EVs – Not Ethical?
EVs – Not Ethical?
This week I talk about the ethics of mineral extraction in order to make EVs, particularly EV batteries. Is it unethical to extract the minerals used?
This is the latest in a series of videos sharing my knowledge and experience with electric cars. EVs have improved immensely over the last few years, and we are at a point where I think the…
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EV's are a passing fad like the Pogo stick or segway, Just because some rich money whore comes along with a pump and dump scheme, doesn't make it useful or feasible to use. Who wants a car that takes hours to charge, and can spontaneously combust without any prior warnings. Using these vehicles instead of an ICE vehicle will skyrocket the price of all goods if they continue to force them upon us. All driven by dim witted greenies.
Thank you for a Very informative video.
BMW does NOT use permanent magnet in their motors. But therefore have some maintenance and little bit inefficiency as a drawback… But then it's up to what is worse?
And illegal wars and invasion of Muslim countries for fossil fuels
You kind of miss the point on the transition here. The question hasn't been should we transition for at least a decade but probably 2 decades now because the direct cost spread is no longer insane, it's just moderately large to the point that it is reasonable to say that maybe now or if not now then some point very soon the direct cost plus reasonable externalities costs will be lower with evs. The question is at what rate should we be transitioning and all the damages feed into that. That's why your two futures dichotomy you propose at the end is false. There isn't two futures, there's an infinite mix of futures we can spend time at on the transition to the eventual future of full transition. Also, if you are choosing the path of least damage then you aren't going to want to transition fully right away because you are going to cause far more damage on your massive infrastructure buildout with suboptimal technologies on the electric supply side vs going more slowly so we can drop the cost of electric storage another order of magnitude before we make that large investment to support solar/wind and/or design and start building much better nuclear fission/fusion plants to handle the demand resource side of the electric supply problem. Transitioning more slowly would also decrease damage in the fossil fuels side of the economy because a whole bunch of time is going to be needed to retool the processing supply chain to deal with the large fraction currently converted to transport fuel and make it into the myriad of other products we make out of fossil fuels instead. Doing the transition and ending up with a huge new investment in electric while having a fossil side that has to flare off a lot of waste product in order to provide the plastic, etc we would still vitally need is a large loser of a path.
May I suggest another topic you may wish to look into:
The arrival of Robotaxi will engender many financial and social benefits for lower income individuals.
Consider the fact that many low income citizens lack personal transport and must rely on public transport and will often require a long walk to their final destination.
This results in more time, more cost and in many cases a reduction of where they can be employed, this is a well-documented fact.
However once robotaxi becomes widespread it will provide low cost transportation point to point, this will negate what's holding back many people's ability to to achieve and sustain employment.
It will also allow people not only the ability to go to workplaces that were not available to them in the past, it also allow for easy access shopping, doctor's appointments and other necessary functions.
A side effect of robotaxi could result in a reduction of poverty, not a bad outcome.
And is the last point, it will Garner a great deal of support amongst a large percentage of the populace and even better, it will bury that meme "Tesla just toys for the rich".
And once people realize how it can benefit them they would increase pressure from voters to allow robotaxis.
Also consider that 70% of US GDP, as well as other countries is consumer spending and if that drops by 2% or more, it indicates a recession.
Now consider if people have a lowered cost of basics, transportation, energy etc and this gives some more disposable income it will increase the velocity of money in the economic system and reduce the chance of a recession.
Remember if you wipe out consumer spending soon the wealthy will become pool as well.
Scientia Habet Non Domus,
(knowledge Has No Home)
antiguajohn
Misdirection is the perfect term for this engineered controversy about battery minerals.
Great narrative shifting.
There’s a lot bigger picture to why EVs are not environmentally friendly, but let’s not mention those .
I think you missed Copper by weight the biggest factor. 80 kg per car 4x that of ICE. However the larger challenge is the Copper needed for interconnect and hooking up chargers which can easily double that 80kg total. We are running out of high concentration of copper oxide source so we need to move 100x the amount of other stuff to get to those poor concentrations?
Excellent video. The scale of fossil fuel extraction is truly staggering, and you didn't even include the 3bn tonnes of natural gas! I've seen many estimates of the amount of material we need to extract in the next 30 years to build all the infrastructure to reach net zero, the highest I've seen is 6.5bn tonnes and we'd do that once. To put that into perspective, we extract the same amount of fossil fuel every 5 months.
Regarding your opening anecdote, I've had the situation a couple of times where I've offered to give someone a lift home at the start of an evening rather than their partner come out for them, and during later animated discussion they've made all the usual comments about EVs, how they'd never get in one because the fire risk, etc, etc. It's so amusing to go out to the car and ask if they really want a lift in an EV or if they'd prefer the 10 mile walk up an unlit single track road!
Simply, well balanced and informative content which is compelling enough 🤞for any open minded / clear thinking person to consider. Die hard fans of ICE vehicles included 👍
Just to add: Cobalt is also used to refine petrol (it helps remove sulphur). Mining is bad, but efforts can be made to clean it up. Minerals are a finite resource – but have the major advantage over fossil fuels in that once extracted you don't set fire to it and have to constantly replace it.
Just to expand on the points you raised; no currently "in production" battery maker makes use of cobalt in EV batteries. NMC chemistries have been phased out by all EV battery makers (BYD/CATL/Tesla and so on).