> To illustrate the ultimate scale of demand that EV mandates alone will place on mining, consider that a world with 500 million electric cars — which would still constitute under half of all vehicles — would require mining a quantity of energy minerals sufficient to build batteries for about 3 trillion smartphones. That’s equal to over 2,000 years of mining and production for the latter. For the record, that many EVs would eliminate only about 15% of world oil use.
> Set aside the environmental, economic and geopolitical implications of such a staggering expansion of global mining. The World Bank cautions about “a new suite of challenges for the sustainable development of minerals and resources.” Such an increase in mining has direct relevance for predictions about the future carbon intensity for minerals because acquiring raw materials already accounts for nearly one half of the life-cycle carbon dioxide emissions for EVs.
People are still living in the fantasy that EVs will solve the problem of ICEs, they haven't thought through what it would actually take to do that. Basically, they are imagining a completely blue-sky happy path where every single piece magically falls into place: abundant high-yield mineral deposits continue to be found and quickly extracted, battery technology improves exponentially, car makers are able to smoothly incorporate all of these new technology improvements and supply chain disruptions to switch to EVs, and cheaply decommission and recycle legacy ICE vehicles. So many things have to come together absolutely perfectly that it beggars belief.
Ironically the very oil and gas industries that funded this FUD via the Manhattan Institute are themselves a perfect example of how extractive industry can scale up far beyond the kind of naive extrapolations that gave us the "peak oil" idea.
I suppose that the Climate and Community Project and University of California, Davis are also being funded by the Manhattan Institute to spread FUD?
> The US’s transition to electric vehicles could require three times as much lithium as is currently produced for the entire global market, causing needless water shortages, Indigenous land grabs, and ecosystem destruction inside and outside its borders, new research finds.
That's the first paragraph of https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-... (that's 2023-01-24, btw). The entire article is worth reading to get a high-level overview of the actual real-world impact the lithium mining will have over the next couple of decades if we keep rushing headlong into a path where we believe electric cars will just magically solve everything.
I know in this cynical age no one wants to believe anything, but really–have we not seen enough ecologies destroyed by mining to understand that this is real?
