Newstalk ZB week on demand Monday 9 September 7:15-7:30 am audio begins at 1:55
By the way, this piece of reading I had over the weekend – and please read it if you are interested in the subject, because it’s a very comprehensive piece written by a guy called Troy Bowker, who, well, he’s at canny wee Capital Partners. They’ve got a small part of their portfolio invested in petroleum equipment services, so you might go, oh well he might say that.
Anyway, what he does is he goes into the world of EVs – and this, yet again, is the danger of the government in their endless policies that they will not take advice on – Treasury have come up with a ‘feebate’, the Julie Anne Genter feebate, and said that this will make no difference at all. It won’t make a jot of difference to saving the planet when you go buy your Nissan Leaf for $8,000 left… ah… less.
“The preaching”, starts Troy, “of the EV gospel has reached evangelical proportions.” And he’s right. No one in authority seems to have stopped to ask just how environmentally friendly EVs are.
The evidence is that EVs risk an environmental catastrophe for this country, and a human rights issue globally. We’ll come to that in a minute because it’s important.
Ah… when we see the supply chain issues are fully understood in this country, the scheme will be seen for what it is. Labour and the Greens are jumping on the EV bandwagon without properly considering the full impact either upstream or downstream.
What… what he’s talking about is, your EVs have got massive batteries. They’re made out of lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel, and these substances are mined in the world’s poorest countries.
And after the battery loses its ability to hold a charge, the metals and the chemicals contain toxic substances. It’s currently very difficult and expensive to dispose of them cleanly. Technology hasn’t developed enough globally to either find a way to dispose of them safely nor to recycle them in the volumes that will be needed.
They will end up being dumped in the landfill. That’s where we are putting them. In the landfill. Average EV battery weighs over 500 kilograms. It’s full of lithium, lasts a maximum of eight years. Now Genter wants all four million cars on the road to be an EV – you can imagine that’s two million tonnes of used toxic EV battery in this country alone.
Have we thought about that? Ah… you could build a giant EV battery recycling plant if you wanted, but guess who is paying for that? That option’s untested by the way. You could ship the batteries to countries that make money from taking the developed world’s rubbish – would we do that? No, we wouldn’t.
So, in reality, the only alternative is to bury them here in the country. Is this the government that wants to bury a whole lot of toxic rubbish in the ground? I don’t think so.
No information on how we are to stop the chemicals seeping through the ground into the waterways. This is the government that announced the cleaning up of the waterways just last week. They’re putting batteries in the ground now.
In the meantime, the batteries are prone to spontaneous combustion, they emit poisonous gases in the air – some Swedish scientists have looked at that. Fluoride gas emissions from EV battery fires pose a serious toxic threat. Apart from normal fires, EV fires are very difficult to put out. Our own fire and emergency people are warning of the risks with the influx of thousands of batteries, let alone four million – the four million that Genter wants; they’re saying they don’t know how to deal with them.
Bolivia is the world’s largest supplier of lithium but has one of the world’s worst records for child labour. Children legally commence mining at the age of ten. Is this the sort of business we want to be in?
There was a CNN investigation. The scientists had tracked cobalt used for the production of EVs to the Congolese child labour camps.
Is Julie Anne still interested in all of this? So, read all of this – it’s well worth reading – it’s a good comprehensive look at the world of EVs and exactly what Julie Anne (a) wants to bring into the country and (b) have you pay for. And she hasn’t even got the answers because as Troy points out, she probably hasn’t even asked the questions.