The writers at Issues & Insights argue persuasively that producing the batteries for electric cars is an extraordinarily dirty, environmentally degrading business.
These paragraphs will give you the gist of the piece:
Today, a typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.
Read the whole thing.
Environmental propaganda has turned millions of people into anti-petroleum zealots, but the supposedly “green” alternatives are terrible.