Toxicity of Lithium-Ion Batteries at Odds With Push for Electric Vehicles
Government leaders are pushing for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), but there are concerns about the vast amounts of mineral mining necessary for battery production and the ensuing waste management issues taking a toll on the environment.
Lithium, the primary component of an EV battery, can be highly environmentally polluting in its extraction and discarding phases.
A major issue with lithium mining is the quantity of water required. Mining just 1 ton of lithium can use up to 2.2 million gallons of water, according to AZO Cleantech. This results in the depletion of water sources close to mining regions and drying out of land, posing a threat to not only the environment of the region but also communities living in the vicinity.
Lithium batteries use various elements like nickel, copper, and lead, which can all be toxic.
The open-pit mining method of extracting minerals required for batteries involves clearing out vegetation and digging a deep pit, creating the circumstances for erosion, according to UL Research Institutes.
According to a January 2023 study by the Climate and Community Project, if America’s current EV demand is projected to 2050, the U.S. market would need three times the current world supply of lithium to meet the demand. This requires a massive expansion of mining activities that can bring about enormous changes to landscapes and living conditions.
The Real Carbon Footprint
A 2019 study by Circular Energy Storage (pdf) calculated that production of an NCM111 lithium battery results in 73 kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per kilowatt-hour (kWh). NCM111 batteries contain one-third nickel, one-third cobalt, and one-third manganese in the cathode.
This means a considerable carbon footprint is generated by an electric vehicle before it hits the road compared to cars with an internal combustion engine.
Over 50 percent of the world’s lithium resources are said to be lying beneath salt flats in the Andean regions of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Lithium mining and other mining activities have consumed 65 percent of the water in Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in Chile. This has depleted groundwater and contaminated the soil.
In Tibet, lithium mining from Chinese operations has reportedly leaked chemicals like hydrochloric acid into the Liqi River, which ended up killing livestock and poisoning the fish, according to the Harvard International Review.
Deadly Lithium Fires
Fires triggered by lithium-ion batteries are another concern with the increasing use of EVs.
In New York City in 2022, there were 220 fires caused by the batteries in e-micromobility devices, such as e-bikes, up from 44 fires in 2020, Mayor Eric Adams’ office announced in March.
“These fires are particularly severe and difficult to extinguish, spreading quickly, and producing noxious fumes,” officials said in a news release.
Between 2021 and 2022, such fires resulted in 226 injuries and 10 deaths, city officials said. In the first two months of 2023, 40 injuries and two deaths have been linked to battery fires. E-bike usage shot up during the COVID-19 pandemic after the bikes were legalized in New York.
Thousands of delivery workers rely on these devices for their jobs, officials said.
Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) Fire Marshal Daniel Flynn pointed out that incidents of electric batteries exploding have happened both when they were being charged and otherwise. This has resulted in many areas of the city opting to ban the batteries in the devices.
“Lithium-Ion batteries are known to unexpectedly re-ignite (without warning) minutes, hours and even days after all visible fire has been put out,” the FDNY warned in a report on safety recommendations (pdf). The batteries “can enter an uncontrollable, self-heating state. This can result in the release of gas, cause fire and possible explosion.”
In January, a Tesla Model S burst into flames in California while the driver was on Highway 50, causing two eastbound lanes to close. The battery reportedly “spontaneously” caught fire, according to the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District.
Firefighters used about 6,000 gallons of water to extinguish the blaze as the lithium battery “continued to combust,” with officials making use of car jacks to lift the vehicle in order to put out the fire underneath it.
The amount of water needed to put out lithium fires is much higher than in fires from gas-powered vehicles.
Electronic Waste Risks
The increasing use of electric lithium batteries also poses a challenge about how to discard them without harming the environment.
Scott Thibodeau is the general manager of environmental services and solutions at Veolia North America, the second largest hazmat removal service in the United States. Thibodeau told The Epoch Times in September that safety is the greatest challenge associated with these batteries.
Thibodeau pointed out that lithium-ion batteries can’t be dumped or recycled as easily as other materials because of the chemistry of the components. Over 6 million EV battery packs are set to become scrap by 2030.
