F150 Lightening

Thermoguy wrote:
Lots of interesting points on these pages regarding EV's. We all need to realize that it is going to happen and all vehicles will be electric one day. I just read a report about a autonomous truck that crossed the US. It did it faster and more efficiently that a similar human driven truck. I think it said 95 hours faster. It's coming faster than you think. The infrastructure is being built out fast to accommodate autonomous and electric. I just saw an electric charging station being put in where a gas station once stood.

However, the missing point on Green vehicles is - are they really green? How much Lithium Ion is needed for an F150 to drive? How about a fleet of them? Where is Lithium ion mined and how does it get to the US? Less than 1% comes from the US although there are mines in the US that are ramping up production. By the way, a mine can use a huge amount of water and be very environmentally unfriendly. I would say more than oil and gas. If you want to keep you IC, start making this argument...

Took this from Wikipedia:

The manufacturing processes of lithium, including the solvent and mining waste, presents significant environmental and health hazards.[132][133][134] Lithium extraction can be fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution.[135] It is known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation and landscape damage.[132] It also leads to unsustainable water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton of lithium).[132] Massive byproduct generation of lithium extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large amounts of magnesium and lime waste.[136]

In the United States, there is active competition between environmentally catastrophic open-pit mining, mountaintop removal mining and less damaging brine extraction mining in an effort to drastically expand domestic lithium mining capacity.[137] Environmental concerns include wildlife habitat degradation, potable water pollution including arsenic and antimony contamination, unsustainable water table reduction, and massive mining waste, including radioactive uranium byproduct and sulfuric acid discharge.

But- by all means, lets shut down oil production in Alaska due to environmental concerns...

Apparently the master plan is to import lithium and other metals for EVs so that we Americans can brag about how much cleaner our environment is.

"Rather than focus on permitting more US mines, Biden’s team is more intent on creating jobs that process minerals domestically into electric vehicle (EV) battery parts, according to the officials."
"the bulk of Biden’s approach is designed to sidestep battles with environmentalists"


Biden wants to import metals for EVs

“President Biden is focused on seizing the electric vehicle market, sourcing and manufacturing the supply chain here in America, and creating good-paying, union jobs,” said Ali Zaidi, deputy White House national climate adviser. “Building American-made EVs and shipping them around the world will include leveraging American-made parts and resources."

Apparently those "good-paying union jobs" don't include miners.

“Building American-made EVs and shipping them around the world"

How many cars do we currently export that are made with "good-paying union jobs"? I don't think that it is very many. Even Tesla is probably going to be scaling back their exports after they get a few more giga-factories going around the globe.

I think that this is the most astute statement from the article:
“We can no longer push the production of the products we want to places we cannot see and to people we will never meet,” said Mckinsey Lyon of Perpetua Resources Corp.

I keep hearing that one of the big advantages of outsourcing to other counties is that many countries do not require the expensive environmental protections that we do. In other words, the amount of pollution increases when we outsource to other countries. But, since we can't see it from our window we feel much better about ourselves while we count the money that we saved by not employing Americans.