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
> 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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