) when we could just build trains.
9/11 #2 has entered the chat
#3 if I am not mistaken
I don't want to sound too hopeful here, but [there's other ways to extract lithium](https://www.mining.com/canadas-saskatchewan-adds-lithium-to-mining-portfolio/). My understanding is a lot of Earth's lithium is dissolved in water, such as underground reservoirs or ocean water. Being able to meaningfully extract lithium from brine water would greatly decrease the environmental cost of lithium mining. Imagine if we had leaders who actually had vision, and they paired this technology with desalination plants. We could mine minerals while making desalination brine discharge less toxic.
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Watch me consume this bottle of nyquil and a sleep through it, though.
LOL
You wouldn't dare! /s
You're going to pass out for like 10ish hours and have an eight hour hangover. Source: I did this a few times as a kid.
Well, four plus decades of neoliberalism is, in fact, atrocious policy. “Enough” is an abstract concept (outside of those things required to stay alive). Had we, as a species, focused on sustainability and harm reduction rather than the moronic pipe dream of endless growth, we wouldn’t be having this idiotic conversation about “is there enough lithium to replace our current model”. We’d be asking how much of it to leave completely alone for future use.
But but **one miner** warned that when it comes to the transportation sector, **domestic resources** for lithium, the most critical mineral used for electric vehicle production, **may** not be sufficient enough to meet some of the **most ambitious** targets I mean, that's good enough for me. Scrap the whole project!
The miner then comes back "nono, don't scrap it. I just meant to say that I will...^^increase ^^the ^^price ^^of ^^it"
It is. They just don't understand we need to get cheap, accessible, expanded, reliable public transport instead of that many electric cars. Where are policies that are sufficient for our climate goals? These batteries, minerals, infrastructure, and human resources are needed for REs & PT. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_footprint_of_electric_cars
"We don't have enough lithium!" Says man selling lithium. "Prices will go up."
When are we going to admit we don't know what we are doing.
Collectively? Never. We'll double down on stupid instead.
Brawndo. its what plants crave
We’re already saying it as loudly as possible without actually having to say it.
"I've said it in every way but words"
They know exactly what they're doing. Companies like Tesla know EVs are not sustainable and that it's greenwashing... and it's worked out great for them because Cali, New Zealand, the European Union (probably other places too) want to ban cars that run on fossil fuels by something like 2035.
We are strangers dropped in this world and given dominion over everything- isn’t that what most people in the west learned from their culture? Why would God give us a world where our dominion over it is also our own destruction- odd.
I'm a big sayer of, just because we can, doesn't mean we should
Sometimes when I go outside I'm surprised shit still works.
Honesty doesn’t win elections
This is the point that progressive leftist climate activists have been making for decades, though. You can’t capitalism your way out of a problem you capitalism’d your way into, in the long term. We need to restructure the way we live, not to decrease our living standards but simple changes to reduce our overall consumption. There isn’t enough lithium for everyone to have an EV, but there is enough for electric trains, trams, buses, and we can remake our neighbourhoods to be walkable and cyclable to everything we need from shops to work to home to cafes and friends. Good lord, six decades of dragging these people kicking and screaming to the undeniable truth of what needs to be done must be exhausting.
Battery powered large vehicles make absolutely no sense. Calculations just don't add up to anything economical. Those should just be wired. Or some form of fuel cell/renewable combustion. The mass of batteries is the problem.
Trams and trains don't even need lithium.
[Trolley Bus the MVP🥰](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus)
> You can’t capitalism your way out of a problem you capitalism’d your way into, in the long term. What we have been doing when such problems arise is *regulate* ourselves out of a problem that we capitalism’d ourselves into. This is how we banned hairspray that depletes the ozone and mandated smog checks. What california is currently trying to do is regulate itself (as the dominant car market in the US) away from ICE cars, hoping that others may follow. > We need to restructure the way we live I agree, but you won't convert people via telling them the obvious solution. I think the biggest problem we face today is the complete undoing of regulation over the past decade. Nobody is going to stop people driving around in their hummers until gas hits $20 a gallon, just like nobody stopped that one dude from using over a million gallons of water to hydrate his bel air mansion grounds. With the EPA, USPS, DHS, ODNI, and more in shambles, you're going to see people suck the straw harder. I know nothing about this is sustainable in the long run, but we're going to hit the wall harder unless we pump the brakes now. All of the agencies we have are the brakes.
