Segment |
Commentaries
Robinson: Dirty Little Secret
Are electric vehicles as good for the planet as everyone seems to think they are? A commentary from Aaron Robinson of Car & Driver Magazine.
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RevGadget says :
Wow! Talk about deflecting. Is this guy on the petroleum institutes payroll?
EV batteries are currently mostly Copper and Aluminum with small amounts of lithium and iron. An EV battery weighs from 700 to 1000 pounds. Most of the battery by weight is copper. Congo produces just over 2% of the worlds copper. Cobalt is not used in EV batteries, but in laptops. The largest producers of copper is the Americas, Chile then the US. Bolivia is being smart about there lithium deposits. They will be refining the ore themselves to bring jobs and wealth to the area. How can he equate the damage done by the mining of this much material, which will get reused and recycled, compared to the damage done by the extraction of oil. Which the vehicle will continue to need for the life of the car. The extraction of metals and minerals will taper off as fleets of cars become electric. At that point old batteries will be recycled into new ones.
The dirty little secret is that we can't even mention the effect of the production of electricity to run these cars. According to one of the latest government reports I looked at, the energy efficiency of producing gasoline is now 1.2 units of energy in for each unit out. That means it takes more energy to make a gallon of gas than you get out of it. So by running electric cars we would need less electricity, and NO gasoline.
I believe that the oil companies are starting to worry since the level of disinformation is on the rise.