Questioning Blind EV AdvocacyThe environmental impact of lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles often outweighs the benefits of forgoing fossil fuels.
By Meg Hansen
April 7, 2022
Governor Gavin Newsom recently ordered the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to ban the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Since the 1990s, 16 states have adopted CARB’s more stringent emission standards in place of federal regulations enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency. Newsom’s mandatory transition to zero emission vehicles will thus have a domino effect in the CARB states (including small, rural Vermont), which will be legally bound to outlaw the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles.
Battery-run electric vehicles are the most advanced zero emission vehicle technology in the market. Californians buy around 50 percent of electric vehicles sold in the nation, with Tesla accounting for 75 percent of those sales. Owning an electric vehicle has become an identity marker of anti-fossil fuel climate activism. However, assigning values to engines—“electric good, internal combustion bad”—shields the complex, real world system of electric vehicle technology from much needed scrutiny.
The most common electric vehicle batteries are composed of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese. Cobalt and lithium mining, in particular, are implicated in human rights abuses, child labor, ecosystem destruction, and pollution in Congo, South America, and China.
In 2016, investigations by Amnesty International and the Washington Post revealed that at least 100,000 and up to 150,000 miners in Congo, including 40,000 children (some as young as six years), use their hands and basic tools to dig hundreds of feet underground in search of cobalt-rich rocks. Absent oversight or safety measures, deaths, injuries, respiratory diseases, and birth defects caused by exposure to high levels of toxicity are commonplace. A report by the U.K. nonprofit organization Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) details the daily racism, physical violence, and verbal abuse endured by Congolese miners working for Chinese-owned companies and subcontractors.
Lithium mining in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia is resource and energy intensive (one ton of lithium requires 500,000 gallons of water) and similarly rife with social and environmental devastation. Nevertheless, local farmers (forced to import water from other areas), indigenous communities, regional wildlife and vegetation, and soil, air, and water quality are sacrificed on the altar of “green” technology.
Lithium is toxic, flammable, and highly reactive, which creates challenges for safe disposal. Dead electric vehicle batteries cannot be dumped in landfills but they are not designed to be recycled, either. Less than 5 percent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled today (in comparison, 100 percent of the lead in lead-acid car batteries is recycled). The hazards of electric vehicle batteries extend from cradle to grave. Yet, climate catastrophists—who decry the extraction and use of fossil fuels as exploitative—turn a blind eye to the electric vehicle-related horrific abuse of humans and the environment.
To what end are we impoverishing societies and ecosystems in multiple continents? Do electric vehicles sizably lower carbon emissions? No, the reduction is minimal because every stage of an electric vehicle’s life cycle requires fossil fuels.
First, mining equipment, materials processing facilities, and factories that produce lithium-ion batteries run on “dirty” fossil fuels. Chinese companies (led by CATL) dominate the world’s electric vehicle battery production, and all Chinese factories run on coal.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/questioning-blind-ev-advocacy/