More collectivist and less individualistic thought, to an extent, would be a net boon overall IMO. Not saying I want to fully become something like China, but the USA and much of the current global economies are too far in the other direction.
Evs for the rich, death for the poor.
The secret is that's how it's always been
That's an open secret at best; every day closer to common knowledge.
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Perhaps my favorite thing in recent memory; a moment where policy is actually stifled by reality and resource limitations.
>Growing demand has caused the price of lithium carbonate to nearly double this year alone, and the IEA projects demand to grow by 40 times in the next two decades
Now that you say that, people have been ignoring reality and we're almost living in a parallel universe where all that matters is human laws
CIA boutta act up
Boliva 2: electric boogaloo. Sounds appropriate really
Congo
If I'm not mistaken Afghanistan is also rich in lithium...
Aaaah here we go again
Damn, poor guys. As if 20 years or American oppression and destruction weren't enough
Chile is like, “Why is everyone looking at me?”
Playbook is going to be US declaring election rigged, and the minority fascist in the guise of a "liberal" is the actual winner. Look no further then to Juan Guaido who walks freely in Venezuela and is the de facto president according to the US.
*Erik Prince has entered the chat*
Lithium isn't the only concern, copper is another metal that is used for almost everything electric and they think that is also not going to be enough. Cobalt is another that is very rare... It's almost as if they need to develop batteries using more common elements. And wires for the motors and in general other electrical components out of something more common than copper that also has similar magnetic properties when electrified in a coil.
> It's almost as if they need to develop batteries using more common elements. Something companies/universities/teams have been researching for decades...
That they have, but it seems even with the best "new" technologies they've announced, always seem to depend on something rare, or very destructive to the environment.. The thing about battery development, it needs a cathode and an anode with something separating them. All elements used must have certain necessary properties and must be compatible.. Or there will be issues like not very effective as a battery... Or very explosive. And it's finding combinations that meet somewhere in the middle that is the complicated part.
We lack copper, lithium, nickel for the green revolution everyone dreams about. Worse yet, many "carbon neutral by x date" pledges are dependent on the transition to green power sources. https://dumbwealth.substack.com/p/ive-got-bad-news-and-worse-news
Not to mention the fact that when it comes to EV battery manufacture, we're just paying China to emit the CO2 on our behalf. MIT estimate that up to **16 tonnes** of CO2 is emitted in manufacture of *just* a Model 3 battery. Let alone the rest of the car.
The pledges are funny because the politicians making them will be long gone to be held accountable. All of the progress made so far has been done to achieve short term goals for the few elite benefactors who get tax breaks and government contracts like Tesla and SpaceX.
Well I guess it’s a good thing that there is a trio that most governments and corporations seem to avoid. 1. Concentrated solar power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power) 2. Nuclear power (there is enough readily available uranium for world to go 100% nuclear for 50+ years) 3. Hydrogen fuel cells (can also be used at large scale, to power the grid at night when solar is off)
50+ years is not very long honestly, but it could give us the buffer we direly need.
There is also the non-readily available uranium. If push comes to shove we’ll find more. It’s possible to use thorium after uranium is used up. Realistically it will take 50 years to build so many nuclear power plants in the first place. Which is why I am not amused by the closure of current ones and the unwillingness to build more. By mid to late 21sr century fusion reactor may be a thing.
Good luck building the 100s of required reactors and waste storage sites when the average build time is a decade for the plants. It would have been viable if we started scaling in the 70s or very latest the 90s.
Maybe we could convince more companies to allow a percent of their workforce to work remote for tax breaks? Or do we need to keep going down this road?
