Oil is out, batteries are out.
We need smarter solutions that work with the environment, not exploit it.
Watch the video and tell me you didn’t say ‘… holy fuck.’
Batteries have a very important role in transitioning off fossil fuels.
They do not inherently lead to disaster, but to make the transition, lithium batteries in their current form are insufficient. Fortunately most people aren’t intending to do stationary energy storage for the electric grid with lithium. For that, sulfur-aluminum or lead-antimony (liquid metal) batteries are better, alongside pumped hydro, thermal storage, liquefied air, power-to-gas, etc, etc.
As the number of battery-powered vehicles grows, recycling of lithium becomes important, and sodium ion batteries (already manufactured, but not en masse) will be needed because sodium is much more abundant.
The electric grid will have to adapt. On some days, vehicles might not draw power from the grid, but return it - to balance out a power plant that dropped offline, or help during peak demand.
Traveling less will help and optimizing life to be convenient with less travel will help - but I think one can safely discard the possibility that everything can be altered. Unless economic shortage prevents them, people will travel, but the environmental impact of this can be very different depending on how they do it. :)
So - it’s a puzzle with many bottlenecks and many ways to circumvent them.
I’ve recently become interested in metal-air batteries, e.g. iron-air batteries, which use only a very plentiful metal (iron) and are thereby suitable for storing energy on a power grid (not much use in consumer electronics, of course - it’s not for that!). Also it’s conceptually hilarious to me that it’s basically rust-powered
It also feels like some of the transportation needs that were included in this video’s lithium battery calculations could be handled with capacitors instead of batteries. I believe we should be targeting capacitors for all of our public transportation infrastructure that travels set routs and routinely stops for 10-30s. Busses, light rail, etc can have quick charging stations along the route and you can not only drastically reduce the electric storage (and therefore remove lithium entirely), you can reduce the weight of these vehicles.
Yep, forgot about iron, and about flow batteries.
The nice thing about flow batteries is that storage capacity and reactive cell size can be scaled independently. :)
Not really. I think there’s a misconception that we want to solve all the problems and be good and pure, and because we can’t do that we’ve got to be pure evil. That’s not how it works. We’re not trying to solve inequality or anything. That’s just capitalism. We’re trying to stop (and now sink) the carbon in the atmosphere. That’s all. We can keep our shitty unequal capitalist world where we exploit poorer nations etc etc. That’s a separate problem.
Also, we don’t really need to use the specific metals he’s outlined. We can use others. There are plenty of chemistries available, and there’s a lot of lithium (in Australia for example). As long as the global south doesn’t get the bright idea to use as much energy as the global north, we’ll be fine.
There is a nice book on this topic, Against Purity:
Why contamination and compromise might be a starting point for doing something, instead of a reason to give up.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/against-purity
But the last comment on the global south is odd, for many reasons. Empathy and support was on your mind, I suppose. 🤓
I can whip up a nice lil homily about how purity is not actually a virtue. Originally intended for fundagelical Christians (about the sechs or about not hearing/looking at cusswords), it can be adaptable to quite a few circumstances because it is always easier to look good than do good.
Added to my reading list.
The final comment was sarcasm but probably encompassing more than it should. See, UE is a nominally right wing channel (there’s grey areas, I’m not trying to dismiss him, but it’s important to see where he’s coming from). His aim is somewhat to convince you to do nothing: You won’t achieve global equality from electric vehicles, so why try? The unsaid bit is as though you could do this via fossil fuels.
This is what conservatives believe btw: We have infinite fossil fuel, stay on the current path and give access to the global south to that infinite fuel, and everyone prospers. You could create an equal but opposite response video where the global south gets access to that fossil fuel, and then see how long we go before we run out (it’s within Greta Thunberg’s lifetime) and how much it would cost (a lot, given conservatives are already pissed at the costs currently). DUN DUN DUNNNNN and then (unsaid) EVs look a lot more appetising.
So anyway, because conservatives gonna conservative, they’d obviously immediately pivot to “who cares about the global south this is why we have the nukes lol” because often they do not critically analyse their beliefs. So my comment was compressing all of that ^^ into “we can use EVs who cares about the global south lol”.
Exactly this. If we keep spinning our wheels looking for a miracle we’ll never get there. Growth happens incrementally.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I honestly don’t like the term “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”, and it’s from what I’m going to call “Zeno’s compromise”. Basically, someone who wants to do nothing will always meet you “halfway” between you and a solution, which basically means you’ll never reach that solution. I also believe this is the underlying reason for the “liberal ratchet”.
Instead, I think of it as “a long journey begins with a single step”. You cannot ensure you will reach the destination if you never actually leave.
Whatever man, a single oil tanker disaster makes so much environmental damage on its own
That’s not a real reason to not advocate for a more sustainable future. Our capitalist society wants us to believe that the solution to the climate crisis will be trading in one form of consumption for another. The reality is that replacing every gas powered vehicle on the road with an EV is not easy, cheap, or a wholistic solution to the problem. EVs will have a place in a sustainable future, but much more important is getting people out of their cars. We need compact, walkable communities with local economies that allow people to access all their daily needs without long trips. We need bicycle infrastructure so that allows people to get to and from work by bike. Not only that, but we need mass transit for moving people longer distances without needing their cars. We need to connect cities via affordable and preferably high-speed rail systems. This all sounds like a lot, but it will be cheaper to implement both in the short and long run than it will be to replace all gas powered vehicles with EVs to see the benefits we’re seeking in the long term. Bus systems become much more efficient than single user electric vehicles, with much fewer passengers than people realize, and themselves come in hybrid and EV variants.
My point? Don’t be defeatist. That’s what the companies who profit from climate change want.
A lithium ion battery for an ev contains 8kg of lithium. That is besides alternatives being available and being deployed right now.
Lithium tech are being abandoned in favor of batteries that last longer and have a lower chance of catching fire.
I feel like lithium batteries are great for mobile application but inefficient for grid storage.
There is a lot of other battery technologies that would be more appropriate but are not produced massively enough to have the economy of scale.
