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Of course we could find and post pictures of oil refineries or large oil fields. Or cities. Or we could mention that where there's one fracking site there are probably many more just like it, just out of the frame.Specifically, it's the Escondido Copper mine in Chile:
Google Maps
This is what a Lithium mine looks like:
Google Maps
And here is the Cobalt mine in the Philippines which Tesla currently use:
Google Maps
Of course we could find and post pictures of oil refineries or large oil fields. Or cities. Or we could mention that where there's one fracking site there are probably many more just like it, just out of the frame.
If you run your e-car on power from a coal-fired plant, its carbon footprint is scarcely better than that of a gasoline engine.
I'd expect this from the right wing press, but the Guardian...?
Rise of electric car solves little if driven by fossil fuels, warns windfarm boss
The rise of electric cars could leave us with a big battery waste problem
Electric cars are not the solution
Apart from the slightly sensationalist titles, there is nothing really wrong with any of those articles.
Except that there are things wrong with them.
1) In the U.S. yes, not in the U.K where the average MPG is already approaching 50mpg due to the price of petrol.
2) Please point to the gigafactory-sized operation that is available today that can do 100% cradle-to-grave recycling on vehicle Lithium batteries
3) The spirit of the article isn't about EV vs. ICE's - it's about driving vs. walking.
Until it is built, it doesn't exist.
The linked article states that the motor weighs 45.3kg, which would include its aluminum housing, steel shaft and reduction gears, steel rotor (Tesla calls it a "copper clad rotor) and stator cores, and maybe the inverter. Still a lot of copper, but not 45kg.There's 45kg of copper in the typical Tesla rotor:
The Extraordinary Raw Materials in a Tesla Model S
This is what grown-up EV debates SHOULD look like.
1) In the U.S. yes, not in the U.K where the average MPG is already approaching 50mpg due to the price of petrol.
Then why isn't the article titled, "We Should All Start Walking" or "All Cars Are Terrible"? It's clearly disingenuous.3) The spirit of the article isn't about EV vs. ICE's - it's about driving vs. walking.
Right. Because burning calories (aka food) is so much better for the environment. Plants have horrible efficiency at turning sunlight into food energy (generally sub-1% for most foods), meat is far worse than plants, and humans have poor efficiency at turning food energy into kinetic energy. An average person burns about 100 kcal per mile over baseline metabolism by walking (116 Wh/mi). Inflate that by 2-3 orders of magnitude to get a sense of sun-to-footsteps human-powered transport efficiency. Solar panels by contrast are ~20% efficient, and transport losses minor (generally less than 10%).
And here we're comparing to plants! 1kg of beef has a CO2 footprint of 13,3kg. At around 2kcal/g, that's 2000 calories, or 20 miles of walking, so 665g/mi, or 41321 g/100km. A Prius, by contrast, is about 90g/100km