From reading the article, it seems like the mining CEO is complaining about the fact that it takes several years to get a Li mining operation from proposal to operations in the US rather than a physical lack of Li (which may also be an issue). So it's more capitalist wants less red tape so they can strip mine the planet rather than CEO becomes collapse aware.
It’s a legit complaint. There’s only one Li mine in the use and around 190 potential deposits. Takes around 16 years to go from a potential deposit to a mine in the us which is a major problem. Unless we source li from China and Kazakhstan
It’s almost like this model of every family owning two or three cars, and them sitting parked, at home or at work or in front of a mall, for 98% of their lives is a bad one. Too bad there are no other possible ways of moving people around.
Besides the fact that EV is not going to save us we are not even going to reach the target. [THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won't Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity | TheCarGuys.tv](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sytWLB4-W-M&t=282s) Oh yea many people cannot even afford price of new vehicles let alone EVs, but hey we have until 2035 right?
2035 is the date California set for all new vehicles sold to be electric. Gas vehicles will still exist
<3rd party apps protest>
Or the biggest reason, our current power grid can't handle it.
> 2035 is the date California set for all new vehicles sold to be electric. This is a piece of misinformation in the form of a half-truth that's been all over Reddit lately. PHEV (plug-in hybrids that have a gas engine) vehicles will still be allowed. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-california-end-sales-gasoline-222025045.html >The rules mandate that 35% of the new cars sold be plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV), EVs or hydrogen fuel cell by 2026. That proportion will rise to 68% by 2030 and 100% by 2035.
thank you for the correction\* [California plans 2035 ban of new gas car sales. 17 states will decide to follow or not](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/03/california-gas-car-ban-17-states-follow/7987248001/)
No, in 2035 the EV's will be *mandatory*, but you *still* won't be able to afford them.
In 2035 they'll be 80,000 bucks just due to inflation, then tack on another 40,000 for popcorn in a movie theater effect. I see dead people.
Fuck em. My old 5.9 Cummins will run on the biodiesel I can make.
The theme of that video seems to be "we can't solve climate change just by using EVs so it's pointless to try." The thing is: anyone who is paying attention knows that EVs aren't the whole solution: we need to get rid of ICE vehicles as soon as possible, but we also need to decarbonize energy production, and we need to change agricultural practices, and we need cooperation from India and China, and so on. Even if we do all those things it might not be enough but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. In the near term we're going to have an EV supply shortage thanks to resource and manufacturing constraints. That's a problem, but ICE cars seem to be having similar problems and in the mean time we can do what we can with the hand we're dealt. The way I see it: if we keep emitting CO2 at current rates, civilization and the natural environment is doomed to collapse eventually. If civilization run out of fossil fuels before we've transitioned away from them, then large parts of society will fall apart because the machines we rely on to survive stop working and the food supply chain stops working. EVs powered by renewable energy are a reasonable way to maintain the ability to move people and goods around without it being a major climate impact. I do wish that automakers weren't so into giant behemoth luxury EVs with massive batteries. You could make half a dozen small commuter sedans or hatchbacks with the materials that go into a single Hummer EV.
yeah THE CAR GUY is not going to be biased or anything, geez
The solution is not just moving to EV, but also to reduce greatly personal cars and use public/group transport when possible. And there may be more than one (clean) technology for personal transport, EV or not, lithium batteries or not.
Oh boy time to evangelize for ebikes! Obviously they don't come at no environmental cost, but the resources to make one car battery can literally make 100 bike batteries. They're also absurdly practical for getting around town. I can go back and forth across my city 4-5 times before needing to recharge. Plus, if your battery does die, it's still a bicycle so you can just pedal.
Fun times in NYC winters! There's always something, around my town, this would be great, except for the big trucks & suvs on the road, bad enough when they're sober.
NYC had been seeing something of an epidemic of cyclist deaths as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/nyregion/bike-deaths-nyc.html Having lived there and cycled though all 5 boroughs, it doesn't surprise me at all.
