Go Electric

[clevtrev]

Go electric we are told to save the environment !

This machine is required to move 500 tons of earth/ ore which will be refined into one lithium car battery. It burns 900-1000 gallons of fuel in a 12 hour shift.
Lithium is refined from ore using sulfuric acid. The proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass, Nevada is estimated to require up to 75 semi loads of sulfuric acid a day! The acid does not turn into unicorn food like AOC believes. Refining lithium has created several EPA SUPERFUND SITES. IT IS VERY VERY VERY TOXIC TO THE ENVIRONMENT !!!
A battery in an electric car, lets say an average Tesla, is made of 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum,
steel, and plastic, etc...... averaging 750-1,000 pounds
of minerals, that had to be mined and processed into a battery that merely stores electricity..... Electricity which is generated by oil, gas, coal, or water (and a tiny fraction of wind and solar)....
Sulfur is a major by-product of oil refining and gas processing. Most crude oil grades contain some sulfur, most of which must be removed during the refining process to meet strict sulfur content limits in refined products.

 

[b'knighted]

Why does the Ariel Owners Club have an interest in unicorn food?
I thought Ariels emblem was a horse.

 

[ClassicBiker]

Well Clevtrev seems you've let the cat out of the bag. This is the information the proponents of electric vehicles tend to willfully ignore. The toxic waste created making the batteries and disposing of them at the end of their life. The "carbon footprint" created by mining the minerals that create the batteries and the electricity that charges them. The proponents of electricity do not comprehend that the quality of life that we now enjoy is built upon petroleum. The synthetics fibers that most people wear and depend on are petroleum based. The plastics that constitute the majority of products now sold, petroleum based.
The amount of electricity consumed that is generated by fossil fuels can not possibly be produced by wind, water, and solar.
Everyone here for some reason likes to use New York City in their examples, don't why, but I'll play along.
NYC uses 52.5 Terawatt hours of electricity per year, I googled it. Which when you google what that is in a day the answer is 11,000 Megawatt hours/day. Which I'm told would require a total 4,000 5 Megawatt turbines to supply. Then the math gets fuzzy. A 5 Megawatt turbine requires anywhere from 2 - 40 acres operational space. So that means 8,000 to 160,000 acres or 12.5 to 250 square miles of land just for NYC. What happens when you need to power DC, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, Chicago, Las Vegas, St. Louis, Toledo, or my personal favorite as I live just north of it, Detroit? If we take the average of the 12.5 and 250 we get 131.5 square miles. Ten cities, 1315 square miles, well that exceeds the area of Rhode Island, which is 1214 square miles. Well now that we've found a use for Rhode Island, what do we do with the 1.058 million people who live there? Where do they go to live? You can't cultivate the land that these things sit on. The bird population is adversely affected, large birds of prey are constantly getting brained by them. They have a finite life time. Which means we've got to go digging up the earth some more for the minerals needed. Oh and we need some light weight synthetics for these things, which are petroleum based again. Oh snap.
My father used to say "My way of doing something beats your way of doing nothing". For the most part I agree with that sentiment. But a bad idea is still a bad idea and should not be acted upon. I don't believe the way we are rushing head long into an all electric future is the answer to our problems. It hasn't been thought out completely.

 

[flxible]

Here's a 15 minute youtube tedtalk perspective on electric vehicles some may find interesting-

Best-
George

 

[vibrac]

Any one would think that electric vehicles were intended to reduce CO2 their purpose is to line the pockets of the vehicle manufacturers who see thousands of long lived cars scraped and a reduced workforce, the owners of motorway service stations who can see Zillions from a captive audience of customers with 3 hours to kill and building firms who put in infrastructure.
If they wanted to have nett zero Co2 they would be making synthetic petrol from atmospheric Co2 and sunlight in a virtuous cycle after all horses and grass have been doing it for aeons

 

[Vincent Brake]

Go hydrogen, go hydrogen.
Although so smal an Atom, it escapes our tank.

Oh and don't let lightning struck it, or was it static electricity, in '37?

Battery's are only nice in this phone....

 

[ClassicBiker]

Static electricity. I was taking a class at Ft. Dix back, in 2000 or so, on the weekend my friend Bruce and I took a trip to Lakehurst Naval Air Station to see where the Hindenburg caught fire.

 

[Gordon Ryley]

I have parked up the petrol mower hung up the electric mower it is a lot
more exhausting pushing this grass cutter than it was 50 yrs ago.
What if I buy a donkey oops Methane how do I get that into the Vin tank.

 

[ClassicBiker]

A little bit more fuel to the fire so to speak.

 

[Magnetoman]

Objective information from Tucker Carlson? You can't be serious.

The problem with any discussion of electric vehicles is that so much authoritative-sounding information is to be found on the web, but much of which is of unknown validity from sources with their own agendas. For example, oil companies obviously would like to keep selling oil, and someone like Tucker Carlson needs to keep his audience outraged so they keep watching.

The first post says "500 tons of earth/ ore which will be refined into one lithium car battery." Without even trying to find where that number came from, it can't be taken at face value simply because there are so many different deposits around the world containing different types of ores with different percentages of lithium. Is 500 tons an average figure, a worst-case figure, or a totally made-up figure? It would take more time and energy than I care to devote to it to, um, figure that out.

I'm not arguing that electric vehicles are good, or bad, for the future, I'm saying that information for such a discussion only should be taken from objective studies conducted by unbiased experts. Unfortunately, a google search is unlikely to be sufficient for identifying trustworthy sources.