In China, decommissioned electric car batteries are estimated to hit 780,000 tons by 2025.
“A 20-gram cell phone battery can pollute a water body equivalent to three standard swimming pools. If it is buried in the ground, it can pollute one square kilometer (247 acres) of land for about 50 years,” Wu Feng, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, told The Epoch Times in 2021.
Electric car batteries are much larger than cell-phone batteries and will thus have bigger impacts. According to Li Yongwang, a chemical engineering expert in China, burying electric batteries poses a danger to people’s lives since they can explode from heat.
In the United States, the federal government and various state governments are currently promoting the shift to electric vehicles by insisting that it will be good for the environment.
The Biden administration is offering incentives for the purchase of such vehicles via the Inflation Reduction Act.
In August 2021, Biden announced that half of all cars and trucks sold in the United States by 2030 should be electric. States like California intend to ban the sale of gas cars by 2035.
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The Hypocrisy of the Left on Energy Policy
Democrats say they represent working Americans, but their energy policies tell another story. President Joe Biden’s environmental regulations are focused on slowing fossil-fuel development and promoting electrification, resulting in higher prices for electricity, cars and gasoline.
Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is holding hearings to support Biden’s efforts. I testified at one this week that poor and middle-class Americans are disproportionately paying the price.
The goal of the Biden regulations is to mitigate climate change, described by the president in his February State of the Union Address as “an existential threat.” But if American energy-intensive production and manufacturing with their associated emissions are simply displaced to China and other poorer countries, global temperatures will not change.
To comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent proposed rules to regulate auto emissions, 60% of vehicle sales would have to be battery-powered electric in 2030, and 67% in 2032. The agency is considering rules that would make electricity production more expensive by reducing carbon emissions from power plants.
As well as being more costly, electric cars take 45 minutes to recharge and lose battery range in cold climates. On average households in the lowest fifth of the income distribution have one car, while those in the top fifth have three cars. Families with two cars can have an electric car for short trips and a gasoline-powered car for longer trips, but poor households don’t have that luxury.
These regulations would make new and used cars disproportionately more expensive for the poor and middle-class people, who can least afford them. And the cost of charging the required electric vehicles would rise too.
To produce the solar panels, wind turbines and electric batteries demanded by the West, China is increasing its construction of coal-fired power plants. America has 225 coal-fired power plants, and China has more than 1,000 (half of all the coal-fired plants in the world). China has not committed to reducing emissions before 2027.
Research by Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician and senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, using an EPA model, has shown that even completely eliminating all fossil fuels from the United States would result in less than 0.2 degrees Celsius in temperature mitigation by 2100.
Auto workers endorsed President Biden in 2020, not knowing that new EPA regulations on automobile emissions would require electric cars. Americans’ auto jobs are being sacrificed to Chinese workers (including slave and child labor) making batteries and mining for rare earth minerals.
Last week Stellantis, after closing an Illinois plant in December, announced that it would be cutting 3,500 jobs in Detroit due to its forced transition to electric vehicles. GM and Ford are also laying off workers.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said on April 26, “This is a slap in the face to our members, their families, their communities, and the American people who saved this company 15 years ago,” United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said on April 26. “Even now, politicians and taxpayers are bankrolling the electric vehicle transition.”
Requirements for renewable energy mean that Americans’ oil and gas jobs are being sacrificed to Chinese making wind turbines and solar panels, even though wind and solar power produce less than 6% of U.S. domestic primary energy consumption.
As the federal government spends billions on connecting wind and solar to the electricity grid, people’s electric bills rise. Households in the lowest fifth of the income distribution spend 10 percent of their after-tax income on electricity, natural gas, and motor and heating fuels, but people in the top fifth spend an average of 1 percent. International aid organizations don’t lend for nuclear or many fossil fuel projects in emerging economics, with the result that many of the world’s poor remain without reliable electricity, clean water, and sewage systems.
