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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

My concern is safety (car wreaks), distaste for touch interfaces (also safety related) and the environmental (ironic, I know) and social impact of rare earths mining.

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Rare earths are not a major component in car batteries. They are mostly used in the electric motors for the magnets and it's acutally quite easy to replace them. Mining of lithium, copper, nickel, will have to expand in the future. But it's nothing in comparison to the damage that is done with the extraction of oil and gas.

Yes, people afraid of rare earth and lithium mining should get some numbers right first: We extract 4 BILLION TONS of oil from the ground every year. In comparison, we extract a few million tons of lithium (and it's reusable / recyclable), and a few tens of thousand tons of rare earths.

The FUD about mining is pure big oil propaganda, frankly.

Oil (let’s forget about Canada oil sands for a minute here) is pumped out of the ground. Lithium and copper is strip mined and lithium salts are dried in toxic pools. I’m all for the electric transition because oil will run out but this needs figuring out environmentally.

Oil is burnt into CO2 that will remain for centuries in the atmosphere, heating it up (and I'm not mentioning countless toxic oil spills, methane leaking, etc). It's less immediately visible and acutely dangerous than toxic pools, but it's really bad.

Is it just pure FUD? There's some very negative and well documented externalities with lithium mining in particular like child slavery and major environmental pollution. It's not something "big oil" is just making up.

"Child slavery" is a known problem with cobalt mining, not lithium mining.

There are negative externalities with any mining, especially as it's often done in developing countries with poor labor protection. However if you are serious about it you should strive to improve the condition of mining workers, as opposed to forgoing it in favor of pumping oil.

Don’t you need to extract hundreds of millions of tons of lithium ore to get a couple of millions of tons of pure lithium? Not to mention the extensive chemical processing the ore must go through.

Yes but it's still absolutely dwarfed by the staggering amounts of fossil fuels we're extracting (and the absolute environmental catastrophe that goes with them):

https://edconway.substack.com/p/the-hump

Few years ago the pure lithium produced was 50 THOUSAND tons. I'm sure it's a multiple by now but I'd be surprised if it has gotten to millions.

Also once lithium is extracted, it carries energy thousands of times before it needs to be recycled to work thousands of times more and so on.

Oil/coal carries the energy ONCE and then it's unmitigated pollution.

And you are right that this is about 4 BILLION tons annually.

Here is data until 2021. http://www.world-mining-data.info/?World_Mining_Data___Data_...

Petrol fire is undoubtedly easier to come by and more dangerous in case of a crash. Touch interfaces aren't specifically tied to electric vehicles; it's a common disease on all modern vehicles, fortunately on the decline. Environmentally, in countries with reasonably balanced (i.e. not China and Poland) power generation, EVs are *way better* than ICEs, without the slightest room for debate.

Petrol fire is much easier to extinguish than a battery fire.

Yeah, touch interfaces is a disease on most modern vehicles (but especially electric).

The infrastructure is the weakest link after the raw material chain required to build them. Oh, and recycling/disposal.

Petrol fire is much more common than battery fires, which are vanishingly rare.

The oil infrastructure must be dismantled as fast as possible. Recycling of batteries is a chicken-egg problem : it's ramping up, but is necessarily lagging behind EV market penetration. It's an eminently solvable problem -- lead batteries are recycled way over 95% already.

Remember : a vehicle lasts about 12 to 14 years. in 2035 (12 years), our fossil fuel consumption must have been reduced drastically compared to now. Buying any sort of ICE vehicle today is really, really hard to justify.

>our fossil fuel consumption must have been reduced drastically compared to now.

Tens of millions of people, and possibly more, see this argument as low credibility. Meaning, that the argument for EVs should probably be made according to their inherent merits and not climate arguments.

Put another way, I'd be careful about tangling up the EV push in divisive climate politics. As one is arguably likely to taint EVs in the minds of the public, leading to ever greater pushback in regard to their adoption. Don't underestimate public response to being told that they have to change their lifestyle because of hotly debated assertions. No matter whether or not you think they should be debated.

Petrol cars don’t burn your house down in the middle of the night while the car is turned off. This happened several times with the Bolt EV (A car I owned) until GM had to recall them all and eventually cancel the entire line and stop manufacturing it. These batteries are extremely dangerous and lithium fires can’t be extinguished like a gasoline fire since the reaction creates its own oxygen.

> Petrol cars don’t burn your house down in the middle of the night while the car is turned off.

Yes they do: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2022/RCLRPT-22V346-3365.PDF

> Risk of underhood fire, including while the vehicle is parked and off.

Data from the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency recently found that ICE cars could be up to 20 times more likely to catch fire. https://www.msb.se/sv/aktuellt/nyheter/2023/maj/brander-i-el...

It also wasn't that long ago that a diesel car that was parked and switched off spontaneously caught fire and wrote off an entire multi-storey car park at Luton Airport, so there's an anecdote for all.

That's not to say that problems with the Bolt weren't serious but they are not representative of the EV market as a whole.

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