ICE cars travel at 30mpg, so you're assuming that ICE cars travel 900,000 miles?
> refined and shipped across the planet by hostile nations such as Russia and Saudi Arabia or through local fracking.
And where do you think the Nickle that your Li-ion batteries use comes from? (Hint Russia). The core manufacturing capabilities of Li-ion batteries are almost entirely foreign. Nickle from Russia, Cobalt from Congo, LFP from China.
If you're trying to make a US-centered argument, the thing about local fracking is that it is US-centered and therefore subject to US laws and regulations.
> There are cobalt-free batteries, and you don't need to use child labor (even if this is the case now, which I doubt). Lithium is super abundant.
> Because lithium’s concentration in ore at Thacker Pass runs as low as two-tenths of one percent, producing one ton of the stuff for use by society entails strip mining and processing as much as 500 tons of earth. Over a single year, producing 60,000 tons of lithium at the site could mean digging up as much as 20 to 30 million tons of earth, more than the annual amount of earth dug up to produce all coal output of all but seven or eight U.S. states.
Are you sure that the oil slurpped up through a straw is really more environmentaly damaging than hundreds-of-tons of mining activity per bit of Lithium?
> Are you sure that the oil slurpped up through a straw is really more environmentaly damaging than hundreds-of-tons of mining activity per bit of Lithium?
Again, a gallon of gas is 2.7 kg, and car consumes thousands of gallons over its lifetime. Batteries are also recycleable, or get a second life as stationary energy storage, unlike gas which just ends up polluting our air. I just can't comprehend how you can even argue for fossil fuels at this stage, it's pure stupidity or nefariousness, I can't tell which.
The energy used in recycling steel and processing it is likely far, far less than mining, purifying, refining, and chemically combining Lithium and the other chemicals needed to make an electric battery.
ICE cars travel at 30mpg, so you're assuming that ICE cars travel 900,000 miles?
> refined and shipped across the planet by hostile nations such as Russia and Saudi Arabia or through local fracking.
And where do you think the Nickle that your Li-ion batteries use comes from? (Hint Russia). The core manufacturing capabilities of Li-ion batteries are almost entirely foreign. Nickle from Russia, Cobalt from Congo, LFP from China.
If you're trying to make a US-centered argument, the thing about local fracking is that it is US-centered and therefore subject to US laws and regulations.
> There are cobalt-free batteries, and you don't need to use child labor (even if this is the case now, which I doubt). Lithium is super abundant.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/02/09/lithium-mining-and-th...
> Because lithium’s concentration in ore at Thacker Pass runs as low as two-tenths of one percent, producing one ton of the stuff for use by society entails strip mining and processing as much as 500 tons of earth. Over a single year, producing 60,000 tons of lithium at the site could mean digging up as much as 20 to 30 million tons of earth, more than the annual amount of earth dug up to produce all coal output of all but seven or eight U.S. states.
Are you sure that the oil slurpped up through a straw is really more environmentaly damaging than hundreds-of-tons of mining activity per bit of Lithium?