Poor Americans are paying the price for Democrats’ plans to transition away from fossil fuels in the name of a cleaner environment. They are paying more for cars and electricity, and they are losing their jobs. But global emissions won’t be reduced if industrial production leaves America and sets up in China.
https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/commentary/the-hypocrisy-the-left-energy-policy ?
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The Dutch farmers’ stand against green tyranny
‘The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.’
Or so wrote the French author Michel Houellebecq in his 2019 novel, Serotonin.
Michel Houellebecq has garnered a reputation as a prophetic novelist with an uncanny talent for timing. His 2015 novel, Submission, about a future France where an Islamic political party won the election and ruled France under Islamic laws, was released on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo shooting, when almost the entire editorial staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were massacred by Islamists for ‘insulting’ the prophet Muhammad. It also anticipated a flurry of deadly Islamist terrorist attacks in France and the rest of Europe.
In Serotonin, one of the central elements was the description of French farmers being deracinated by EU laws and globalisation, driven to violent protests, despair, and suicide. This book was written before the Yellow Vest Protests began in France – a movement of the working class against policies that squeezed their lives, such as increasing diesel tax, while the comforts of the upper, metropolitan classes were spared.
Many of these policies were the manifestation of the elites’ quixotic pursuit of extreme green agendas. The Yellow Vest Movement has spread globally, from Europe to Asia and the Americas. This is because many working-class people are faced with the same problem – a faceless elite who get together at immaculate and lavish conferences, download unproven and often naïve ideologies into their craniums, and who then try to implement policies that will ruin the lives of the working class, whom they see as raw material to be moved around like chess pieces, not people with lives, dreams, yearnings, and rights.
This is exactly what is happening in the Netherlands. In early May, the European Commission gave the green light for the Dutch government to start buying out farms to meet the EU’s climate targets. The EU’s 2021 European Climate Law set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum of 55 per cent by 2030, less than 7 years from now.
To meet this impracticable goal, the Dutch government has decided to target their farmers, blaming them for high greenhouse emissions. Dutch estimates suggest that up to 3,000 farms will have to be closed down. The government is offering buy-outs, with force-outs likely if they refuse. This radical policy is despite that the Netherlands only contributes 5.2 per cent of EU emissions, and that its emissions have reduced by 13.4 per cent between 2005 and 2019. Agriculture only makes up 9 per cent of Dutch greenhouse gas emissions, and its emission has been falling, even as its income increases.
In response, in an eerie echo of Houellebecq’s novel, Dutch farmers have been driven to protest en masse. In March, more than 10,000 farmers and their supporters gathered to protest in The Hague, days after similar protests by Belgian farmers, who blockaded Brussels with thousands of tractors, against plans to drastically limit emissions.
The Dutch policies are particularly puzzling, as Dutch farmers are among the most efficient in the world. The Netherlands, a tiny country both in terms of land and population, is nevertheless the second largest food exporter in the world, after the US, a country infinitely larger and with around 20 times the population. It has achieved this amazing feat by being a leader in agricultural technology innovation, as acknowledged even by the World Economic Forum, which is itself a leader in the push of the extreme green agenda. It is therefore mind-boggling that the Dutch government and the EU would want to uproot this industry rather than to promote and emulate it in a world that is running out of food.
As if to emphasise the EU’s foolishness, there is a condition for farmers who accept the buy-out, which is that they are not allowed to start another similar operation in any EU country, obliterating their world-class expertise and knowledge. Imagine being told by your government that your hard-earned skills cannot be used to make a living again, not only in your own country, but in your continent.
Some think that there is a hidden motive – the Netherlands is desperately short of new housing, but has very little land to build them on. This is shaping up to be a major election issue. The seizure of farmland is therefore suspected to be a land grab by the government.
Whatever the reasons, the farmers’ cause against the government’s immiserating policies that will end their livelihoods have garnered a lot of sympathy and generated equal measures of anger. The farmers’ protest party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB, Farmers-Citizen Movement), scored an astonishing victory at the March provincial elections. The BBB is projected to take 15 seats in the 75-seat senate in the late May senatorial elections, giving them an equal majority. Amazingly, it won the popular vote in all 12 provinces.
