How Do EV Owners Sleep?

There may be a more smug class of people than EV drivers, but only on two wheels. As South Park satirised them, EV drivers are bourgeois hippies who are so full of themselves that they smell their own farts.

But what have they got to be so conceited about? “It’s much better for the environment,” they pompously intone. “Think of the planet.”

At the heart of every EV is a lithium battery. The story of that battery is one of destructive environmental and social impacts. Just because the damage is done far out of sight in developing countries doesn’t make it any less horrible.

Just one lithium supply mine where entire mountains are eliminated. Each mine usually consists of thirty-five to forty humongous 797 Caterpillar haul trucks along with hundreds of other large equipment. Each 797 uses around half a million gallons of diesel a year. So, with an inventory of just thirty-five the haul trucks alone are using 17.5 million gallons of fuel a year for just one lithium site.

There is virtually non-existing transparency of the environmental degradation and the human rights abuses occurring in developing countries with yellow, brown, and black skinned people. Both human rights abuses and environmental degradation are directly connected to the mining for the exotic minerals and metals that are required to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries.

No doubt, though, EV owners never stop to think for a single moment just how many literal mountains of resources are needed to power their smugmobiles. The same people who think that mining is an environmental evil are sitting on top of literal tons of mined resources.

To manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.

The current fossil fuel infrastructure is less invasive than mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy”. In developing countries, these mining operations exploit child labor, and are responsible for the most egregious human rights’ violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation. The 2022 Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy, does an excellent job of discussing the lack of transparency to the world of the green movement’s impact upon humanity […]

So, the next time you are thinking about purchasing an electric vehicle, or driving your EV car, before congratulating yourselves on saving the environment, remember that it came at a cost of entire mountains in developing countries, thousands of square miles of land and billions of gallons of oil and fuel.

Then there’s the EV equivalent of the “Pinto Problem”. The Pinto Problem was a groundbreaking consumer rights scandal in the 1970s. After a spate of fires in Ford Pintos, it was revealed that the car’s design meant that even minor rear-end collisions could result in deadly fires.

So far, there have been 85 Tesla EV fires — many of them deadly — mostly caused by batteries. Some are exacerbated by design features such as Tesla’s lack of external door openers. Currently, there is an EV fire nearly every week.

As for “emissions free”, leaving aside the emissions from manufacturing EVs, which are many times those of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, the cars are charged with electricity. Electricity which almost always has emissions somewhere in its generation.

To say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid as 80 percent of the electricity generated to charge the batteries is from coal, natural gas, and nuclear.

Since twenty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S is from coal-fired plants, it follows that twenty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered.

Since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S is from natural gas, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are natural gas-powered.

Since twenty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S is from nuclear, it follows that twenty percent of the EVs on the road are nuclear-powered.

CFACT

History is littered with the disastrous outcomes of the green fantasies of bourgeois westerners. The fad for biofuels led to food crops being cleared for fuel-producing crops, and farmers in developing countries were driven violently off their land.

There has been a concerted awareness campaign around “blood diamonds”. Perhaps there needs to be one for “blood minerals” in EVs. Or perhaps EV owners are well aware of the environmental degradation and human rights violations built into their smugmobiles — and just don’t care.