So the UK gov have bought forward the date where all new cars must be electric or hybrid.
Now forgive my ignorance but I get the damage that oil/petroleum does to the environment but surely there’s a negative impact to this ‘green’ tech too? Am I overlooking how much lithium or cobalt will be needed for this mass change? Surely having a huge need for these resources will mean just as much mining or seabed trawling to the degree that it’s not really ‘green’ any more…
In: Earth Science
Indeed mining for resources like mineral and copper are part of the “hidden cost” of green energy. Other things might be tire particles and lubricating oil from electric cars or transportation costs of equipment. Probably the best way to evaluate how “green” something is would be to compare the energy produced to the emissions produced.
For example, where I live we have coal power, which means an electric car runs on coal (dirtier than petroleum). However the power plant is more efficient at converting fossil fuels to electricity than a gas car due to its size. So even though coal powers the electric car to its generally better than gasoline.
With the resources like mineral mining, it gets even more complicated because of international politics. Minerals and magnets make the high efficiency turbines for a lot of green tech. There just are not that many do called “rare earth mineral” mines out there and around 80% of them are owned by China. These minerals are not only used for energy but also for defense and it is a riding geopolitical tension.
You’re right in that there’s a tradeoff to everything and nothing is ever zero impact, but some things have lower impact than others.
With ‘green’ energy, there are up front costs and maintenance costs. Materials have to be mined not just to make batteries, solar cells, wind turbines but to fix and replace them when they wear out.
However, the same is true for non-green energy, because those power stations also have to be built, maintained, and eventually replaced. But in addition to that, an enormous amount of fuel has to be extracted and transported and once burned is gone. [The Kingston coal plant in Tennessee burns 14,000 tons of coal a day to power 700k homes](https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/coal/how-a-coal-plant-works).
While green energy is not zero impact, it’s much lower impact than non-green energy.
When it comes to electricity the greenest form is nuclear. It takes the least amount of fossil fuels to mine the ore that gets refined into fuel, build the power plant, and produce the power. Yes, nuclear storage is an issue and accidents have happened, but the environmental impact and loss of life is tiny compared to coal. There is some very exciting work being done with thorium reactors right now, I strongly suggest looking into that if you’re curious about the future of green energy.
The biggest issue with wind and solar is that the lifespan of the infrastructure is often too short to make much of an impact in carbon offset compared to the amount of release it takes to create. It is also a land-hog method. Look at Ivanpaa in California for an example.
An issue just as important as carbon emissions is resource management, as you mentioned. I haven’t heard/seen very much in the way of alarm bells on this front. For instance, the global supply of indium is set to run out in the next decade at its current level of use vs known deposits. Indium is what makes touchscreens work, hard to keep our modern society without smartphones.
All energy generation has some upfront environmental cost, however in general once installed “green” energy has no or minimal ongoing environmental cost and even the initial creation of the structure is minimal compared to fossil fuels.
Yes, everything we do have an environmental impact the question is to what degree. Green in this context means less bad for the environment than the alternative, not that there is no impact all
If we like to have cars it is better with electric cars. No cars would be even better from an environmental perspective, it would be problematic from an economical perspective and very unpopular. I suspect that a government that suggested that cars should no longer be allowed would be out of power after the next election.
So a requirement that cars should be electric or hybrids result in less environmental impact that if you do not change the rules
The main problem with fossil fuel global is the emission of CO2 that is a greenhouse gas.
Locally the emission of NO2 and particle release is a problem for humans.
Mining for stuff you need in electric cars is a problem. The manufacturing is another problem.
>Now forgive my ignorance but I get the damage that oil/petroleum does to the environment but surely there’s a negative impact to this ‘green’ tech too?
That really depends on how you define ‘green’. It’s true that even hybrids and electric cars have their own negative environmental impact. However, this is also true of every possible method of transportation – even walking and cycling have negative impacts because of food energy input requirements. This mean that defining ‘green’ as having zero negative impact is meaningless, because that goalpost cannot be reached by any transportation alternative.
Instead, the useful view of ‘green’ is something that has a notably lower environmental impact than the current status quo. By that definition, hybrids and electric cars are, in fact, greener than gas cars. This remains true whether you measure that green-ness in terms of [emissions and energy use](https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/ev-vs-gasoline-cars-practicum-final-report.pdf), or [in terms of harm to human health, ecosystem diversity loss and resource quality loss](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es903729a) (via the EcoIndicator 99 benchmark) to capture impacts that the former two metrics don’t adequately portray.
This is in large part due to the fact that, for any given car, operations dwarfs manufacturing in overall impact, as evidenced by the lifecycle analyses above. Even a relatively small improvement in operational efficiency can translate into a sizeable overall impact over the car’s life, and the efficiency gains of hybrids and EVs over gas cars is anything but small. At a bare minimum, even if you account for the resources needed to build the batteries, hybrids and EVs are still better for the environment than gas cars.
It’s a valid point. Also, even with electric vehicles, the power still needs to come from somewhere. Part of this is that using electric vehicles means the energy production doesn’t need to happen in the vehicle, so it doesn’t produce gasses that choke cities. The energy production can be moved elsewhere, so can be made cleaner (wind turbines, solar panels, etc.). It’s sort of a NIMBY approach, but it also makes it easier to deal with the problem.
> Am I overlooking how much lithium or cobalt will be needed for this mass change? Surely having a huge need for these resources will mean just as much mining or seabed trawling to the degree that it’s not really ‘green’ any more…
I see this thought process a lot, with people looking at the projected downsides in such a way as to give themselves an impression that we end up back where we started.
There’s a kind of false elegance to this, people can watch [this scene](https://www.hashcut.com/v/xZ3zrr5) from blade runner, and feel like we follow along with the point of the argument even though the content is fictional, because it follows this pattern of new counter-balancing problems revealing themselves.
What will happen instead is that this will certainly lead to new problems tied to resource extraction, though not of the same scale, and once the extraction has occurred, recycling lithium becomes increasingly lucrative, with alternative ways of storing energy like fossil fuels of course not being recyclable in the same way.
There’s more to it, that feels hard to eli5, but the basic jist is this; there’s no moral law that demands that the negative side effects and consequences must match the benefits, it depends on the specifics of the tech, so that it really can be possible for this to result in a lower impact.
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