Off the top of my head, Chile is one of the biggest producers of lithium.Doesn’t most of the lithium ion come from China? Is switching to being dependent on them vs the Middle East really “better”?
And isn’t most of our domestic energy from coal? So is burning more coal to charge our electric cars really “better”?
It does seem, as was previously mentioned hybrid power trains would be the best of both worlds.
Straight from the gooberment https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3Off the top of my head, Chile is one of the biggest producers of lithium.
I'm not a big fan of electrics, but there a number of calculations that have been done which show that even though electricity is largely derived from coal in this country - there would still be a net reduction in greenhouse emissions if all (maybe most) vehicles were electric.
Energy source | Billion kWh | Share of total |
---|---|---|
Total - all sources | 4,243 | |
Fossil fuels (total) | 2,554 | 60.2% |
Natural gas | 1,689 | 39.8% |
Coal | 828 | 19.5% |
Petroleum (total) | 23 | 0.6% |
Petroleum liquids | 16 | 0.4% |
Petroleum coke | 7 | 0.2% |
Other gases3 | 12 | 0.3% |
Nuclear | 772 | 18.2% |
Renewables (total) | 913 | 21.5% |
Wind | 435 | 10.2% |
Hydropower | 262 | 6.2% |
Solar (total) | 146 | 3.4% |
Photovoltaic | 143 | 3.4% |
Solar thermal | 3 | 0.1% |
Biomass (total) | 53 | 1.3% |
Wood | 37 | 0.9% |
Landfill gas | 9 | 0.2% |
Municipal solid waste (biogenic) | 6 | 0.1% |
Other biomass waste | 2 | 0.1% |
Geothermal | 17 | 0.4% |
Pumped storage hydropower4 | -6 | -0.1% |
Other sources5 | 11 | 0.3% |
Depends on if markets are eventually allowed to decide (e.g. if current regimes finally collapse under the weight of all the BS, fiat currency, etc) or not.I'm not worried about gasoline engines going away (yet) but I know that eventually "innovation" tends to win out.
And when they burn, they really burn, like take the house with it (my garage is under my master bedroom = no farging way I'll ever park an electric there).It seems that currently, the cost of repairing an EV‘s is higher than a comparable ICE car - parts availability and time taken to undertake the repairs being cited as reasons. Damage to the batteries also often results in the car being written off / totalled.
There is also a side to this that wasn't mentioned in the thread which may not be known to those of us on this side of the pond.
I still want to know how lower income people in more urban environments are going to charge?