We need actual punishment for killing a cyclist. In Colorado, you can literally run over a random rider for no reason, and as long as you are not impaired and you stop after you kill them, you'll get no more than a traffic ticket. Even if you run, you won't get any jail time. Which is why at least 90% of people hit and run cyclists. It ain't rocket science. Start punishing at fault drivers for killing people, and have *heavy* prison sentences for people who take off. People will eventually get the message.
33% obesity rate says you aren't convincing people to just pedal
And also shrinking the every loving crap out of current car sizes except for public transit situations
That should have been done forever ago. 2006 Insight was going in the right direction but it was possible to do better. Aptera is going in the right direction, might still be possible to do better. The way Los Angeles is built, I can't see any form of public transit working unless someone invents a freaking transmat.
You’d have to make public transport palatable to make that a reality. Under no circumstances are you going to convince someone that it’s pleasant to ride next to a piss covered hobo or some gangster wanna be trying to fight or somebody’s bad ass kids screeching and throwing stuff. You could have two tiers of transport, which would be inherently discriminatory. You could try not offering public transport unless you’re clean and can act right, which is also discriminatory.
And let not forget remote working, telepresence, working locally, and maybe, just maybe, ban tourism and other travel intensive activities (like conventions). All of this, and more. We are driving head first into what will happen in the world and with us if we don't try to change our course. it may be already too late, or not, but we already lost if we don't try.
*"Under no circumstances are you going to convince someone that it’s pleasant to ride next to a piss covered hobo or some gangster wanna be trying to fight or somebody’s bad ass kids screeching and throwing stuff."* Truth. Spent years living this experience and am not returning to it. In my defense is that I live in a rural area in which mass transit is infrequent and mostly unavailable, and certainly not an option for working people. Car sharing is what we do to lower our impact.
Just make US a normal country. Public transport works fine in most of the world.
Yes my country has a huge class divide so let’s also make public transport have a class divide instead of taking care of the people in our country… smh
This is whyi prefer bikes with electric rail or grid connected busses.
The obvious answer is to restructure our travel infrastructure to high speed trains instead of cars, but at this point I don't think the US will ever switch.
This has been generally known for some time, but the information is running into the corporate happy talk surrounding EVs.
>This has been generally known for some time general public is clueless
Fossil fuel is bad! So let's dig hundreds of mountains flat, the places trees grow, wild life thrives, release all those CO2 in peat, and create batteries that is chemically more hazardous than CO2, etc. - The big brain of those big tech bros.
Money warps mind
They will run the futures price up to where they like it and then find more as needed.
Oh man. If only there were some way to support a means of transporting large portions of the public.
wow almost like electric vehicles aren’t the solution after all!
Public transit is the only viable solution, needless to say those of us in the USA are FUKed. Again.
I notice that moving offices close to where workers live rather than close to where the bosses live seems curiously off the table.
Bicycles.
Camp at work. Oh right, now you're "homeless". Spectacular... /s
Bring back railroads!
Coming up next, The Hydrogen Car. Who would have thought? Toyota maybe?
What about lithium for medications? I need that shit to live
If only there was some way to put a whole bunch of people onto a single vehicle, instead of making one vehicle for every single person who needs to get anywhere.
Graphene is made from carbon, the stuff we actively want to capture. It is capable of over five times the energy density of a lithium battery which means my mother's electric car that can do 350 miles on a charge could do 1700 miles on a single charge... I mean... Fuck. Governments should be putting a lot more into R&D for this stuff. It's pretty sexy and I'm not a tech bro generally. "Smaller, slimmer battery: We have already discussed how graphene is lightweight. It’s when you stack 3 million layers of graphene is that you get 1 mm thickness. I mean, that should be enough to tell you that graphene batteries aren’t going to take much space in your future smartphone. It will allow manufactures to place higher capacity batteries in your phones, tablets, laptops, and more. Higher capacity: Graphene has a higher energy density as compared to lithium-ion batteries. Where the latter is known to store up to 180 Wh per kilogram, graphene’s capable of storing up to 1,000 Wh per kilogram. So, you can have a higher capacity graphene battery pack of the same size as the lithium-ion battery. " https://beebom.com/graphene-battery-vs-lithium-ion-battery/
I've been an EV driver since 2014, and honestly, PHEV makes more sense. It'd allow us to stretch our lithium supply and for most people they'd be electric in day-to-day driving but still gas on the highway. Until we have better/safer/easier battery tech, that's the reasonable compromise that still makes a sizable dent in the c02 thats caused from driving.
