wow. I did not expect my "simple" contribution a while back to result in stoking up the fire underneath this debate so much :)
Perhaps in all the posts (this thread is up to almost 200 pages long by now!) all the pros? and cons have been lost in the discussion.
As a person that agrees with the venerable mr. Clarkson on EV's being soulless microwave ovens and chest freezers :) allow me to address captain rightfoot's and others concerns regarding 'security?, ?big oil? and ?environmental impact? as best I can.
My little proza will take them in order of importance where possible.
Let's start with security. The argument has been made (albeit perhaps briefly and strewn across a large range of previous posts) that anything chinese is basically not a good idea. I agree. The ccp does not have the best interests of any citizens in the world at heart, not even their own quite often it seems. In my opinion this means that anything produced in that country by companies that are mainly chinese owned should be avoided. Put tarifs on them (seems to be popular) ban them, whatever. Since 90% of the entire green agenda seems to be coming from china in on form or another, I see it as a real and present danger and thus should be stamped out. I am sorry of that inconveniences any persons EV dream. And yes, that also means a bunch of electronics in modern ICE vehicles no doubt.
All that talk of 'my PV system produces?? what it has actually produced is more capital in a communist country that has clearly stated in, IIRC, 1948 that it wants to be the world dominating power by 2048 and that is not a good thing. Of course, unless you bought your installation a long long time ago when the rest of the world was still producing this stuff. At least today where the discussion is taking place chances are you are not even able to buy non chinese products.
Mind you, I am not going into the quality debate right now, I think we can skip that and look at the underlying problems first.
The best choice, what a certain much maligned person on the america's is trying to achieve, would be to take back production of 'stuff? (whatever it may be) to your country or region or at the very least your global allies. If I look at the united states of europe, pardon me, the european union, what we SHOULD have done is push low cost labour towards the former eastern block countries that were now members of the EU. That way capital would have flowed into the coffers of the (let's say) Polish, we would have increased their standard of living AND after 20 years they would not go for world domination but be a ?1st world? country, adding to the coffers of the EU strengthening the west in general.
I am fairly certain this can and should (have been) done in down undah albeit in a different way no doubt due to your geography. In any case, in short, ?fuel? security is a valid argument, but I believe this (above) to be a far more important problem to be solved FIRST.
Then, big oil as it was used to be known and anti climate change etc. opinions. I agree, admit, concur that these things have existed and probably still do. I do wish to point out however that ?big oil? as a collective term has been at least complimented or is being replaced even by a new 'mafia? if you will allow me: ?big green?. This lobby is at least as pernicious, manipulative, etc. as its other ?big? older brother from which it has pretty much copied the rulebook. It is not about the environment, it's bout making money, lots of it and by any means. If truly done in the name of the environment I salute the Rory Sutherland types that have masterminded this propaganda machine. Mind you, I am not arguing there is NO good to come from ?big green? but the same can be said about ?big oil?, it too had and still has its merits.
Lastly the environment. This is the big one isn't it? Firstly I would like to take the stance that CO2 is not important for this part of my lengthy post. ie. I will ignore it for now and address it at the very end. Let us first get into the impact of resources and recycling. It is here where I have the most problems with the modern world and the so called ?green revolution?. To the best of my knowledge and research capabilities (ie. the most accurate and recent data I can find) it seems that most things ?green? are not too recyclable unfortunately. Let's take the following premise:
an ICE and EV vehicle are the same apart from their propulsion. The chassis, bodywork, controls, wheels, windows, pretty much everything is the same. From a recycling/environmental impact POV we can cross these off and only deal with two things (well three actually).
- fuel/battery
- engine/electric motor
The third being difference in weight but we'll glance over that and hand that over to the EV for free for now
Let's start with the easy part, the engine/electric motor. Both are made of mainly aluminium and steel these days which is pretty easy to recycle well. Sure the electric motor has copper but being a metal it will recycle just fine. Both have a degree of plastics involved but we?'ll call that largely even. The ICE is bigger perhaps, but I do not see this as a very big deal since the recycling of metal is so very near to 100% anyway. We can cross of the larger volume of metal in an ICE to the increased complexity of rare earth magnets in the electric motor I guess.
Of course the fuel tank of a modern ICE vehicle is no longer made of steel but plastic so there is that. I would like to see them use metal again but hey. The battery, the big point of course, however is not as recyclable as far as I can find the best self reported figures (thus I do take em with a grain of salt) are 95% but real world figures seem to be closer to 80%. In comparison a lead acid battery is recycled up to 99%. I will skip a whole books worth of text in itself about how the processes work and what is recycled and what not since this post is going to big big enough as it is but it boils down to this: recovery of complex chemicals and plastics. This process is not free and acid leeching and other processes are not exactly environmentally friendly and energy intensive.
What you end up with in the end is a 'sludge? of questionable chemical stability and impact that is simply not economically viable to further refine or not even possible. This brings me neatly to my problem with the modern world: we are creating more and more ?green? options that in the end are just not that green. To simplify it by a lot, all 3 major green pushes of this moment have the same sludge problem. Solar panels are very recyclable, up to a point. Sure the metal frame and the glass panel are easy to do but the doped silicon wafers do have a limit as to where we can extract the silicon and separate the chemicals. Yet we have put uncountable millions of tons of the things everywhere. The same goes for LED lights, even more so I would argue, since the darn things are so small. (and thus more difficult to recycle)
So, no. I am sorry but ?green? is not what I would call any of these initiatives. We are creating rivers of chemical sludge and digging up the entire planet to get to them.
Let's put this into perspective, the best recyclable battery is lead acid. Sure it is heavier and lasts less but we could have all been driving milk floats decades ago! The same goes for lighting, the best recyclable light is the incandescent lightbulb, after all it is a piece of glass, some metal and a vacuum? Crush the darn thing, and melt down it's constituent parts. I mean, with all that green energy it would not be a problem that they are less efficient right?
So. I guess it is time to address that proverbial elephant in the room. CO2. According to some it is the end of the world (and not even as we know it but end period.) and to others it is plant food. I guess the truth is somewhere in between those two points (and I do not mean the middle). I find it fascinating to see that we make a HUGE problem out of it in some circles but we seem to refuse to actually fix it, and with that I do not mean go the entire green road we have discussed above. I know it is simplified but we are able to extract CO2 from the atmosphere if we want to and we can then either use it or put it back under ground. Sure it is very expensive but I wonder what is more expensive in the end? Let us expand that and put it like this: if climate change mitigation (sea level rise whatever) is going to cost the world trillions, is that not cheaper than what we are doing now? Would simply recycling CO2 into synthetic fuel not be at least as efficient?
Ah well, I think this post is long enough for now :)
Cheers,
-P
