- Farmington Hills officials are fuming over a glut of unsold Cybertrucks being stored in the city.
- Tesla has been parking the EVs at a shopping center earmarked for major redevelopment.
- Officials say the electric vehicles violate zoning codes and are warning the property owner.
Batteries can be recycled, reused or repurposed. It’s nowhere near as damaging as drilling for/refining/shipping/burning oil and we decided we are perfectly okay with that.
Why is the alternative to an EV SUV a combustion engine SUV? Why isn’t cycling and public transport?
I’m not saving ICEs are good and EV are bad but that maybe… both aren’t great anyway, especially when actual alternatives that make people healthier do exist.
Biking doesn’t always work well in the us because shit is spread out further.
Anything else but driving doesn’t work well in the US because the “way of life” is indeed car centric. It will never change without infrastructure, including but not limited to bike lanes. Large distances are possible with (electric) bike but this at least needs to be safe.
So… yes I’m not advocating for somebody leaving the middle of absolute nowhere to give up on their cars. This is not even about cities (as the article mentions a parking lot I assume it’s next or even inside a city).
No, my point instead is to question the false dichotomy.
I agree we shouldn’t have set things up as we did but it’s done and there is no way I’m biking what would be a 40 minute drive to microcenter.
I did spend last week biking 45min somewhere and back (so 1h30) for 4 days in a row. It’s not for everyone … but not only it’s feasible but (and I know it will sound crazy to some) I actually did enjoy it. On the last day I even did the last trip with a new friend, chatting the entire ride.
Again, I’m not arguing that anybody should do that, or have fun doing, only that’s it not impossible.
I thought it was widely accepted that lithium mining is far more harmful to the environment than drilling for oil, and that the hope was that not burning oil/gas we offset the mining (to the point if u drive ur electric car x miles it’s cleaner overall than if u drive an ICE vehicle). Do you have information that states otherwise?
Oil spills are far worse for the environment than mining could be. Also, electric cars keep air pollution in cities down. Not saying there is zero environmental impact but mining is not nearly as bad as fossil fuels can be, and same could be said for nuclear as well.
Let’s maybe not shorthand Internal Combustion Engine for a little while lol
The lithium mining process is laborious, dangerous, and releases radioactive elements into groundwater and into the air as mine tailings. Not to mention, most of Earth’s lithium reserves are in Chile, Bolivia, and Rwanda. With Western investors backing corrupt national governments, this means that exploitative labor (read: slavery) is the primary means of extraction.
It is, in comparison to other extraction methods, literally just as bad.
Mexico has a giant deposit but they insist on silly things like environmental regulations.
Actually lithium isn’t the long term plan, it’s just the plan for today. Sodium is the long term. But huge lithium deposits exists in the US and China too.
They won’t be, though :(
Lithium is pretty stable. Those dumbtrucks will rot there for some time, then got reposessed and eventually moved to a recycling plant, and almost all of the lithium will eventually be used for something useful.
They literally already are and have been for years.
Agreed. The person you’re responding to is using the same logic as “wind turbines kill birds”, “EVs run on FF electricity”, etc. Anyone trying to convince you to let perfection get in the way of progress is almost certainly being disingenuous, or at best has been talked into it by someone who was.
Lithium mining is horrible for the environment too. I don’t think that’s a bit improvement over gas\oil
It happens once and is reusable forever. It’s a massive improvement.
Sure, and it’s a good interim tech until we get things like hydrogen working better.
Dude hydrogen is a bait and switch. We’ve had hydrogen engine tech forever. As for the source, you CAN get it from water after putting in more energy into it than you get out of it, or you can just refine it from oil. Guess what the plan has always been?
Hydrogen is just a way to greenwash big oil.
there are modern ways of doing it they’re pretty efficient from what I’ve been reading using natural gas and water or electrolysis but I’m no scientist so I’m not going to try to explain it here I think maybe you should look into some more modern methods than what you’re talking about.
Natural gas is not green. Not even close. It’s just more convenient. Electrolysis cannot magically be made more efficient here either. It takes a certain amount of energy to break those chemical bonds and you can’t magically break those bonds using less energy. The amount of energy you get from burning that hydrogen is less than what you put in to break those bonds via electrolysis.
I actually do know what I’m talking about here.