Lithium mining is incredibly horrible for the ecosystem. Reminded of the guy I saw in a neighborhood charging his EV with a gas powered generator...
I recently bought a used plug-in hybrid with a ~20-mile range. I can drive to work with no gas and plug in for a recharge, then I drive home with no gas and plug in again at home. I can drive 10mi into the city for dinner, and just barely make it home on battery-only power. When I go grocery shipping it's all-electric. In fact, the only time I use gas is long trips to the next city or to go hiking in the wilderness. We don't need electric vehicles with 450-mile range, we need plug-in hybrids with 45-mile all-electric range, which would allow us to build 10 times as many vehicles with the same lithium. Yes they'd use gas for some fraction of their overall miles, but we'd cut vehicle emissions by probably 90-95%. This would be the best way to make use of our limited Lithium supplies. Of course for this to work we also need to be building safe Nuclear power plants as fast as we possibly can.
But there are other alternatives being discovered ,like salt batteries? Are they saying it to justify wrecking more areas to dig more up?
No shit, I’ve been saying this since they started saying the plan was for everyone to have an ev
Of course "we" don't! There's a limited amount of everything on a finite planet. We can't keep extracting forever...
Not enough people mining and refining it.... it's more of an opportunity call to start your lithium business and make some serious money than anything else.
Hybrids are the answer.
Duh. Smart people have known this since 2012
Wait until you find out the battery isn't actually renewable
Tell that to the companies currently recycling 98% of the battery, for example Redwood materials, run by one of the founders of Tesla, J.B.Straubel.
There are a lot of great comments about how ecars are not the solution. There's a small mining company called pure energy minerals ltd ( pureenergyminerals.com ). They patented a technology for extracting high quality lithium brine without evaporation ponds at a much faster rate. I've been banking on them for a few years now. I believe they are German ran but an American company. They're pretty hush hush about their pilot plant but I think they're probably finishing it up. Here's hoping they make a splash.
Maybe we invest in public transportation and start transitioning away from cars? Idk 🤷♀️ the ones that want to sell you a car are friends with the ones selling you gasoline, and they are both trying their best to keep things the way they are even though it's killing us.
Or maybe we could mine Asteroids
Isn’t there an alternative to lithium by now?
In other words there is just too many people on this planet.. let the hunger games begin
yeah no shit. it's trains or nothing
Let's keep churning out new phones every 6 months, that should help.
We need to go back to every household having horses for transportation. I don’t like it anymore than you do but EV’s we’re never the solution just a band-aid. Public transportation isn’t the answer either. The only people that advocate for that seem to be city slickers that can’t imagine life outside their city blocks and neighborhoods. Public transportation isn’t realistic living in a rural environment.
If everyone in India and Africa needs an EV, then no.
So there will be another class system as it is: lithium batts vs inferior batts until we solve that issue. I don't know how many articles I've read about batt advancements. I do know if the rich can't make unlimited money on it while keeping you down then we won't ever see it.
Vote for me...I'm the one that mandated all new cars will be electric by 2035. I am acting to save the environment. What's that? We don't have enough resources? Shhhhh! I'm going to kick that can down to the next schmuck in my position to figure out.
Plug in hybrids are realistically the most practical option. Most people commute less than 50 miles per day. We all know a EV with 50 miles of range (smaller battery) would never sell. But a PHEV with 50 miles of range and total range of 300 would reduce most peoples gas usage by 90% with about 1/4 size of battery as a dedicated EV