Schneier on Security

1&1~=Umm • September 4, 2020 4:25 AM

@Elnac:

“Batteries are made in China/India, so it’s not a ollution people see, or think about.”

Elon Musk gets bateries from where?

“From the battery manufacturing to its currently inexistant recycling.”

There is some recycling currently going on in the West. In part it’s from splitting battery packs down and pulling out bad cells and reusing the good cells. For some reason that is not understood as well as many would hope the lifetime on lithium cells is very variable and in some cases as much as 5:1. Which is why it is cost effective for people building their own “PowerWalls” to buy up both used vehicle cells and used computer cells. As for more industrial style “recycling” as with most recycling it’s actually ‘market driven’ that is currently there is no market for the recycled parts with sufficient profit for the usual Asian operations to get involved. But,

“Most electric cars take between 300.000 and 500.000km to even out their pollution with older diesel/gasoline ones, just because of the enormous initial pollution to produce the lithium, and electronics.”

I think you need to compare like with like European studies have shown that the average family car takes ~25years of usage to repay it’s “Manufacturing polution” offset. Which in the case of both iron and aluminium require a very very large electrical input for the smelting process so much so infact that for many years Aluminium smelting was only carried out in areas with lots of low cost electricity that was produced by hydroelectric generation. The studies of interest were carried out before electronic engine managment and it’s consequent ‘extra polution’ became prevalent.

The real issue between electric and IC vehicles is actually two fold. Firstly the inefficiencies of total drive chain from storage to vehical movment. Even with the old heavy lead acid batteries used in “delivery vehicles” having nearly no mechanical drive chain tipped the balance in favour of electric vehicles. Secondly though was and still remains the issues of fueling. An IC engined vehicle can be ‘charged’ in a matter of minutes, whilst batteries can take hours to sizeable fractions of a day. If you were to try to replace the current fossil fuels with another source of chemical energy the chances are you would not be alowed to do so due to health, safety, and environmental protection legislation. The ‘Petro-Chem’ industry with regards vehicle fuels would not be alowed to exist if the legislation in place today was in place a little over a century ago. Thus the IC engine is not playing on a level playing field and thus leads a ‘charmed existance’.

But talking about fuel transportation, whilst finding figures on ‘loss’ for the electrical/mains grid is not particularly difficult, finding simillar for petro-chem / fossil fuels is very difficult as it’s more or less kept ‘hidden’. The reason is most electrical grid transmission loss is ‘heat’ which whilst it is the ultimate form of pollution is nowhere near as dangerous as the chemical ‘loss’ ditectly into the environment, most chemical energy sources are toxic (including those we eat) and so just dumping them into the environment is a very bad idea.

But you mention coal etc used for electricity generation but you do not mention the refining process of fossil fuels and the immense polution issues involved.

We could endlessly bat individual parts of the ‘from sunlight to motion’ chain backwards and forwards, but in most cases that would be like arguing what effect the colour of ‘the lipstick on the pig’ has on the taste of the sausages or the quantity of squeal in the process.

You need to consider the entire chain from ‘sunlight to motion’ and compare them side by side. If you did you might find that the real joker in the pack is the petro-chem industry from ‘hole in the ground to vehicle storage’ as far as polution is concerned.