Even if you remove “gas” from the equation, I think people sometimes don’t realize how vital fossil fuels and minerals are to building even the greenest of green cars.
Just think about all the parts in your car...
• All the steel? Requires carbon, iron ore, and metallurgical coal to get the temperatures high enough.
• All the plastic? Made from petroleum.
• The batteries? You need lithium, cobalt, nickel, phosphorus, silver, aluminum, iron etc.
• The electronics and wiring? Rare-earth metals, copper, tin etc.
• All that wonderful “cruelty-free” leather? You’re basically swapping animals for seats made from oil.
• Glass? You don’t have glass without raw material and high heat.
• Rubber in your tires and trim? That needs to be vulcanized.
• Oh, you want parts to move? Well, you’ll need some oil-based lubricants for that.
Add on top of that:
• The amount of mining that needs to happen to get all these raw materials. Mining which needs heavy-duty machines that need to be built with raw materials, to be powered by diesel, and eventually replaced.
• The stable base-load energy required to power the factories making all these car parts.
• The transportation of all these raw materials, individual parts, and finished cars around the world.
• Perhaps the biggest issue, the upgrading of our entire electrical grid to handle all these electric cars, which will require a massive amount of things like copper.
If we want to shift to electric cars and meet 2040 climate goals, the International Energy Agency says mineral supplies will need to increase by 30 times(!). Think of the amount of exploration, mining, transportation, and fuel energy that will be required to make that happen.
Now we may be ok with doing all of this, but anyone who thinks the "energy transition" happens without fossil fuels and minerals is frankly not a serious person. Frankly, nothing in life happens without resource extraction.
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