Over at The Daily Kos Mark Sumner is furious about some lies told about lithium batteries:
Lately (or more specifically, perpetually off and on for the last few years), this set of images has been circulating.
Mark then goes on to correct the record, noting the first image is actually of a copper mine. I initially shared this without comment on Facebook, leading to a remark from a reader:
The only negative for electric cars is that depending on where you live, the electricity might be generated from coal plants. But Tesla provides free super charging stations all around the country, and Musk is using solar to offset that.
This remark is similar to criticisms from anti-electric car folks (although my reader doesn’t fall into that camp), which strikes me as intellectually lazy, because it’s not a criticism of a solution process, but of a single category of action, which means it’s out of context.
Let’s characterize our situation: we have N cars, each of which emit pollutants including climate changes gases. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists,
Our personal vehicles are a major cause of global warming. Collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. emissions, emitting around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas. About 5 pounds comes from the extraction, production, and delivery of the fuel, while the great bulk of heat-trapping emissions—more than 19 pounds per gallon—comes right out of a car’s tailpipe.
We also have a collection of centralized power sources, consisting of traditional fossil-fuel power stations, nuclear power stations, and alternative energy sources such as solar and wind. With the exception of the last category, these, too, must be replaced with clean sources. That “too” is the crux of the situation: since we must change both cars and power stations, the argument that switching to electric cars is useless becomes a great irrelevancy, because both steps must be taken in any case.
The fact of the matter is that we’re switching the centralized power source for cars from oil refineries to the category of clean energy, and in order to do this successfully, both the cars and the centralized power sources must be changed. By buying an electric car, one of the steps is incrementally accomplished; as each one is bought, it becomes more and more economically feasible to replace the dirty power sources with clean power sources (because oil refineries can be put out of service, thus freeing up resources for nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, tidal, etc etc).
Getting back to my reader, I will also point out that Tesla sells something called the Powerwall, a solar sourced battery for house and car, so you can power the car independent of a centralized power source. I do not know how well this works in practice.