We seem to be living the imagination of Houellebecq, who has been a resigned chronicler of the self-mutilation of Western culture for decades. However, counter to the pervasive pessimism and heart-wrenching ennui in his novels, the Dutch farmers, as well as the populist protests sprouting around the world, show that there is a deep sense and yearning for freedom, as well as disgust for tyranny, whatever guise it may present itself. The Dutch farmers’ peaceful and democratic revolt is to be celebrated and duplicated.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/the-dutch-farmers-stand-against-green-tyranny/
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The stage is set for a battle royale within the New York Democratic Party over climate policy. Governor Hochul has suddenly realized that the cost of the state’s planned emission reduction scheme will be “extraordinary,” and is challenging her own party to make the climate law less damaging to New Yorkers’ pocketbooks. Will the left wing of her party go along?
In this year’s budget negotiations Ms. Hochul and the legislature agreed to a cap-and-invest program as recommended by the state’s Climate Action Council. Cap-and-invest programs put an annual limit on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions New York businesses collectively emit, with the amount declining each year. Businesses will have to bid for an ever-decreasing number of permits and naturally will pass the costs on to consumers by raising prices.
But a wrinkle in the Climate Act will make those costs more than half as much as they would be under Hochul’s proposed change.
Most countries and states compare emissions of different greenhouse gases using a 100-year time frame. New York’s Climate Law is unusual in that it uses a 20-year time frame. The issue is complex, but New York’s choice has two effects: it would reduce greenhouse gases faster, but at a much higher cost.
The governor has recognized this and wants to change to the more commonly used 100-year time frame, which would reduce greenhouse gases more slowly, but would have less sticker shock for average New Yorkers.
Under the Climate Act’s 20-year time frame, cap-and-invest would add 63 cents to the cost of a gallon of gasoline. Ms. Hochul’s proposal would reduce that to a still hefty but more bearable 39 cents per gallon.
For users of natural gas, the current approach would add $595 to the average family’s average annual bill. Changing it would reduce that to a $330 cost increase.
And for users of heating oil, the annual hit under the current law would be $605, while Ms. Hochul’s requested change would drop that to $410 per year.
Either way, the price increases are going to be considerable, but if Ms. Hochul gets her way, many New Yorkers would be spared hundreds of dollars per year in Climate Act costs.
This could be important politically, because while the public overwhelmingly supports taking action against climate change, people’s willingness to pay for that action is very limited.
A recent Siena College poll conducted for the industry group New Yorkers for Affordable Energy found that three-quarters of New Yorkers were unwilling to pay $480 per year to combat climate change, and more than half balked at paying just $240.
Granted, the cap-and-invest program is intended to use the proceeds from sales of emissions allowances to give rebates to poorer New Yorkers to offset their costs. Yet those folks will still have to scrounge up the cash to pay upfront costs. And middle-income New Yorkers will suffer the blow without any rebates at all.
This poses an urgent political problem for Ms. Hochul, whose gubernatorial win last year was by the slimmest margin in more than a generation. People vote their pocketbooks, and fair or not they tend to blame the chief executive when their wallets get emptied.
Yet that doesn’t mean the Democrats in the legislature will go along with the governor. While gubernatorial candidates must appeal to middle-of-the-road voters, many legislators represent lopsided districts where the political voice is dominated by activists.
And climate activists are outraged at the governor’s proposal to change the Climate Act’s greenhouse gas accounting method. Their sentiments are summed up in the words of a Cornell Professor and Climate Action Council member, Robert Howarth, who said the governor’s proposal would be “disastrous for the NY climate law.”
Even some Democratic legislators who might personally agree with the governor about reducing the financial blow to New Yorkers may balk at changing the Climate Act out of fear of their most vocal constituents’ response.
So Ms. Hochul and legislative Democrats have an intra-party battle on their hands because they don’t share the same set of voters.
Ms. Hochul tried to get this change made during budget negotiations but was shot down. How hard she’ll push during the rest of the legislative session is anyone’s guess.
In the short run the activists may get their way again. But how long they can dominate a public that’s increasingly financially pressured remains to be seen.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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