Though quite a few studies have documented that the advantages of electrical autos far outweigh their environmental impacts over time, a Redditor has shared a deceptive tweet from 2022 concerning the mining required for EV battery supplies.
The tweet included a photograph of a diamond mine that was purported to someway drive its level dwelling.
A lot of the commenters have been conscious that this tweet was skewed, if not completely false, particularly since this explicit meme has been circulating for years and was fact-checked by Agence France-Presse in 2022.
A protracted-standing debate has existed about the advantages of electrical autos in comparison with inside combustion engine vehicles. Whereas EVs have room for enchancment, they’re way more environment friendly and have decrease lifetime emissions than gas-guzzlers — even when accounting for extracting supplies and producing batteries, because the U.S. Environmental Safety Company has famous.
The common lithium-ion EV battery requires round 408 kilos of minerals to assemble, based on a 2024 Mining Business evaluation.
The shared put up claimed that 500,000 kilos of earth is excavated for a single battery, which an knowledgeable quoted by AFP mentioned was “not the appropriate metric for evaluating environmental influence.”
A lot of a battery’s supplies may be reclaimed by way of recycling efforts, together with the remainder of a automobile’s parts. Research have proven that new recycling methods beneath improvement can already recuperate 99.99% of lithium from decommissioned batteries.
“One of many largest issues folks maintain towards EVs would possibly grow to be considered one of its largest advantages in the long term,” mentioned Daan Walter, one of many authors of a 2024 report from local weather assume tank RMI, per Canary Media. ”Battery minerals have an incredible profit over oil, and that is you can reuse them.”
The report defined that with out the previous decade’s value of technological developments within the sector, the demand for key mined battery minerals can be 60% to 140% larger than it’s in the present day.
If tendencies proceed, we might attain peak demand for newly mined battery minerals by the mid-2030s, based on the report’s authors.
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Plus, when you think about elements such because the speedy development in battery design, effectivity, and recycling, the report said that we may attain net-zero mineral demand by the 2040s.
Researchers at Argonne Nationwide Laboratory calculated the emissions of each a gas-powered automotive and an EV with a 300-mile vary, and the electrical automobile received simply, because the EPA famous.
Whereas emissions from electrical automobile manufacturing and end-of-life are larger than making ICE autos because of the battery, these gasoline guzzlers proceed to spew planet-warming gases into the ambiance daily they’re pushed.
“In the case of uncooked supplies, there’s merely no comparability,” mentioned analyst Lucien Mathieu, per Transport & Atmosphere. “Over its lifetime, a median fossil-fuel automotive burns the equal of a stack of oil barrels, 25 (tales) excessive. For those who take note of the recycling of battery supplies, solely round 30 kilograms of metals can be misplaced — roughly the scale of a soccer.”
A self-proclaimed combustion-engine fan shared in response to the Reddit put up, “I’ve critical doubts about the remainder of the mathematics there. I’m not one to undertake electrics both, however dishonesty is dishonesty.”
One other really did a few of their very own calculations and summarized issues by saying, “That is propaganda.”
“When an EV battery dies, all of the steel you took out of the earth continues to be there,” they added. “Not like the burned gasoline, you possibly can recycle that steel into extra EV batteries again and again, so in the long term, EVs take far much less out of the earth.”
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